How scoring templates work

Explainer

A scoring template 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 template and reuse them.

A scoring template 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 rules decide how those ranks, and any non-finishing codes, become points across the event. See Scoring types for the ranking side.

Every event keeps its own copy

This is the part worth understanding, because it decides what happens when you change a template.

When you create an event, Dockside copies the chosen template's rules into the event. From that moment the event has its own scoring rules, and nothing else shares them. The event's scoring rules show which template the copy came from, as Based on {template name}.

Two things follow:

  • Editing a template does not change existing events. It sets the rules for events created from then on. An event that already exists keeps the copy it took.
  • Editing one event's rules does not affect any other event, and does not change the template.

If you want an existing event to pick up a template's current rules, open that event and select Reset to template. That takes a fresh copy.

One template covers all three event types

A single scoring template holds a separate set of rules for each racing event type: Series, Regatta, and Open. When you edit a template's rules, you switch between the three with tabs. This is why one template is usually enough for a whole club: the same template 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 template.

Where templates live

Templates can be defined in two places:

  • Club. Most templates live here, managed from the club's Scoring templates page.
  • Class association. A class association can hold templates for its own events.

An event can use a template from the organisation that owns it or from its host club. For a club's own event those are the same organisation, so the choice is simply the club's own templates. For an event a class association owns but a club hosts, you can pick from either.

How Dockside picks a template for a new event

When an event is created, Dockside picks the template to copy in this order:

  1. The template chosen on the event, if someone picked one.
  2. When the event is cloned from another event, the source event's rules, so any customisation travels with the clone.
  3. The host club's default template.

The first one it finds wins. Most race officers never have to think about this: they create an event and the club's default rules are already in place.

If none of the three resolves, the event has no scoring rules of its own and standard position scoring applies (1st place is 1 point, 2nd is 2 points, and so on).

Once the event exists, this order stops mattering. The event scores from its own copy, and only from that.

The default template

Each club marks one template as its default, shown with a Default badge on the Scoring templates page. The default is the template new events copy automatically.

You can change which template is the default at any time. Doing so affects events created afterwards, not events that already exist.

Why templates 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 template captures one club's conventions in one place, so the rules are applied the same way to every new event without being re-entered, and so a sailor can see exactly how a code was scored.

The per-event copy exists to protect results that have already been sailed. When every event pointed at a shared set of rules, editing those rules silently re-scored each event using them, including finished seasons: a club correcting its OCS rule in August could change the standings of a series that ended in May. The risk of that also made mid-season changes unsafe, so an event with a genuine mistake in its rules had no safe way to fix it. Giving each event its own copy separates the two jobs. Changing a template is a decision about future events. Changing an event's own rules is a decision about that event, and you can make it whenever you need to, including part-way through a series.

Holding all three event types in one template, rather than three separate templates, 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.

What to do next

    How scoring templates work · Help · Dockside