The Greater of Two Evils

In our league we have people who have been skating on their derby names for a year or so, and have recently found out their names have been rejected from the TwoEvils site. But they've bouted under those names, had uniforms and helmets done up with those names, and are just finding out that that was all worth shit.

I talked about TwoEvils here in this entry, but I think there’s increasing frustration with how the site is run. While I certainly appreciate that someone out there has gone to the effort of keeping a site like 2E, derby has grown exponentially, and the system that 2E uses is clunky and can’t really keep up with the volume of names that one can only imagine they get registered. At the time of writing this, there are something like 36,144 names on 2E. That's THIRTY SIX THOUSAND names that you can't copy.

Honestly, I think the time will come very soon when one of the following will happen:

1. Nobody cares about 2E anymore and will actually seek to register their name formally as intellectual property or on regional associations (like RDAU) instead, 
2. Nobody will care about having unique names in the derby world (come on, there’s really only SO many combinations of words you can do that aren’t above some degree of similarity) or
3.  2E will have to evolve its registration system to make it easier for people to actually get onto their site. 

Waiting for 9-10 months is kind of ridiculous. Half the names of the people we registered with VDL are obsolete or don’t even skate with VDL anymore, so that was a waste of time for the 2E people to have to process them. I can’t imagine that a considerable proportion of names on the 2E list are actually currently being used. 

Vague concepts = opportunity to trundle in
Sorites paradox! (Yes, I'm a nerd.)

Also, at the time, if your name is rejected you have no idea if it is or isn’t, except for the fact that your teammates all have their names up and you don’t. TBut today, we received an email from 2E listing the names that were rejected, but with no explanation why they were. I can imagine how frustrating this would be to some people, especially if their names were only remotely smiilar to other names there.

The best indicator of a name rejection is when you type a name in and it tells you the likelihood of a match (from very high to low). But terms like “very high” and “low” are vague, and it’s not clear exactly what that means for rejection. Since the system is automated, changing a letter sometimes does the trick, even if phonetically the names would still be the same. What’s the point of that?

Presumably 2E works something like this (although, of course, I am open to correction): There’s this online spreadsheet (in effect) with everyone’s names on it, and when you submit names they are checked off against the spreadsheet for similarity. Those that don’t match anything are admitted, and those that match things are rejected, and then there’s some additional checking that goes on for the in-between ones. I don’t know if the additional checking is manual, but I’d assume that it is, given how long it takes.

Ironically, THERE IS NOBODY CALLED JOHN DOE ON 2E.

Many people are already moving away from 2E. In Australia, RDAU has its own list for roller derby names for Australian leagues. It's not like I'm ever going to have to bout against someone called MadMouse from some random place like Bumblefuck USA or anything, so why the hell would I need something that is internationally original? (Of course, yes, my name IS on 2E, but the principle still stands.)

Okay, tons of people have already ranted about 2E. (See here for probably the most scathing and hilarious attack, but also here, where a Canadian skater had the same name as a mascot and it was rejected--a MASCOT*! WTF! and also here, for another Australian story.) But suppose now that we DO need to have 2E for whatever the hell reason. How do we fix the machine that is broken, instead of just abandoning it?

Obviously, we need to make sure that people aren't waiting 9-12 months for their names to clear. How do we fix that? Well, how about this: there’s already an automated checking thingy that exists on the 2E website. Why not use that to let people add names to the list themselves? Like, suppose I have a list of names. Maybe I can just copy/paste them into the name submitter thing, and it runs through the names and automatically adds the ones that are unique to the site. The in-between ones can be confirmed by looking at what the search throws up as being the most similar, and then maybe there can be a section for people to provide evidence if they’ve got permission from a skater to use their name. That would considerably reduce the workload that the 2E admins have to do, since there’s less manual labor involved, and let people get instant gratification almost right away.

This is who I'd want to be checking my name
on the website. Of course, that just means less
manual checking, not no manual checking
whatsoever.

Now I’m not a mega computer nerd, but I’m sure there’s a pretty basic program you could write that would let that happen. But that said, I’m not sure how much longer unique names will be sustainable in the derby world. Of course, there are already trends for people to skate under their actual names (which you’d think would be necessary if roller derby becomes an Olympic sport or something) and hey, if someone just happens to have the same (actual) name as you, then what are you going to do?

But so far as having a program for registering names on 2E goes, I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened yet. So consider this a plea to the 2E peeps: Nice work so far, but you don't need to have this burden all by yourself. Please consider updating your system to be able to deal with the number of submissions you're getting for this sport that we have all come to love. We want our names, because the derby side of us is, well, a real part of us, and it is really shit when you are denying that we can have that.

(Postscript: my MS Word spellcheck is dumb and doesn’t recognise the word “Pow”, or the word “spellcheck” for that matter.)

*Speaking of mascots and skates, I imagine that this post will have possibly enraged some. Here, lighten it up with some mascot skating fail. (This is also why I don't support the Raptors, heh.)