Bug in FS affects leading points in stopped tasks

This was discovered during the Belgian Paragliding Open 2012, thanks guys for bringing it to our attention:

There is currently an error in FS where in stopped tasks, the stop time is not considered for calculating leading points. The end is determined by the last pilot to land. This does usually  not make such a big difference since in most cases pilots tend to land more or less together, at the same time, if a task is stopped. But not in Task 1 of the Belgian Open, where pilots flew for up to an hour after the stop was announced, some free flying, others trying to finish the task. And whatever happened during that hour strongly influenced the leading point distribution: Pilots who went to land early were punished for “not advancing towards goal” any more, whereas those who tried to finish the task were rewarded.

This bug was introduced last year, with version 1.2.14, when we formally introduced the concept of a stopped task in FS. Up to that time, the only way to tell FS that a task had been stopped was to set the closing time for all the waypoints to the stop time. Unfortunately, the need to shorten the tracks used for calculating leading points in this case was overlooked.

The good news: There is a workaround. Not a convenient one, but there is one:

Like before 1.2.14, besides setting the stop time for a task, score keepers must still set the closing time for all turn points in a task to the task stop time. If a score-back time is used, they must set the closing time to (stop time – score-back time). This will result in a correct calculation of leading points, only considering the flights until that time. Setting the time must happen from top to bottom, starting with the very first turn point, otherwise it won’t work.

We’re already working on fixing this issue for the next release.