Web Team Update - January 2026

2026 Web Team Goals

We have formulated Web Team Goals for 2026.

2026 Website Wishlist Survey

Charlie created a 2026 Website Wishlist survey, which was publicized via the RUSA Google Group. 23 members took the survey, providing useful and thoughtful suggestions. These have been compiled and commented on by the Web Team. Some will likely influence our 2026 Web Team Goals. Others may be addressed further in the future. We are preparing individual responses for the people who included their RUSA # in the survey.

Climbing Support

This feature is completely rolled out for all use cases:

Member results pages now show yearly, annual, and per-result climbing data. Results can also be dynamically filtered.
The events search, brevet routes search, and permanents route search features now display a climbing column that can be toggled between feet and maters. Min/max climbing have been added as search filter options. Some columns have been made optional in order to conserve space. Some of these features now have a proper search results page and details page.
RBAs can assign climbing to routes through a self-service tool. This will also update calendared events using that route. There are also several options for assigning climbing to events at results submission time and handling one-off route deviations. Climbing for team events is also supported.
Back office support to include climbing and team climbing in all relevant reports.
Back office tooling to allow brevet coordinator to manage climbing for events.
Back office tooling to allow permanents team to manage climbing for permanents results.
Management for perm result reversibility, plus climbing validation based on perm route climbing and net elevation.

Interactive Maps and Visualizations

Launched an interactive tool for visualizing completions times of historical permanent routes and brevet routes.

Ex: https://rusa.org/cgi-bin/resultsplot_PF.pl?permid=3709
Customizable interval size.
Stats for total finishes, median finish, and finish range.
Overlays for median and standard deviation.
Fine-grained selection of which result dates to include.

Preparing to launch a new interactive tool for visualizing American Explorer credit.

https://rusa.org/cgi-bin/amex_chart_PF.pl
Choropleth map - Ability to plot several people on the same map and color based on how many people have visited each location (0, 1, multiple).
Pulls data from claimed American Explorer credit by default. Toggle to include unclaimed locations.
Navigation to American Explorer award application for claiming unclaimed locations.
Navigation to/from American Explorer awardees list.
Potential future navigation from member results pages once a good UI design is proposed.

Membership Workflows

Working with membership team and Dave to address data corruption and back office overhead related to the membership signup/renewal workflows.

Resolved a production fire and fixed data where an ID sequence went backwards and overwrote a bunch of important data.
Added additional validation and logging to thwart malicious usage of the membership workflow forms.
Collecting requirements for workflow changes that will prevent duplicate membership change requests and store orders. Have an initial plan in place but needs some polish. Some changes are nearly ready for allowing members to change their payment method while reusing an existing pending store order.
Future work will include deduplicating membership change requests and decoupling membership data changes from the renewal workflow.

Google Analytics

Ted Fay reached out with lots of good recommendations and expertise.
We should start instrumenting inbound RUSA URLs with UTMs in order to better understand where traffic is coming from and what results it produces. We're starting with the January Between Controls.
Upgraded from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 plus Google Tag Manager.
Ted updated the Google Analytics configuration to make it more useful and less noisy. We're actively exploring next steps.

Content

Added missing footer to ~250 static content pages.
Fixed broken redirects for several static content pages.
Updated logo and grand randonnée configuration for North South Battlefield (formerly: Northern Virginia Cloverleaf).

System Health

Added database query optimizations, new filter operators, and improved output format.
Resolved several Perl and PHP warnings and errors. The remaining PHP warnings are now enumerable. They need to be addressed before we attempt the upgrade to Drupal 11.
Investigated options for addressing web scrapers and system performance/availability due to high traffic. Identified a web application firewall that would be a good candidate for RUSA.
Made several fixes and improvements to various deploy processes.
Fixed ACP year computation for events in or after 2024.