Improvement to electronic reporting of peals or quarters

Six years ago Tony Parry, the creator of Campanophile, kindly added a special form to the site for entering North American peals and quarters. That was originally used to ensure they went to the Peal Secretary and/or Clapper Editor, as appropriate, and has since also been used to populate a section of the North American Guild's web site, nagcr.org. Since that time, though, Richard Smith created Bellboard, which has proved exceedingly popular. In addition, folks have been using the special form less and less. Last I checked, over a quarter of North American performances were submitted not using the special form, which necessarily makes it less useful.

The web site has now been changed to no longer need the special form. Instead, Bellboard is automatically searched each day for performances rung for the NAGCR or in North America, and pulls them into the web site. This technology has actually been in use for about the past year by Rick DuPuy to pull both peals and quarters out for The Clapper and for the Guild's records.

In particular, any North American peals or quarters submitted either to Bellboard or to Campanophile should be automatically picked up and placed on the NAGCR web site, and made available for publication in The Clapper. There is no longer any need to use the special North American form on Campanophile, though there is also no harm in doing so. Indeed, some folks may find it more convenient, since it is prepopulated with North American tower details.

The software to extract performance details from Bellboard is run only once a day, so it may take up to twenty-four hours for a performance to appear on nagcr.org.

Because of the ambiguity of place names some heuristics have to be applied to recognize performances rung in North America but not credited to the NAGCR They've been tuned a bit over the past year, and appear to be working well. However, if after twenty-four hours a performance you've submitted doesn't seem to have migrated to nagcr.org, or you see one there that shouldn't be, please let me, or John Danaher or Rick Dupuy, know. Thanks!

Please also double check the spelling of place or Guild names. For example, peals rung for the North Ammerrikkan Guild in the UK will not be picked up.

And many thanks to John Danaher for integrating this mechanism into the NAGCR web site, and to Rick DuPuy for have been exceedingly helpful in testing and correcting it.