Couple notes:

1. I know the BikeReg folks as much as I know, say, botto. I communicate with them regularly at certain points, phone or email, and they're pretty much the best customer service type folks you could ever want. I think I know what they look like. But I'm not buddies with them.

I've never dealt with time-sensitive registration on BikeReg so I can't comment on that. I have sniped on eBay and on an internal corporate website. I'm not sure if you could do the same thing on Bike Reg (book mark page, log in, go there, keep window open while doing other things, click "submit" when your alarm goes off). That's what developers are for right? Do research, make apps.

A data dump wouldn't be very useful unless it was regular (every day for example). It's like a data dump of licensed riders - you'd need to grab data regularly to keep the information relevant. And I don't know them that well, nor would I want to bug them to get that kind of info.

2. "Confirmed Rider" is a promoter option. The promoter can choose to display or not. We didn't for a long time because the list wouldn't reflect series registration, nor folks registered on a separate website (which we have since stopped using). Now we use it because we only have one electronic registration service, the best one available to us.

3. Good point on Cat 3s. Some get full - the old Harlem, for example, with, I think, a 200 or 250 rider field limit. I remember being about 20th on the waiting list and then realizing, "waitaminute, I don't want to race that course with that many guys". So I left.

cdr