So this is our second year of using Axtime and while we had a couple of teething issues, they were minor and Chris was very helpful. We ran it for the entire season and it made timing so much easier. We weren’t even using any of the wireless features
Then the logic board on our old Macbook Pro died before our last event of the season and we had to go back to Axware since that was our back up. It was terrible and reminded us of why we switched to Axtime in the first place.
This year we bought a brand new Macbook Pro to replace our old one. I had a couple of issues getting it to run as I am not a programmer at all but Chris spent an hour with me getting everything set up and working. As always he was great.
This is a dedicated computer that doesn’t do anything else except our timing, club related business or some random Internet surfing. We bought a router as well but couldn’t get the wireless results working. I asked some questions about that in another thread.
So for our first event 3 weeks ago Axtime ran perfectly. No timing issues at all.
But we had our second event of the season yesterday and everything just fell apart and I have no idea why. We didn’t even start Axtime in the 3 weeks since then so we made no changes to anything.
It started the night before with trying to create the second event and nothing appeared. We restarted it and tried creating the event again but this time two events appeared. The one that we tried to create before and the new one. We couldn’t figure out a way to delete one of them.
We started the system the next morning and while we’ve never been able to import from MS Reg due to some sort of error, we usually just import a .CSV file and it works just fine.
Yesterday, it wouldn’t even do that. In Chrome, I got a localhost refused to connect error. We tried several times and a couple of times it even said that it was imported successfully but nothing actually imported.
So this sucked but we figured we could just quickly type in their info as we checked them on or use member lookup for people who had come to our first event. We get about 70-80 cars per event with registration being open for at least an hour so entering them on the fly wouldn’t be a big deal.
So I decided to add the few club members that volunteer since I knew their cars, class and number to get started before the rush. I went to new registration and noticed that half of our PAX classes were missing. Only Street and Street Touring were showing. All of the classes were showing though. Even member lookup wouldn’t show their PAX class for SM or SP competitors.
I went into manage seasons and noticed that the PAX classes were buggy in there. I’d try adding SM and it would disappear or ask me if I’m sure I wanted to delete this driver. I’d also hit Add Class and the first bar that I’d need to type the PAX class into was missing.
At this point we realized that we’d have to use our Race America AC4 to record times and manually enter them into a spreadsheet to time. Axtime was just being too buggy and the worst part is we have no idea why.
I know Chris is one man (and a busy one at that) and he has built what is usually an excellent timing system but none of us that time for our club have a software or pogromming background so when faced with these errors we have no idea where to even start troubleshooting.
There also isn't nearly supporting documentation to go with it especially explaining what system is doing. Even the install guides assume a high degree of understanding but still don’t explain why it’s being done a certain way.
I tried setting up an event today and I’m still getting all the same issues I mentioned above. I have screenshots of all the issues we were having. We have no idea what we’re going to do going forward timing wise as Axtime really let us down when we needed it and after working perfectly 3 weeks earlier for our first event.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
