Athlinks Response

In December I became a member of Athlinks.com a local website with universal appeal to anyone who wishes to see their race times and history in one location. Some neat aspects to the site is that you can list 'friends' and 'rivals'.

A friend might be a team mate, a friend located in another part of the country or someone you have met at races before. A rival is someone automatically generated by the website as a person you competed in three races with, regardless if you know the person or not.

There are some growing pains that still need to occur but overall its worth the free admission. In response to some of those concerns based on my first post, I was surprised to see this morning a response from the webmaster, also in the first posts comment section.

Hey guys - to answer a few questions from above:

We (Athlinks) inherit the state that the race was run unless it is given in the official results (which is pretty rare) so that we can keep profiles segregated until you register and claim them. Although you may not think that yours is a common name, you would be amazed to see how often seemingly rare names are duplicated around the world.

As for ages, the differences in ages generally comes from the race director using age groups only as opposed to your actual age. So, if you are 20 and the RD gives only age groups, we take the oldest possible value (24) and use that.

We're working everyday adding and fixing features. We have added about 2 million individual results since your original post (Dec 8), so I'm sure that our coverage has improved significantly.

Even if there is a few bugs regarding multiple entries for the same person (there were eight of me and I have never met another person with my name-every case was a race directors error in my city or age), I appreciate that site being 'stand up' about its problems and actions to fix them.