UKARA Alternative

[Guest PT247]

Am not a fan of UKARA as such either, but as a player it is simple to obtain, and there is no need to wear a band, a patch or anything else once obtained. I get that logging in to sites to sign a waiver takes a couple of min to do and an electronic band may save a few seconds but is it necessary?

You are also still relying on site owners to upload the player data from each event, currently all they have to do is sign a form to say that the new player skirmishes regularly with them which the player can then take to their local shop or post off to UKARA. The current system is not complicated, adding technology will make it complicated and you can bet ya bottom dollar that the players will still have to sign the paper waiver.

I honestly am for improved control of who has and who has not got a defence and for making it easier for legitimate players to register their defence and if it is cheaper as well then bonus.

I'd not wear a wrist band or a patch to show I have jumped through the required hoops, and making an individual pay for a band/patch prior to them having been playing a significant amount of time will put them off too. Currently we pay once we qualify and have expressed a desire to obtain a defence, this prospect unless I am mis-reading would require players to have a wristband and pay for it from their first game.... which would require the site to hold wristbands to issue to new players and imo cause more delays to those who already have a defence as they would be jamming up the sites registration process.

[Airsoft-Ed]

We're hoping to build the insurance waivers into the scan system, so that by scanning in on the site you accept the insurance T&Cs, you won't be required to wear your band either, it doesn't have to be visible. Leave it in your kit.

Similarly, if you forget it one day, the only thing you'll lose will be evidence of your attendance at that site on that day, if you aren't trying to qualify for your 3 games then you likely won't be that bothered if your attendance isn't recorded. You could still prove you were there via photos etc if it came down to it for a legal dispute or something, we just thought we might as well have the auto logging system for the sake of those trying to keep their defence up to date.

Also, sites aren't required to hold the bands to give out to people on their first game, the player registers with the project online and they'll then be able to either print their barcode out, or we'll send them a package containing it.
At this stage we haven't decided exactly how it'll work, but rest assured the idea is that sites and retailers will have no admin to deal with as we'll sort it all out, server side on the database.

The scanners sites are given will come with software which saves all the scanned info until an internet connection is present, it will then automatically send the info, which will then automatically be updated on the database.

It's a hands free, no hassle system that does everything automatically.
If anything goes wrong with the scanners it will simply result in lost attendance for a day, there'll be no personal info linked to your scannable barcode thing, it'll all be stored server side and everything will be properly checked and maintained against the data protection act.

[Carrel]

what happens if you forget your wristband. Also, A wristband, really? Surely a card would be easier and cheaper. Then you can have better fail safes. Sits in your wallet as well so you can prove you are a skirmisher to a retailer

[Airsoft-Ed]

See my last post about forgetting it, Carrel.

We are actually doing cards now, a lot of people raised issues with wrist bands.

[rexfan10]

Im sorry if this has been mentioned, however;

How does one go about becoming a luther member with their unique barcode? Is it the same idea as ukara as in attend a certain amount of games in a certain amount of time, or will the luther project be available to those with other defences or....?

 

Thanks in advance

[Airsoft-Ed]

Anyone will be able to register, you'll do it online and as soon as you're entitled to buy RIFs the status of the member's account will reflect that on the database.

It'll take age and everything into account automatically.

[Mike636]

The Home Office set "the 3 skirmishes in more than 2 months" rule so there isn't a way around it BUT with Luther they don't have to be at the same site so you can travel about to different places if you so wish. We are still in the early stages now so we don't have a set date for when the system will go live.

[M_P]

Not sure how often you guys check other forums but it seems to be appreciated as a good idea over at zeroin (yes I know full of crap the majority of the time but support nonetheless) http://forums.zeroin.co.uk/showthread.php?229383-Project-Luther!&p=1281808#post1281808

[Esoterick]

Not sure how often you guys check other forums but it seems to be appreciated as a good idea over at zeroin (yes I know full of crap the majority of the time but support nonetheless) http://forums.zeroin.co.uk/showthread.php?229383-Project-Luther!&p=1281808#post1281808

 

Yeah I had a quick look earlier, saw a thread about it here too: http://www.airsofters.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=316347#post316347

 

It could be worth engaging the guys on the other forums discussing it, but it would largely depend on how willing they are to actually discuss it and not just shout how you are wrong over the top of any points made.

 

Overall though I think what you guys are trying to do with this project is a good idea and it looks like you are on the right track for how it should be setup. I would imagine the main stumbling block will be getting retailers and sites interested, although that is probably stating the obvious.

[Zak Da Mack]

This scheme could be a step forward for us all. I'm just hoping that it's done right and that you can get support from the retailers. Otherwise, it'd be pointless if no retailer accepted it.

 

Good luck

[Deva]

Who on this forum is involved in this? (usernames)

 

The system you are proposing sounds very ubiquitous. This won't be cheap, at all, unless you have contacts or ability to do it within your team. If you don't have that, you will need to get that, because in my opinion you are going to need this system set up and flawless before you can start convincing anyone to hand over cash to be a part of it, sites and retailers.

 

Along with the above, where does the amount of £5 come in? How many people are you expecting to sign up? Has this been researched? If this is a consumer based body, why not charge the retailers? You can possibly make it cheaper to the consumer whilst still beating UKARA on the site and retailer front.

 

Just some thoughts.

[Kaza66]

Who on this forum is involved in this? (usernames)

 

The system you are proposing sounds very ubiquitous. This won't be cheap, at all, unless you have contacts or ability to do it within your team. If you don't have that, you will need to get that, because in my opinion you are going to need this system set up and flawless before you can start convincing anyone to hand over cash to be a part of it, sites and retailers.

 

Along with the above, where does the amount of £5 come in? How many people are you expecting to sign up? Has this been researched? If this is a consumer based body, why not charge the retailers? You can possibly make it cheaper to the consumer whilst still beating UKARA on the site and retailer front.

 

Just some thoughts.

 

The people involved are as follows:

- fivezerothrees

- Mike636

- Airsoft_Ed

- Myself

- Dave... (He recently made an account here at AF UK but I am unsure to his username)

 

Whilst charging retailers more would make it cheaper to the consumer and more appealing, retailers are less likely to climb on board if they have a high price to pay? That said though we do need to keep improving, altering and re-jigging the project to ensure we can maximise the number of people on board.

 

The number of people who would sign up is something we are beginning to look into now we've publicised the initial planning stages.

 

As for a quick update, copied from our facebook page:

 

"We've come to the decision that in order to make a slick and flexible system for all parties involved our system will be internet based and no longer Windows application based.

What this means is that those who chose the admin free player attendance system can use mobile devices and bluetooth barcode scanners – of course the internet is required. But we will look into on offline 'app' version further down the line.

As an alternative you can simply use a remote barcode scanner that saves a long list of recorded Luther ID numbers of which you can upload to the system at your convenience.

You could also use any laptop with a USB Barcode scanner and record them into a spreadsheet – works nicely! This would again upload straight to Luther.

Lastly, good old pen and paper! Then enter the ID numbers on our online system, again at your convenience."

[Deva]

Fair enough.

 

You've kind of avoided my question about the cost for this system though. You're trying to do a dumbed down version of the Oyster card for airsoft, as you can imagine that wasn't cheap. It seems to me you have an issue in that you've proposed no solution how you are going to set this all up. You need some cash up front because you can't expect everyone to pay up and then wait 12/24 months until you're able to deliver. If you have those 5000 people, 10% of your budget is gone *just* on the required amount of 2nd class stamps to send them their card and welcome letter. That's before you add in the cost of a load of envelopes, paper, ink, the design and production of the cards themselves and all the admin work involved. You're going to have to do that all again if someone loses their card as in my opinion, you can't reasonably expect them to pay again.

 

There's a further issue with the cards. If some dodgy person wants a RIF, they go to their mate who plays airsoft and says they really want to buy a load. Yes, in any case, they could get their mate to buy the stuff, but, what happens if they register on your site for the small sum of £5, then his airsofting mate simply swipes his card for him every time he goes. He's already done enough skirmishes for the year for his defence to be valid, so he gets 3/4 skirmishes on his mates card, his mate can now buy a RIF.

 

A retailer will then be making a sale in false belief. If the dodgy person then gets caught doing something he shouldn't, and they wonder how he got hold of a/so many weapon(s), a nasty process will start. If you're selling your system as a defence for the VCRA, you better make sure it is watertight. This hasn't happened yet, but assuming a case is brought to court, and PL was used as the defence, but proved to be useless. The seller/retailer is going to sue you and bring you in to it because you haven't safeguarded them like they wanted. You need to budget to have this looked over on any system. It will possibly never happen, it's unlikely, yes, but going on chance isn't a wise idea and I wouldn't like to see anyone in the community get done over because you didn't get proper legal advice.

 

I have a lot of other questions about the system, but don't want to post them all here because I think the idea is good (but needs tweaking) and don't want it to look like I'm slating it.

[fivezerothree]

Fair enough.

 

You've kind of avoided my question about the cost for this system though. You're trying to do a dumbed down version of the Oyster card for airsoft, as you can imagine that wasn't cheap. It seems to me you have an issue in that you've proposed no solution how you are going to set this all up. You need some cash up front because you can't expect everyone to pay up and then wait 12/24 months until you're able to deliver. If you have those 5000 people, 10% of your budget is gone *just* on the required amount of 2nd class stamps to send them their card and welcome letter. That's before you add in the cost of a load of envelopes, paper, ink, the design and production of the cards themselves and all the admin work involved. You're going to have to do that all again if someone loses their card as in my opinion, you can't reasonably expect them to pay again.

 

There's a further issue with the cards. If some dodgy person wants a RIF, they go to their mate who plays airsoft and says they really want to buy a load. Yes, in any case, they could get their mate to buy the stuff, but, what happens if they register on your site for the small sum of £5, then his airsofting mate simply swipes his card for him every time he goes. He's already done enough skirmishes for the year for his defence to be valid, so he gets 3/4 skirmishes on his mates card, his mate can now buy a RIF.

 

A retailer will then be making a sale in false belief. If the dodgy person then gets caught doing something he shouldn't, and they wonder how he got hold of a/so many weapon(s), a nasty process will start. If you're selling your system as a defence for the VCRA, you better make sure it is watertight. This hasn't happened yet, but assuming a case is brought to court, and PL was used as the defence, but proved to be useless. The seller/retailer is going to sue you and bring you in to it because you haven't safeguarded them like they wanted. You need to budget to have this looked over on any system. It will possibly never happen, it's unlikely, yes, but going on chance isn't a wise idea and I wouldn't like to see anyone in the community get done over because you didn't get proper legal advice.

 

I have a lot of other questions about the system, but don't want to post them all here because I think the idea is good (but needs tweaking) and don't want it to look like I'm slating it.

 

Hi Dev!

 

I'm currently 'managing' the project if you will, so I thought I'd try and address your concerns.

 

Usually there are quite a lot of people that end up getting paid to produce such systems, luckily we are these people in the week which means we will do this work for free as its only our time. The server will cost us but it's nothing worth even mentioning as we are already set up for that in our line of work. So the most expensive part to most, is free to us.

If we were to order 500 cards as our first batch, it'd work out at about 50p per card, if we order 1000 then 35p. The more we order the less the price per unit and all that jazz – I'm sure you see where I am coming from. Investment wise already we are looking at £250-£350 here. Yeah, that money will have to be raised rather than waiting for memberships to fall in. How? Not sure yet, I'm attacking this project bit by bit, logically.

 

There's been a lot of realisations and player requested changes of which we've actioned so it's evolving quickly.

 

With the cards I did intend to manually write their names in marker, but even if they were printed it wouldn't change the fact that people could still be sneaky as you describe. Which has really stumped me. The only solution I can think of is by using a photo on these cards too – it'll raise the cost per unit (not sure by what margin yet) but should technically eradicate the issue as long as they are checked. I'm assuming you know that UKARA also has the same flaw.

In terms of our admin time, the system is actually pretty slick, automatically prints off an envelope the whole lot we only need to pop a card and a standard letter in there. We budgeted a £2 cost per member, so in terms of stationery and postage we have wiggle room.

[Ian_Gere]

I think it is fair enough to ask people to pay again to replace a lost card - maybe not the full price, but an admin fee to cover costs, yeah - it's a cheap lesson.

 

I agree about the startup costs though and that you can't simply ask people for their membership fee and then use that income to develop the project. In fact there may well be a law against that! Another way to approach it may be to ask people to invest now and get free membership when/if it goes live, with the knowledge that they are supporting development. Maybe go further and ask for 'uber-investors' say £30 now for lifetime membership if/when it works out (you can have mine on Wednesday).

[Deva]

Yeah you could do it kickstarter style. Good idea

 

I'm not sure UKARA has the same flaw, it's possible, but not quite as possible. If I'm already registered at a site and then I start trying to get registered again a few months later they might think it was strange my name had changed and that I looked rather familiar.

 

Glad you have people with the technical knowledge, as a system you describe is quite complex, with the wait to upload to the internet and all that, you're going to need more than just a scanner. The first thing that popped in to my head was a Raspberry Pi, but by the time you'd kitted that out for 250 sites across the UK, you'd have blown a lot of money. I suspect a Pi is overkill, but do you see where I'm coming from? If you want to automate the sync process to the database that's going to be impossible without an end user plugging it in, unless you package them with some kind of pre-paid SIM. A cheap system isn't going to have Windows on it, it's going to have some kind of Linux distro on it, will the people running the sites be familiar with this? Will they know how to plug it in and all that? You'll have to forgive me if you've come up with a solution to this.

[typefish]

Hi, I'm "Dave" and I'm one of the guys mentioned on that list back in the previous page.

 

I was suggesting something like a Google Chrome App - that browser seems pretty ubiquitous on machines now, and can run in persistent offline mode, on OS X, Linux and Windows.

[jcheeseright]

Would involve a pretty radical rethink of the system, but why not do a smart phone app and have a QR code for each player instead of a barcode?

 

since most modern smartphones have cameras good enough to read a QR code from another phone's screen you could dispense entirely with the ID card/wrist band etc. Then all people need to do is take their phone to get scanned. If you forget your phone... no problem, just log into someone else's phone app with your unique username/password combo and it'll display your personal QR code as well as your membership number underneath.

 

Using technologies like this would take away the vast majority of your materials overhead as well as make the whole thing much less labour intensive. People can sign up for an account online for free and enter their details etc, the membership numbers, QR codes are all automatically generated and all the admin team will need to do is validate their membership by having them upload a picture/scan of some form of photo ID to prove their age.

 

Not only that, site owners/marshals etc won't need to have another bit of kit knocking about to get broken/lost, they'll just need to download an app to their phone and scan people's codes.

 

To make it more attractive to retailers/site owners you could have 2 versions of the app, one for businesses which is free and contains the scanner function as well as database lookups, another for players which costs a small sum (99p?) and allows them to display their QR code and see a record of their skirmishes.

 

You could even make both apps free and charge an annual fee for membership as you're already planning to do. The apps would run in tandem with the online service that I expect would be used more by retailers for checking of defences.

[Longshot]

The Home Office set "the 3 skirmishes in more than 2 months" rule

Just to check, are you SURE that's the case?

[Deva]

A Chrome app will still need some hardware and requires Chrome. I like Chrome and use it, but not everyone does. It sounds like another hoop to jump through.

 

I think if it was me I'd be tempted to make it a bit simpler, have a scanner just spit out a text/CSV file or something. Site owner gets home, logs on to your website, uploads the CSV, done.

 

With the QR code, cheese, how would that work? If you have a unique QR code for each player, the site has to know who is coming so they can produce all these QR codes? You can't have a QR code produced on your phone because you can't take a photo of your own phone, and how would the app know when it was supposed to display the code? The site would have to switch it on at the beginning of the day to allow you to do it, but it still doesn't make sense.

 

If a site prints off a QR code for each game day, that makes more sense. Everyone scans it, duplicates aren't accepted and as you are logged in to the app it knows who you are and can be sure of this. So people can't log visits more often the code will have to change week to week but I can't see sites having too much issue with printing a piece of paper off each week. Disadvantage, not everyone has a smartphone. Using other peoples phones = slow registration, people have to get their earlier etc.

[typefish]

I don't have an Android nor an Apple smartphone (I'm a Windows man) so heh, that's at least £180 quid used in getting access to the toolkit to publish apps!

[Ian_Gere]

I think QR codes are not error free enough to go with yet - if it goes wrong it will be admin intensive to sort out. A barcode is bombproof these days.

[jcheeseright]

The QR code would be on the player's phone and the site would scan that to register their attendance. The QR code for each player would simply be a representation of their membership number, for example if my number were 123456JSC my QR code would look like this:

The site owner/marshal would scan that code which I'd have displayed on my phone screen (the app would generate it based upon a dataset that's unique to me, presumably my membership number or a hash of it) and that'd register my attendance. The best thing about a QR code is that it's not only got redundancy built in (less chance of an error than a barcode) they're also extremely versatile in the amount of data you can store in one, all the way up to names/addresses/etc if required.

 

I think I could have probably worded the initial suggestion a little better, the consumer app (as opposed to the business app) wouldn't have a QR read function, it'd just produce your unique QR code to allow the site owner to scan you in, exactly the same as a barcode on a card but with no requirement to print and post a card for every member. The business app would have the QR reader function that'd tell the central database which players had been scanned at their site that day as well as tell them that player's skirmisher status if they wanted to.

[jcheeseright]

I think QR codes are not error free enough to go with yet - if it goes wrong it will be admin intensive to sort out. A barcode is bombproof these days.

 

QR codes have been in use for a long time now, since 1996! They're very, very error resistant, more so actually than a barcode;

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xc94eq_qr-barcode-custom-embroidery_tech

 

check that out, a company embroidered one and it read without error.

[jcheeseright]

having thought about it, my narrative explanation above is actually quite confusing so I'll re-jig it:

 

Consumer app:

- Produces a QR code based on the player's Luther membership number/name/DOB/hash.

- Allows the player to check their own skirmisher's status and see a log of games where they've been checked in.

 

Primary use for the consumer app is to display the user's membership number in an easily scanned format; the QR code. You open the app, log in and the whole screen becomes one big QR, site owner scans it, their device acknowledges the player by displaying their name, DOB, membership number and the next person gets scanned. Swipe the screen to the left and you get your skirmish diary, swipe it to the right and you get your personal information that's stored on the Luther database.

 

Business app:

- Scans player's QR codes to register their attendance and saves a list of names/numbers for that day's skirmish, or if data is available uploads them to the database in real time.

- Allows the user to check the skirmisher status of a player either by scanning their QR code or inputting their membership number (for privacy possibly just have the name show as either red or green, maybe have a tick if they've met the requirement to prove a defence?).

 

Using this method, even if you had to borrow someone else's phone to check in it'd still be quicker than the traditional form filling and just as quick as an ID card without the financial and admin overhead required with the ID card production and distribution.

Those without smart phones would be able to print their own QR code onto a bit of paper using the web interface and just take it with them. Not only that, because QR codes are so readable, you could actually get a patch made with your own personal QR code on if you were that way inclined!