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I was looking up a local race to examine the map, and found it wasn't there (on http://www.usatf.org/events/courses/search/ ); looked for other local races, no maps; looked up known races I've looked at in the past (e.g., Marine Corps Marathon), no maps; went to various cities, like Atlanta GA (home of Peachtree 10K), no maps. Has USATF decided to shut the field off? I haven't signed in to this board for awhile but haven't seen any topic involving the maps. Anyone have any idea what's going on? Thanks!
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Richard,

There were several technical issues with the USATF national web site that appear to have started September 19, 2017. We have reported the map problems to the national office. The programmers are working on the web site problems and are fixing them in priority order. They will get to our map issue as soon as possible.

Thank you. -- Justin
Is it possible for the RRTC to host a separate map and data website? The orginal idea for USATF to host the certified course maps and associated data was to help drive member traffic to the USATF parent site, along with the course measurer’s listing. If USATF can’t currently maintain the map search functioning, why not host it separately while the site isn’t fully operational?

The independent RRTC site could be considered a backup site. Backup for any large data files would seem to be helpful and practical.
Do you really think USATF needed us to create traffic on their site? If that’s the case, then they must still need us, which I doubt. I do agree we provide a real service for USATF. All our Certifiers and Measurers do so musch and I know USATF appreciate what we do.

Now for your idea, it is a good one. Time will tell when that will happen. I am sure David will keep us posted when this will become a reality.
We could do something like the link below right now.
Includes only 2017 Michigan certs

(Note the entries in the map field are links.)
People would have to understand how to use the filter option to search for a cert though. You can't edit this document but you can filter/sort it by selecting the filter symbol and selecting "Create temporary filter view." Once you understand that it might be easier to find what you're looking for than with the USATF database search.
And we could change it!!! Create new fields, modify them, etc.

I'm putting in a "Yea" vote for hosting the course search function here as a redundancy effort, if you have the resources. I wanted to check on record eligibility today for some July 4th races but the USATF hosted database is down this afternoon/evening.
http://www.usatf.org/events/courses/search/
Note that I attended many meetings in Dec at USATF Ann Meeting, specifically targeting website issues. My takeway based on decades in the industry is a Nov 2020 estimate for a reliable usatf.org infrastructure. So hosting a backup would not be a waste if you worry this may be "fixed" tomorrow and efforts wasted.  Note that Justin reported original problems started in Sept 2017, which is 20 months ago, so no one should worry that this is a short-term issue not worth addressing!

Since the permanent usatf.org URLs to the maps seem to be pretty reliable, only a rough database is needed to generate a course certification number. That can be easily turned into the URL, which can point to usatf.org.

Also curious if anyone is monitoring the downtime of the course search database to use in negotiations with usatf.org.  They'll simply say that the isolated several hour outage you are pointing out is the only time it was out in the last three months unless you have evidence to the contrary. Or say that it works now, so what's your problem?

I have updated my google sheet that I referenced above to include all the courses in the USATF database as of July 5, 2019. If the database search on the USATF website goes down again, you can use this is look up courses and view maps. This link to this google sheet is given below:

https://docs.google.com/spread...MaU/edit?usp=sharing

A few disclaimers:

1) It includes courses only through July 5, 2019. I'll download new courses periodically (when I think about it). This is a stop gap solution. Hopefully a permanent solution to our database issues (which is being worked on) will be up and running before too long.

2) You can click on the triangle in a column heading to filter the rows based on that column. Alternatively you could select Edit>Find and Replace... to search for a particular string that you know is in the course listing you are looking for.

3) Click on the "Map" link on the left side to see the course map/certificate. In the past these direct links to course maps have still worked when the database search function stopped working.

4) I believe all the course information has been downloaded correctly, but I'm not guaranteeing it.

Thanks for that non-trivial piece of work, Mark.

If you are not yet "in the know" about our new map database that is on the horizon, Jim Gilmer and his team expect that it will be up and running about the same time as our new certification submission portal later this year. Keep an eye out for an email from Jane Parks and Jim later this summer announcing our new system roll out. Jim and his team have been working on this for many months.

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