Hi all, Chairman of the GDC here.
I’d like to be upfront about one thing - I take full responsibility and accountability for the delays this season. Many people on the GDC contribute to Q&A answers, but ultimately I am the one who clicks “post” when an answer is ready. There is no excuse for the way this season has gone, and as a former competitor myself I would probably be making the same post if I were in your shoes. By our own metric that I wrote in the Guidelines (quoted at the beginning of this thread and bolded for emphasis), I have failed you. So, please accept this apology, in the form of an attempted explanation for the delays and a peek behind the curtain at what goes into Q&A responses.
1 - “We’re busy”. This is the first reaction I typically have when someone comments to me about Q&A delays. It is one of the most common cop-outs in human nature, and it is easy to get caught using it as an excuse. Any time you have not done something, that means you were doing something else.
The GDC is not the full-time job for any of its members, including myself. It is probably my favorite part of my job, no doubt. However, an unfortunate reality of life is that how much you “like” something does not always correlate to how much of your 24 hours it receives in a day. The typical GDC member is, by definition, a valuable subject-matter-expert of the VEX or RECF workforce in some capacity - which means that they/we may be uniquely suited, and therefore occasionally re-prioritized, to other tasks that support our mission. When that happens to too many of us at once… delays happen.
2 - A staple of the VEX Q&A has always been its intent as a general helpful reference for rules implications/clarifications. If we gave one-sentence answers to every question, it would help a lot with point 1. However, I don’t think that would benefit anyone.
The part of answering Q&A’s that takes the longest is not actually the root question. In most cases, if you ask a GDC member “hey, what happens if Cubes cross the line in auton”, we can probably answer in 30 seconds or less, “I think that means you lose auton”. (I do this every year at VEX Worlds, during the Open Forum and Driver’s Meeting).
Rather, it’s the fact that that answer by itself is pretty much useless as a long-term reference. Head Referees and teams need a background that you can use to make your own judgments. This step - pulling together combinations of different rules, debating over the verbiage (to make sure we don’t mis-use the word “should”), and trying to answer future in-the-moment questions - takes substantial time and mental energy. It is not the easy way out, but I feel very strongly that it preferable to one-sentence “read the manual” answers.
3 - Y’all ask… a lot of questions, so they need to be organized and discussed before answering. Some people have asked if the RobotEvents system is the cause of the delays. Ironically, the RE system was developed specifically to improve the efficiency on our side (and therefore speed/quality) of answers. There are new backend tools where we get notifications for new questions, discuss in-line, vote on proposed answers, etc.
With that being said, this thread has definitely brought to light a major issue with VEX U. When we were originally working with the RE developers to create the Q&A system, there was a lot of debate about how to handle VEX U. Most VRC answers apply to VEX U, but not all; some VEX U answers apply to both VRC and VEX U; some VEX U answers may look like they apply to VRC, but would actually not. We took a stab at combining them, but it is now clear that the way in which VEX U questions are handled by our back-end is not working as intended. (I am going to be completely honest - I do not recall seeing sazrock’s linked question that was posted in June). There is no excuse for this, but I assure you that I am going to personally look into this for next season.
There is nothing I can do to take back any event difficulties that occurred this season which would have been mitigated by a then-unanswered Q&A; for that, I sincerely apologize. The GDC cares deeply about the integrity of all VEX competitions, and I will be reviewing our internal processes ASAP so that we can return to expected response timelines before the end of this season, and maintain them moving forward. (and, I will be writing some answers this weekend!)