# Why does WCA ID have a year in it?



## qwr (Aug 19, 2022)

I've wondered this for a long time. Most organizations give you a simple numeric ID or if you want something more memorable like a username maybe a combination of first name and last name like jdoe3. 

The advantage of using a number is that it can handle the rare name change or typo, since it's auto generated by a central database. I've also seen systems in data dump that just put a number after your first name like Doe, John3 which is interesting.


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## baseballjello67 (Aug 19, 2022)

The year is the year of that person's first competition.


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## GenTheThief (Aug 19, 2022)

baseballjello67 said:


> The year is the year of that person's first competition.


That's _what_ it is, but OP is asking why is that necessary information to encode in an ID.


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## qwr (Aug 19, 2022)

I'll ping @Lucas Garron because he has a lot of WCA knowledge


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## Kit Clement (Aug 19, 2022)

I was not around when WCA IDs were first introduced, but there are many advantages to the current system:

It uses a fixed number of characters. With the positions of numeric/non-numeric also fixed, this makes WCA IDs easily recognizable as WCA IDs.
Despite being a fixed number of characters, there are still a vast number of possible WCA IDs in a given year.
The method for determining a WCA ID is easily understood in 99% of cases, with some edge cases like very common 4-letter last name starts (e.g. CHEN) that often exceed 99 competitors in a year. But besides that, this makes reading a couple points of basic information from a WCA ID very easy, and it also makes trying to recall your WCA ID or someone else's WCA ID much easier.


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## qwr (Aug 19, 2022)

Kit Clement said:


> I was not around when WCA IDs were first introduced, but there are many advantages to the current system:
> 
> It uses a fixed number of characters. With the positions of numeric/non-numeric also fixed, this makes WCA IDs easily recognizable as WCA IDs.
> Despite being a fixed number of characters, there are still a vast number of possible WCA IDs in a given year.
> The method for determining a WCA ID is easily understood in 99% of cases, with some edge cases like very common 4-letter last name starts (e.g. CHEN) that often exceed 99 competitors in a year. But besides that, this makes reading a couple points of basic information from a WCA ID very easy, and it also makes trying to recall your WCA ID or someone else's WCA ID much easier.


That doesn't explain why the starting year is necessary. For example is say 2021CHEN50 really better than CHEN0500? Maybe...

Maybe it's easier to recall your own ID, but I don't see how it's easier to recall someone else's ID unless you know that person's first comp. Also the fixed number of characters and easily recognizable are nice features but having an ID tied to someone's name instead of just recording the name separately seems kinda strange to me.


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## Imsoosm (Aug 19, 2022)

qwr said:


> I don't see how it's easier to recall someone else's ID unless you know that person's first comp.


I also find this very annoying, there's a WCA statistics page that requires you to put a person's WCA ID in there instead of their name. I have to open another tab and check there ID before copying it in the statistics page.


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## Kit Clement (Aug 20, 2022)

qwr said:


> That doesn't explain why the starting year is necessary. For example is say 2021CHEN50 really better than CHEN0500? Maybe...
> 
> Maybe it's easier to recall your own ID, but I don't see how it's easier to recall someone else's ID unless you know that person's first comp. Also the fixed number of characters and easily recognizable are nice features but having an ID tied to someone's name instead of just recording the name separately seems kinda strange to me.


I would say that a random string of four digits is harder to remember than the year of someone's first competition and 2 digits, which are often 01 if their name is unique enough. Using the year also at least resets the number of IDs available for a four-letter set in a given year.


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## Lucas Garron (Aug 20, 2022)

qwr said:


> I'll ping @Lucas Garron because he has a lot of WCA knowledge


I wasn't quite working on WCA code at the time! So I don't know if there's a deeper meaning than "it was useful enough at the time". You'd have to ask someone like @Stefan when they converted from https://web.archive.org/web/20061117091306/http://www.speedcubing.com/rankings/ to the first WCA-hosted database.


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## abunickabhi (Sep 14, 2022)

qwr said:


> I've wondered this for a long time. Most organizations give you a simple numeric ID or if you want something more memorable like a username maybe a combination of first name and last name like jdoe3.
> 
> The advantage of using a number is that it can handle the rare name change or typo, since it's auto generated by a central database. I've also seen systems in data dump that just put a number after your first name like Doe, John3 which is interesting.


I kinda like the keeping the year of WCA ID creation as the first 4 digits of the ID. @Stefan would be able to explain the pros and cons of this system better. 

I think numbers are better to have as ID as opposed to just letters. In the current system we have 6 digits and 4 letters which is a good ratio.


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