About

The judges’ score is the official total segment score from the ISU protocol — technical elements plus programme components, less deductions. We never touch it.

The crowd rating is out of 10 and comes entirely from people using this site. Anywhere you see a gold number out of 10, that is viewers, not officials. Most skates have no crowd rating yet: there are tens of thousands of them and the site is new, so an empty rating means nobody has voted, not that the skate was poor.

Robbed compares the two. Each skate’s judged score is turned into a z-score within its own segment, its crowd rating into a z-score within its discipline, and the gap between them is the robbed score — positive when the crowd rated it far above where the judges placed it. Ratings are shrunk toward the average until enough votes exist, so a single enthusiastic vote cannot top the chart.

Nothing is hosted here. Where an official upload exists, it is embedded from YouTube and the view count is read from YouTube’s API. Roughly a sixth of the catalogue — Olympic skates especially — has no official upload at all, and those performances still get a page, just without a player.

“Video won’t play?” is ours, not YouTube’s. It files a report against that performance in our own database; it does not contact YouTube and no one there sees it. Because most uploads are blocked somewhere, a report only counts when it comes from a country the upload is meant to work in, and a video is marked broken only once reports arrive from two different countries — a dead upload is dead everywhere, a rights problem is not. Once marked, it drops out of the thumbnails and the has-video filter until a re-scan finds a replacement.

Geo-blocking. Rights for skating footage are sold by territory, so a great many official uploads are blocked in some countries — over 1,900 of the videos we hold carry a restriction list. We read that list from YouTube up front and compare it with the country your request arrives from, so where a video will not play for you we say so before the player loads and offer a search link instead of a dead black rectangle.

A job runs every Sunday and works down a queue of whatever is most overdue: events that have since happened, segments that were empty last time, programmes Wikipedia has since written up, videos that have since been uploaded. Nothing here is a one-off import, and no source is ever finished — a skater’s article is re-read at least monthly even after it has been parsed successfully.

That job lives on GitHub, which switches off scheduled work after sixty days with no commits. A catalogue that has quietly stopped updating looks exactly like one that is up to date, so the crank is here too: this runs the same ingest for about twenty seconds and picks up whatever is most overdue. Press it after a competition weekend and the results come in.