It happened again...

[optidiscic]

If labelkills would chime in we'd have our foursome...I like the diversity here. I also like the interaction between different skill sets and experience. Makes for a better community than the clique-ish sites I wont mention. I just wish we could categorize courses somehow on difficulty level so the reviews would not be such an issue.

 

[bcr123psu]

I just wish we could categorize courses somehow on difficulty level so the reviews would not be such an issue.

I think you know that this is also a can of worms because of greatly differing opinions of difficulty. What would be great would be a mathematical formula to derive a "Level of Difficulty Utility Score" that takes into account some of the following (if not more) criteria:

• Square footage of the entire hole
• Square footage of the fairway
• Length of fairway
• Width of fairway
• Tree density of the entire hole
• Tree density of the fairway
• % of course bordered by or containing OB
• Elevation increases
• Elevation decreases
• Degree of curve from tee pad to pin
• Length from tee pad to pin
• Fairway composition (manicured lawn, rocky, dirt, etc.)

As great as I think this would be, I don't think it would be possible to calculate this on any more than one or two courses, if at all.

 

[All GUNKed up]

jerome i saw another post of yours where you were talking about this difficulty thing and the site owner shot your idea down. why not just set up a s.s.a. for each course then everyone would know that a course like nockamixon is hard and a course like wehrs dam is easy. I think you guys are overthinking this. The only problem with that would be is that you would have 30 noobs ask on 30 different threads what does s.s.a mean. ahhh neverending. The reason you set up a ssa and not pro par would be that for example buchmiller park and wehrs dam are both par 54 . So on paper the difficulty looks the same . However i think the ssa for buchmiller would be 6 points higher than wehrs dam and by seeing that difference in the number you can then determine if the course is easy, moderate,above average or difficult in difficulty factor.

 

[Ryan P.]

jerome i saw another post of yours where you were talking about this difficulty thing and the site owner shot your idea down.

TimG has good reasons for not adding those features. I've suggested ideas like that to Tim on two different occasions, and after talking with him about it, It makes sense for him not to post SSA and similar things.

Solid SSA for a course doesn't exist. There is estimated SSA, but that can change up to 5 strokes per round (depending on time of year, weather, and other variables). That's up to a 10 stroke variance.

As for putting a courses difficulty rating online, the people who post those reviews aren't going to see the course difficulty. They are called fly-by reviewers for a reason. They come to the site, post their reviews, and do absolutely nothing else. Yes, course difficulty would be nice to have for those of us who would actually use it. However, Tim has good reasons for creating the site and editing it the way he has, and that shows in the amount of quality members this site has while being so young.

 

[billnchristy]

Ya know guys, if we want a good average we could all do our part by putting our scores in the scorebook.

Then you will get a true average, all skills, all tees. Yes it will be many strokes higher than an SSA would be but it doesn't matter as long as we compare apples to apples.

Also, if more people would link their PDGA number it would be easy to cross-reference your abilities.

 

[ssejhill]

Peer review of course reviews

... It takes volunteerism (and may have been discussed here before) but perhaps a sort of peer-review system for the reviews could work ...

Don't the reviews have a feature like that now. Other members can "vote" on whether they feel that a course review is helpful or not. This allows you to gauge whether others agree with the reviewer's rating and then you may be able to quickly decide to disregard or accept the rating as a result.

Of course, that system may not be perfect either if members don't actually read the reviews and they just "vote" that a review is "not helpful" if a reviewer pans a course, even though the review carefully explains why the course received a low rating.