Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Background
What are the senior rankings?
This website provides the best possible indication of your real world ranking amongst your peers - competitors aged 40 upwards.
Non-contiguous ranks are because of unlisted / unknown seniors but the overall rankings are very accurate due to the way that they are calculated.
Why was this project created?
Prior to my first competition, I was curious about what kind of times the over 40s were achieving in competition. I was quite active on the Speedsolving.com forum so I created a thread listing the results of the people that I knew personally or who were well known in the community.
The original list of official results only contained 11 seniors but the list was up to 23 names within a week. Since its creation in July 2015 the senior rankings have continued to grow and contained ~650 seniors by August 2020. It was originally intended to be a one-off activity but has subsequently evolved into a somewhat elaborate project!
Senior Rankings
How do I get my name added?
To be included in the rankings, I will require your WCA ID and DOB.
Please use the registration page to supply your details.
Notes about the registration process:
- Requests are typically processed within 14 days but may take up to 28 days, if I am particularly busy.
- This delay is because processing batches of submissions is far more efficient and less time consuming for me.
- Please do not submit multiple times as you will be added during the next batch. You just need to be patient. :)
How many seniors have competed officially?
As of May 2020 a total of ~2,040 seniors had competed in 3x3x3, aged 40 or above.
You can check the latest figures at the bottom of the senior rankings page.
What results qualify for the senior rankings?
Only official results achieved after turning 40 are eligible for the over 40s rankings. The same principle applies to the over 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s rankings.
It is worth noting that results after turning 50 will apply to multiple age categories. For example, official results of a 68 year old competitor will be eligible for the over 40s, over 50s and over 60s rankings.
How accurate are the rankings?
The world rankings are very accurate (typically +/- 1 or 2 places) because I know approximately where gaps exist in the list of known seniors. Whilst the world rankings do not list the unknown seniors they are evident through non-contiguous ranks. The results / positions of the unknown seniors are not known exactly but they are thought to be pretty accurate and likely to be within +/- 1 or 2 places.
For example, if ranking 50 is missing, that missing person could potentially be a couple of ranks above or below where it is currently listed (e.g. likely to be between 48 and 52).
The rankings for individual regions (i.e. specific countries / continents) are also thought to be pretty accurate due to the number of seniors being known for each event / age category / region. The regional rankings estimate the number of unknown seniors who are ranked higher than known seniors in the regional rankings as follows:
faster regional unknowns = faster worldwide unknowns * total regional unknowns / total worldwide unknowns
Future Competitions
The future competitions page is updated throughout the day using the WCA API and a number of additional websites that are used for competition registration.
It retrieves registration data from worldcubeassociation.org, cubingchina.com, cubing-tw.net, speedcubing.pl and cubecomp.de. Although the code also supports zawody4event.pl it is unable to connect to the website from my AWS environment.
Technical
What data do the senior rankings use?
The details of known seniors along with their DOBs are acquired directly from individuals / friends / relatives / public sources and stored in a private database. In addition to the details of known seniors this project uses the public WCA results export and a bespoke extract provided by the WCA results team, summarising the results for each age category. The bespoke extract does not identify individual competitors or disclose their ages / DOBs but it does allow the senior rankings to be padded appropriately where there are omissions in the list of known seniors.
What is your data privacy policy?
The data privacy policy for this project is described in the privacy notice. The senior rankings strive to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) which gives control to individuals over their personal data. We are committed to keeping your DOB well protected and it will never knowingly be given out or published in the public domain.
How often is this website updated?
The senior rankings are updated daily using the WCA results export which is published at around 0400 GMT. A daily batch job runs at 0410 GMT which downloads the latest WCA database export and refreshes the senior rankings.
The future competitions page is updated every 3 hours - 0000 GMT, 0300 GMT, 0600 GMT, etc. This ensures that any registration changes are reflected promptly without the process being overly excessive.
What Technologies are Used?
Data Wrangling: MariaDB, SQL, Python
Web: GitHub Pages, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Terraform
SCM + CI/CD: Git, GitHub, Jenkins
Although the majority of the project code can be found on GitHub it cannot be run without the private data.