On Saturday, August 12, 2017 at 7:33:26 PM UTC-6, wrote:
"Some competitions have been very communicative with status updates multiple times per day, promoting the event, posting results shortly after completion, which really gives remote spectators like me an opportunity to experience the event virtually via the internet."

Very true Adrian, but way too few. Wake up SSA, a "dark" contest is hurting our soaring movement.

Same for tracking, the number of pilots operating trackers is shrinking. One day at the recent Uvalde Nationals there were only 7 out of 30 plus sailplanes "tracking". Few trackers and infrequent updates provide little, if any, entertainment.

R.A.S. hashed this before, the reality is "reporting" does not work well if it requires a computer and an internet connection to "assemble" the report. Reasons ... reliable internet is difficult to find on many contest sites, too much work load for one person and one person cannot report as well as "many", too much work to include pictures, and by the time it gets published, its "old news". Right now, like it or not, what works best is a Facebook group because it is focused to only those interested. Yes, a Facebook group requires effort because the group owner has to approve requesting membership. But, it is so, so feature rich. It allows any group member to report or share a picture almost in real-time and usually with just a smart phone.. The time difference can be measured in minutes instead of days.

Just look at Uvalde's outstanding Facebook reporting. Sean Franke broadcasted daily pilot's meetings from his Wings & Wheels page https://www.facebook.com/wingsandwheels.aviation/ . Bruce Taylor's Taylor Gliding Page https://www.facebook.com/Taylors-Gli...-298561465980/ or Sean Fidler's Sean Fidler Soaring https://www.facebook.com/SeanTiff7T/ provided daily grid, in-flight, land-out, and post blow-by-blow updates. Thank you guys, you really made a difference. Even Charlie Spratt's magical reports could not begin to compete with the power of Facebook.

For you "I'll never do Facebookers", this darkness would improve if the SSA would "handshake" with these excellent reporters and find a way to immediately "mirror" Facebook reports on the SSA website.

The bottom line: currently, if you want to stay informed, open a Facebook account and follow these outstanding reporters. If you want the SSA to report, "court" your SSA director and ask for their support to provide better contest reporting.

FB is not particularly reliable and shapes what a particular account might see. Some posts appear rather late. I checked Sean Fidler's personal page and very few Uvalde posts there. I checked your link to Sean Fidler Soaring and found an invite for me to like the page. That invite never appeared on my FB page that I recall or was lost in the noise. Taylor's Gliding Page was liked by SSA FB and me and LetsGoGliding and has been used as resource previously. Page feeds are checked, but FB shapes what it shows and I never noticed a post from Bruce. After Jason Stephens asked for some coverage of the World's Glider Aerobatics competition, we were flooded with posts from that event. It's also been a very busy two weeks, so no time for further digging. In the past, I've tried to recruit people to post directly to the SSA FB page, but am now of the opinion that specific event pages are better for archival purposes. We just don't have a process in place yet.

As far as any trouble posting to the SSA server, I've only noticed issues during incremental and full backups, which are done in the wee hours in the Central Time Zone. So filing a late night report could bump into this. Any server development or maintenance is done after business hours in Hobbs. Sometimes a reboot is required. Unless the server is going offline for some period, such work in not announced. Someone filing a contest report might run into an issue posting.

Frank Whiteley