Is there a reason that the PDGA does not follow rules?

[Fishy]

lack of a viable alternative, the surcharge on tourneys, and players are addicted to ratings

If I was great at disc golf and I am not ...I would feel compeelled to exhibit my skills in the pdga since its the only show available

they got it monopolized...you can bitch about the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL,Nascar etc.....but it takes cash to try to upstart and compete...and we all know how that went with the USFL, CBA, WHL, etc

but there are viable alternatives, just not on a national scale, I believe I heard of one in the south, and one in New England area. We don't see much of the PDGA out here.

_MTL_ thanks for clearing up how much money they take from tourneys, I wasn't aware of the amount. It does seem that they get most of their money from memberships. Still don't see them doing much with it, you can say they do, but it's not visible from my point of view. Maybe if I lived back east where there were more tier'd tourney would be a different matter.

I'm not into a number, they are not prevalent here or really have much of a presense, and I don't need another mini or non existent magazine. I'll save my money this year. Maybe put it towards something useful, like hand warmers and gators for winter playing.

 

[_MTL_]

but there are viable alternatives, just not on a national scale, I believe I heard of one in the south, and one in New England area. We don't see much of the PDGA out here.

_MTL_ thanks for clearing up how much money they take from tourneys, I wasn't aware of the amount. It does seem that they get most of their money from memberships. Still don't see them doing much with it, you can say they do, but it's not visible from my point of view. Maybe if I lived back east where there were more tier'd tourney would be a different matter.

I'm not into a number, they are not prevalent here or really have much of a presense, and I don't need another mini or non existent magazine. I'll save my money this year. Maybe put it towards something useful, like hand warmers and gators for winter playing.

The PDGA budget is public which is required by law for a not for profit organization.

If you want to see how the money is spent, you don't have to question. One quick trip to their website and a search for budget should answer any and all questions you have.

 

[Fishy]

The PDGA budget is public which is required by law for a not for profit organization.

If you want to see how the money is spent, you don't have to question. One quick trip to their website and a search for budget should answer any and all questions you have.

cool, I may do that if I'm not busy at midnight so I can get on the site when no one else is.. not sure what kind of ancient server they run on, but it's still not good, hate to overload the pipe with 4 other people. It's cool, I'm sure if I actually gave a **** I'd look. I think I'll pass again this year, maybe next spring. Not going to join when tourney season is almost over here. Have enough non sanctioned tournaments and sidework to keep me busy every weekend into the middle/ end of September. Just very hard for me to justify the purchase.

 

[_MTL_]

cool, I may do that if I'm not busy at midnight so I can get on the site when no one else is.. not sure what kind of ancient server they run on, but it's still not good, hate to overload the pipe with 4 other people. It's cool, I'm sure if I actually gave a **** I'd look. I think I'll pass again this year, maybe next spring. Not going to join when tourney season is almost over here. Have enough non sanctioned tournaments and sidework to keep me busy every weekend into the middle/ end of September. Just very hard for me to justify the purchase.

You have to do what is best for you. I'm fine with someone saying "hey, thus isnt good for me." I just cant stand ignorant bashing like we had earlier ITT.

 

[Cgkdisc]

I believe at least one server is hosted by Amazon.

 

[Fishy]

ok so I looked at the budget.. there are several areas that are obviously bloated for some reason..

for $135k they should have the fastest best damn website out there! they don't they have about a $10k set of websites maybe $30k. I think their "consultant" is raping them.

$212k for Magazine, new member discs/minis, Ace/Birdie/Eagle Club gifts, ratings processing, 10 & 20 year member bag tags, stickers... this seems a bit bloated.. if I were on the finance and wanted to embezzle I'd do a line like this and not put out magazine.. seems like some serious bloat here especially when this is realistic for legal council:

$25k for Trademarks, legal services, business fees, bank charges, customs, moving, miscellaneous.. this would have been a good place to bloat but they didn't.

$181k for Receive process & fulfill memberships, merchandise, event packages, promo & info kits, direct mails, incl supplies, postage, fees charged... isn't this pretty much the same thing as the $212k?

Seems to me they don't do very good budgeting for some things. I'll go with the Executive director and staff positions, they are even reasonable. but some of this stuff seems dodgy to me.

Yeah, I'll keep my money this year. But thanks for showing me they do have a budget on line.

 

[optidiscic]

My only complaint with the pdga is basically them dictating payouts...all my other complaints are trivial at best

as far as supergroups go....I kind of think "some" of the "elite" pros will bitch no matter what the scenario is

we have to play with this big gallery and cameras and its distracting vs we have to play with this chump who is slowing us down.....I would say save the supergroups for the superscores and the 2nd round though

 

[Cgkdisc]

Not sure what you mean dictating payouts? There's a fair amount of flexibility from 25% to 50% with two different curves. The TD can even deviate from the recommended payouts with advance notice to players.

 

[optidiscic]

Not sure what you mean dictating payouts? There's a fair amount of flexibility from 25% to 50% with two different curves. The TD can even deviate from the recommended payouts with advance notice to players.

I guess I would prefer the pdga does ratings and track scores and allow TDs to format their tourney and prizes however they like.....just my personal bias

 

[aardvarkious]

ok so I looked at the budget.. there are several areas that are obviously bloated for some reason..

$212k for Magazine, new member discs/minis, Ace/Birdie/Eagle Club gifts, ratings processing, 10 & 20 year member bag tags, stickers... this seems a bit bloated.. if I were on the finance and wanted to embezzle I'd do a line like this and not put out magazine.. seems like some serious bloat here especially when this is realistic for legal council:

How many active members are there? 10k? That means they are sending out 40k magazine per year. If this number only included magazines, they would be spending about $5.30/magazine. That is for a high quality (physical quality: content quality can be debated) magazine produced, printed, and mailed. That actually doesn't seem too bad to me.

Anyways, this year I started a brand new club in a town in northern Canada that had never heard of disc golf, was 4.5 hours away from the closest course, and 6.5 hours away from the closest PDGA tournament. The PDGA website gave me great resources to use in developing and pitching the course. I have noticed that community leaders and business people start taking me a lot more seriously when I can mention my affiliation with the "Professional Disc Golf Association." The potential to host a PDGA sanctioned event that could attract out of towners was a big plus for city council to give us money- "PDGA sanctioned" makes it seem like a legitimate tournament to them. Several PDGA reps have given me great advice. Showing technical standards to local people has helped make them see this as a legitimate sport, and convinced the city to buy real baskets instead of making crappy ones. DiscGolfer magazine has generated excitement for some of our players who have never made it to a tournament before. And the PDGA gave us $1000 worth of seed money to buy discs and portable targets to use for promotions, giveaways, and to lend to school.

Despite the fact that I won't be playing in a single sanctioned tournament this year, my membership was well worth it. And I really think that the PDGA can be a great tool in developing the sport.

 

[Cgkdisc]

Not having standards and expectations kind of undermines the whole idea of a consistent competition experience which is one of the things the PDGA has been charged to do by the membership. The existing guidelines were developed and codified from the popularity of the formats TDs were already using and members supported. Most guidelines were never dictated from the top down or TDs and members wouldn't willingly follow them. Even then, the flexibility is still there as long as TDs inform players in advance so they can adjust their expectations. Guidelines are just a shorthand way to communicate these without having to do it for every event.

 

[biscoe]

if you are into playing tournament on a regular basis then joining the pdga is money well spent, if you aren't playing tournaments on a regular basis it is not- simple as that.

 

[DavidSauls]

if you are into playing tournament on a regular basis then joining the pdga is money well spent, if you aren't playing tournaments on a regular basis it is not- simple as that.

Unless you like enough of what the PDGA is doing to want to be a member and support their efforts.

 

[_MTL_]

I guess I would prefer the pdga does ratings and track scores and allow TDs to format their tourney and prizes however they like.....just my personal bias

See, I disagree with this.

When I've randomly traveled to different parts of the country for events, I've enjoyed the comfort of having a pretty good idea about the payout b/c there is some structure to it. Inconsistency is a big issue in our sport and structure to things like that is a good thing.

My thought is if you don't like the structure of a PDGA event, don't sanction it under the PDGA.

 

[mjoyce]

if you are into playing tournament on a regular basis then joining the pdga is money well spent, if you aren't playing tournaments on a regular basis it is not- simple as that.

Unless you like enough of what the PDGA is doing to want to be a member and support their efforts.

I'm with biscoe on this one. But, mainly because I don't play many tournaments. (I haven't played a PDGA sanctioned one yet). So dropping $50 for a yearly membership that expires in January just isn't practical.

 

[mjoyce]

How many active members are there? 10k? That means they are sending out 40k magazine per year. If this number only included magazines, they would be spending about $5.30/magazine. That is for a high quality (physical quality: content quality can be debated) magazine produced, printed, and mailed. That actually doesn't seem too bad to me.

I doubt they're spending that amount per magazine due to the amount of ad space that is contained in said magazine which would offset much of the cost of producing the magazine.

It's cool that you get the magazine but in reality print media is going the way of the dinosaur. You're not going to read about anything new in the magazine. If you're interested enough in the sport to join the PDGA you're probably interested enough to be on this forum or one like it and you'll find out about new tech such as blizzard, the new MVP driver, Opto Pures and the like on said forum.

But judging from the responses this thread has garnered I'm not the only one who thinks the membership price is a little steep. But if you're going to play in 5 sanctioned tournaments in a calendar year it's worth the price ($10 non member fee x 5= $50 membership). I probably won't play any because rec isn't often offered in the tournies around here, I'll end up just donating to Int. And I don't really have 8-10 hours to donated to disc golf on a weekend.

 

[steveganz]

if that's faster then maybe they need to clean up the scripts, get a better server...

PDGA.com is currently hosted by Amazon Web Services and utilizes their Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Services.

Whatever problems the website has had over the past two years had nothing to do with where it was hosted. It's been due to running poorly written code on an outdated, deprecated platform that was improperly configured.

the webmasters need to be retired and get some new blood in there.

Done. I joined the PDGA as Technology Director about 7 months ago and after a thorough assessment of the situation, I severed the relationship with our existing vendor, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work.

I have been on the fence for awhile and reading this thread, then going back to their site and finding it only marginally faster...and that could be that I'm the only one stupid enough to be browsing it right now so it can handle the load.

Over the past several months, countless hours have been poured into system reconfiguration, refactoring code and optimizing database queries for performance, all while introducing some of the most commonly requested features that people have been clamoring for.

While we've made great strides towards improving the situation, our work has only begun. We've squeezed just about every last bit of performance we can out of this old dog while we migrate to a new platform and rewrite applications from scratch to take advantage of the latest caching technologies, etc. that will improve delivery of content up to an order of magnitude.

During the week of the 2012 PDGA World Championships, PDGA.com handled record-breaking loads. Traffic was more than double what they've ever been in the history of the PDGA. This is in stark contrast to this time last year during the 2011 Pro Worlds in Santa Cruz where loads less than half the size brought the site to its knees.

In the month of July, PDGA.com served up 3 million pageviews during over half a million visits and never broke a sweat.

We can handle one more.

and all it is for is someone's ratings? some rules?

...and Event Schedule, Player Statistics, Tournament Results, Course Directory, Live Scoring, Membership Services, Tournament Administration, with much, much more to come.

P.S. Thanks for listening. Sorry for the thread hijack. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

 

[martygregwah]

Yeah all that and...

Steve G works his ass off on the PDGA site, and still found time to whoop everyone's ass in his division at The Memorial this year. That's some straight brogrammer ballin right there brahs.

 

[Todd Wiley]

PDGA.com is currently hosted by Amazon Web Services and utilizes their Elastic Compute Cloud and Relational Database Services.

Whatever problems the website has had over the past two years had nothing to do with where it was hosted. It's been due to running poorly written code on an outdated, deprecated platform that was improperly configured.

Done. I joined the PDGA as Technology Director about 7 months ago and after a thorough assessment of the situation, I severed the relationship with our existing vendor, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work.

Over the past several months, countless hours have been poured into system reconfiguration, refactoring code and optimizing database queries for performance, all while introducing some of the most commonly requested features that people have been clamoring for.

While we've made great strides towards improving the situation, our work has only begun. We've squeezed just about every last bit of performance we can out of this old dog while we migrate to a new platform and rewrite applications from scratch to take advantage of the latest caching technologies, etc. that will improve delivery of content up to an order of magnitude.

During the week of the 2012 PDGA World Championships, PDGA.com handled record-breaking loads. Traffic was more than double what they've ever been in the history of the PDGA. This is in stark contrast to this time last year during the 2011 Pro Worlds in Santa Cruz where loads less than half the size brought the site to its knees.

In the month of July, PDGA.com served up 3 million pageviews during over half a million visits and never broke a sweat.

We can handle one more.

...and Event Schedule, Player Statistics, Tournament Results, Course Directory, Live Scoring, Membership Services, Tournament Administration, with much, much more to come.

P.S. Thanks for listening. Sorry for the thread hijack. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

^^ I can't consider the above post a hijack of this thread. Instead, it is completely the opposite. Steve, you have "right the train to the tracks", thank you.

I have not had a single problem with the PDGA Site in a long time. I am there quite a bit, whether it is links from dgcoursereview, discgolfscene, or facebook... everything has worked flawlessly since I joined the PDGA

It definately wasn't all that hard work Steve put into it

 

[_MTL_]

And the changes Steve has made have been very useful.

On just the Tour results page, Steve has done the following (that I've noticed) that have greatly increased the usability of the site:

- Added the total number of competitors per divison beside the division name (as a TD, that is VERY usefull).
- Made all catagories on the site sortable (very helpful for things like seeing the order or ratings, alphabetical, tee times in order [did it this morning for the vibram]).
- Added a hover feature over player names that show where a player is from. Helpful when this info disapears once results come in.
- Highlighted propagators within results to show how many per division were playing.

And Steve is a great guy and listens to members. We are lucky to have him.

Based on the things has told me about what is coming, we are just starting to see improvements!