Race Crashers New Tactic

[Melissa Gresham]

I've encountered a new tactic by race crashers and I want to see how others handle this. There is a checkbox in ART when programming bibs "assign to this specific race". I've never check it because the warning does say "don't use this unless you know what you're doing". LOL Race crashers in my area are now wearing their bibs from other races or previous year. Yes, the bibs look different, but in a crowd of 2000 I would not see this. When they keep their bib #23 that was programmed for the race last year, and run through the timing, it reads them, and then messes up the results for actual bib #23 for this race. I'm directing a race coming up in September that had this major issue from many people reusing their bib from last year. 

Solutions: 1) start with different numbering, instead of 1-1500, we start with 3000-4500 this year. This will also let us disqualify any bib outside of that range, 2) use the "assign to this specific race feature" but I'm not an expert and don't want to mess anything up. 

What do others do? 

[Patrick W]

This will work as you want.  The race specific can be problematic if you have multiple races /distances but otherwise will do exactly the limiting you want. Just be very sure you program the tags only from this race (and maybe test a couple randomly lol)

[Raphael Leal]

I´m not sure but I did some tests when programming the tags for specific races.

Let´s say the race ID is "173".

ART will read if the tag is programmed as 000000000000000000000101 and  000000000017300000000101.

[JK Race Timing Systems]

yes it works well

Just use with caution (your use case is perfect on this occassion)

[Raphael Leal]

But if it works as I mentioned it doesn't make sense.

Let's say a race crasher wears an old bib# with tag programmed as 000000000000000000000101 and the "regular racer" with tag  000000000017300000000101, ART will read both...

[Brian Agee]

In the Settings screen, in the Advanced tab, there is an option that says "Enable option to ignore 'Open' tags."   This is something I made somewhat difficult to turn on because if someone didn't know what they were doing it could make for a very rough race day for them. I added this many years ago, so hopefully it still works.

[Raphael Leal]

So the "Open tags" are the tags without the Race ID?

[Brian Agee]

Here is what the help text says for that feature, except I think that "Lock" icon is in the Action Keys tab now. I don't have a reader close to me now to test it out though.

[Patrick W]

Brian, is there any chance that you could adjust this so we can set a fixed ID? I'd like to be able to have a random ID that I encode on all my tags that will limit the reads to only support tags with that ID, regardless of what race they're attached to.  Sorta an open tag, but just for my events.  It would really resolve situations where there are multiple races at the same time, with the goal to limit bandits but make it easy to change people between races.

[William Sanchez]

I hope I'm not misreading this, but I agree and prefer Option 1. For me it's the simplest solution. Change bib numbers (and colors) for each year. I would just ignore any of the reads that show up as "red" and are out of the bib range. Bandits will be ignored. When you see them come across the finish line, you can shame them. (just kidding)

I try to avoid restrictive settings where possible. 

On Thursday, February 19, 2026 at 11:49:53 AM UTC-5 Melissa Gresham wrote:

[Graham Hall]

This so is not an issue we have had to contend with, and so we leave the tags open. 

However, we have events we with more than one distance and like the ability to switch a runner from one distance to another. 

It therefore would make sense to have an option to lock to tags to a date (integer represtation). This would prevent the crashers and allow switching between distances.