Generating Team IDs

[jawaad-ahmad]

From comment:

Discuss how we want team IDs generated. How many characters, how many check digits, how will they be expired/reused. How to guard against transposing characters.

[ellerychan]

First of all, do we want to keep the "user-friendly" form of the code, where each character is a word? Or is it not fun and not useful. The team only really needs to enter it once, I believe. After that, the ID code is stored in the BRATA for inclusion in messages.

[ellerychan]

We can reduce the chance of character transposition by appliying a different transform to each letter, such as rotating the bits of each character by index bits, where index is the character's position in the string, before summing and modding them to get the check value.

[jawaad-ahmad]

The user-friendly words aren't in the functional spec yet; no reason the spec can't be changed if we go down this route.

A simple N-character team ID is simple and it works, but agreed the words would add to the fun. I think you made a comment about running out of ice cream flavors. Perhaps we could add toppings to the list if we need more values.

Would the scoreboard reference the team ID at all? Should it?

If I recall last year correctly, every time Jaron looked up something in the database, he needed to know the team's five-digit ID. Even if we do use the user-friendly words, I wonder if the actual team ID should also be printed on the card for ease of reference:

• Team Name: Technical Turings
• Team ID: November Bravo Delta Rocky Road (NBD02)

[ellerychan]

Team ID will be in the database, so there will be multiple ways to get to it. But I also thought we might print it on something, just in case.

[jawaad-ahmad]

How about have the leaderboard have columns something like: Team Name (Team ID)[*], Score 1, Score 2, Score 3, Score 4, Total?

(The optional asterisk indicates some sort of problem e.g. disqualification as proposed earlier.)

[ellerychan]

I renamed the Team ID to team_passcode in the database, as I see it being used like a PIN, so displaying it on the leaderboard probably is not appropriate.

I feel the Team ID concept has gotten messy. Trying to clarify and simplify...

My current thinking:

• It's just a simple password or PIN
• No check digits are necessary
• It's only purpose is to authenticate a Team so they can get their reg_code, which will allow the MS to identify their BRATA transactions

[jawaad-ahmad]

How are things with this issue? Can this be resolved/closed as well, or is there still anything more to do with it?

[ellerychan]

Some of it is OBE. Some of it is still being debated. Let's keep it open for now. I am assigning it to myself.

[jaron42]

I am opening another issue that is related so that I can try to get code in to get registration working. I have the brata code changed to assume the pass code is just part of the end of the url and it will get back and persist the reg_code for usage. I need to test it though, so I am creating a repeat reg_code issue and branch on the MS. I am going to hard code the pass code and generation of the reg code for now, so when this issue gets resolved it can replace those.

[ellerychan]

reg_code should be getting generated in the Register message. See the Register message handler.