How scoring profiles work

Explainer

How scoring profiles work

A scoring profile is a reusable set of scoring rules. It decides how Dockside turns each finish into points: how many points a sailor gets for a code like DNF or OCS, how redress is averaged, and how many races are discarded. Instead of setting these rules on every event, you set them once in a profile and reuse it.

A scoring profile is not the same as a scoring type. The scoring type (Position, Corrected Time, or Pursuit) decides how boats are ranked in a race. The scoring profile decides how those ranks, and any non-finishing codes, become points across the event. See Scoring types for the ranking side.

One profile covers all three event types

A single scoring profile holds a separate set of rules for each racing event type: Series, Regatta, and Open. When you edit a profile's rules, you switch between the three with tabs. This is why one profile is usually enough for a whole club: the same profile scores your weekly series, your open meetings, and your regattas, each with its own rules.

Non-racing event types (Training and Social) are not scored, so they do not use a scoring profile.

The three levels

Scoring profiles can be defined at three levels:

  • Class association. A class association can publish profiles its events use.
  • Club. Most profiles live here. A club's profiles are managed from the club's Scoring Profiles page.
  • Event. A profile can be attached directly to one event when that event needs bespoke rules.

Each level holds its own profiles, and a higher level can stand in for a lower one when no profile is set.

How Dockside chooses a profile for an event

When an event needs to be scored, Dockside resolves a profile in this order:

  1. The profile attached to the event, if one was chosen.
  2. The host club's default profile.
  3. The owner association's default profile.

The first one it finds wins. For a club's own event, this usually means the club's default profile is used unless someone picks a different one on the event. For an event a class association owns but a club hosts, the host club sits between the event and the association, and each level can override the next.

If none of the three resolves, the event has no profile and standard position scoring applies (1st place is 1 point, 2nd is 2 points, and so on). You can read more about choosing the profile on an event in Choose a scoring profile for an event.

The default profile

Each club marks one profile as its default, shown with a Default badge on the Scoring Profiles page. The default is the profile new events use automatically, so most race officers never have to think about scoring rules: they create an event and the right profile is already in place.

You can change which profile is the default at any time, and you can still override it on an individual event.

Why profiles work this way

Clubs do not all score the same way. One club scores OCS as the fleet size plus one; another awards a sailor on race-officer duty the average of their other races; a third discards a fixed percentage of races rather than one race in every three. A scoring profile captures one club's conventions in one place, so the rules are applied the same way to every event without being re-entered each time, and so a sailor can see exactly how a code was scored.

Holding all three event types in one profile, rather than three separate profiles, keeps a club's scoring consistent. Series, regattas, and open meetings at the same club usually differ only in their discards and a few codes, not in their whole approach, so they belong together.

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