I'm sorry to have to report this, but we found a bug. Hopefully it can be squashed and prevent future frustration for other clubs. We've seen it before, but rarely, and it was only in testing, not during an event. It was hard to replicate because we didn't know exactly what caused it, however we were able to repeatedly cause it yesterday.
Problem:
Chrono, TK, CQ screens all fail to update properly (automatically) and require manual refreshing of the browser window.
Normal:
Car #1 is on course. Car 1 is displayed on the CQ, TK, CC, and Chrono screens. As soon as Car 1 trips the finish lights, Car 1 disappears from CQ screen and the car is bumped down on Chrono and TK while the time is recorded and is displayed as a recent run.
Symptom:
In the case of the bug, the time for car 1 simply vanishes from Chrono and/or the time is assigned to the next car on course, and TK and CQ do not refresh, so it appears that Car 1 is still on course. Essentially, it appears as though Car 1 never started his/her run at all, and now any ongoing timers are assigned to the wrong drivers.
We found this only happens when a driver completes his/er "nth+1" run, where n is the number of runs to count in the Event Setup. E.g. we allow 4 timed runs, so this problem only happens if a driver has completed 4 runs already and is taking his/her 5th run.
If you manually refresh the Chrono, TK, and CQ screens, they all show the recent run properly, but if you don't do this, it's a big mess. To the casual observer, it appears that the run completely vanishes in the system and is lost forever, which causes panic and confusion in the timing trailer, as there are usually other cars on course when this occurs. If you don't refresh, and see the issue with cars out of order, you might try to "fix" them, and then cause an even bigger problem. Ask me how I know. :S
Normally we don't allow for n+1 runs, but it can happen during an event if a codriven car is out of order, or the drivers forget to add&remove the 1 correctly and the timing guy fails to catch it before the nth+1 run starts. That's what happened to us yesterday. Also could occur if someone enters DNF instead of Rerun, so the run counter is off by one, or if a special situation arises for a driver to take an additional run, or for a number of other reasons.
Anyway, we thought we had lost data and had to stop the event to clear up the other 2 cars on course by the time we saw the issue. Then after some auditing we found the core issue and carried on with business. A few cars later, we still had issues. So we ended up stopping the whole event again, restarting our machine and starting up the software from scratch. Then it happened again (another guy got a 5th run) and it caused the same issue. We then realized why it was happening and did some tests, and sure enough, it was due to the any driver getting a 5th run. This was repeatable so I'm pretty confident that it is related to n+1 runs.
