Been playing with ranking till about 1 - 1,5 year1 ago...
exchanging some e-mail with the then vsk team. Had to drop that cause of some new crewmember joing our family.
Basics should still be online most of the time, (doesn't work with NS 6x + , should be okay with IE) just try the link link
'sim sail ladder'
at
http://www.admirals.de/virtualskipper/
It should show at the top. It's dynamic so don't bookmark.
It revolves around some formula Keith Suderman (CAN Knot) came up with, borrowed from the international chess federation.
I did some small modifying to be able to compare matchraces with fleetraces etc.
It basically compares skippers' odds of winning with his actual result.
e.g. bad result although high odds for a win gives little points (bad enough may even result in deductions....)
good result against bad odds gives many points.
The odds are based on accumulated points to date of the various participants in a race.
The points are mediated to compensate for the number of boats in a race.
1.stly it matters little how many races you sail.
2. ndly newbies are advanced more promptly then more experienced skipper (newbies have to be evaluated so that they have the right odds put against them)
3. rdly winning 100 times against the same skipper won't help,
as the odds of winning rise with every win, leading to no point
gain after a short while.
By changing the paramaters in the formula the rates of change can be influenced.
The number of points (could call that a rating) translates into a
ranking.
The bigger problem (for a vsk independant ranking, rating or point system) is to get the results in a database.
Keith came up with a real good idea, unfortunatly a bit late for
incorporation in the release version. Basically he suggested that
the race results should be presented to the host in XML format.
I would like to take that further. The host should have to
give an e-mail adress(es) to wich the results are to be be e-mailed. (I think xml format will do just fine).
Receiving an e-mail, extracting the results and dumping those in a database, execute some code etc. shouldn't be much of a problem for most 'clubs, organisations, committees etc.' and would allow the automatisation of tournaments, rankings and ratings etc.