Splitting classes- suggestion

I'd love to see a mechanic, if possible, that allows judges/hosts to split large classes prior to judging! We have such a large pool of entrants on the site already and I worry that we'll lose people who may decide it's not worth their time if they are consistently competing in classes with 100+ entries and not getting anything (I am very pro-placing through 10th so I'm happy we get that here!) Not to say that a ton of classes have hit that mark (you can tell the statistics of this on the back end likely right?) but with the site being only about a month off the ground and already growing so quickly I could see this becoming a problem. Plus, the ability to split classes as long as there is a factor to base a split off that is fairly equal would be less stressful for judging! Having half as many entries to review and pick from!

Since we already have to indicate information like gender, breed, and scale, it would likely be easiest to perform splits based on existing info (rather than things like color or pose which are not currently tracked in the system). For example, say you have a Quarter Horse class with 130 entries. Roughly half of these are mares, so you'd split that class into A. QH Mares and B. QH Stallions & Geldings. Any photo that is tagged as a "mare" would get either automatically or manually moved into the split (depending on how that can be programmed? I don't know a ton about coding).

It would be interesting if classes over a certain amount of entries (amount set site wide?) could be flagged for review by the show host/judge once loading closes. Something like "do you want to split this class/these classes?" and then the host/judge is prompted to review the photos and decide what a fair split would be (if they'd like to split) or choose to keep the class as is.

I imagine all of this would be easier to achieve with free shows that will not have physical prizes, but personally as someone who would like to host future shows, I'd just keep it in mind if I wanted to award physical prizes and maybe have a little bit extra on hand. (Though thinking about it, the paid shows might have fewer entries and perhaps would not run into this issue as often?)

This is a great suggestion and I agree with all of your points fully. It's been very rapid growth and I think the Welcome show was a great litmus test, of sorts, to see how it all played out (except with many, MANY more entries than we initially expected - which is a good thing for now!). Since we made it so broad to cover most makes, looking over the number of entries per class was a useful way to see what got a lot of entries and probably needed to be pre-split in future class lists, or classes that got none or a few horses and could be combined.

However, even if we personally know now what is popular to show now, user-hosted shows may have a class list in mind already that could need splits later, so it would certainly be a useful, if not must-have, feature to be able to split. I will definitely talk to the developer about it. Perhaps it could be both "choose a pre-entered setting to split by" and a manual "select all the horses you want to split out" system, depending on how a judge wants to split.

These are wonderful ideas and I also appreciate how well thought out they are. Thank you for taking the time to post it! The site kind of went from 0 to 100 in a fairly short period of time (we're already topping 10,000 horses uploaded to the site in just over a month), but we want to evolve with the growth and make it the best thing it can be - and user feedback is always the best way to decide how to.