Seven things members asked the System Builder to do — and what happened next

Between 3 and 10 August, seven separate members wrote in asking whether the System Builder could do something. Five of the seven described a job the tool already does. Two described a genuine gap, and both were built within the same day.

The pattern is worth writing down, because a feature nobody can find is not much better than a feature that does not exist.

Already there, five times

Filtering a system by price band or Betfair SP. Run the system, then open the Market tab in Breakdowns. It splits the result by price band.

Age filters. Available in the System Builder, though the request came in against the racecard filters.

Sire Age as a rule. Already under Add Rule on the Breeding and Pedigree tab. The member found it themselves before a reply went out.

Official ratings. Fully integrated as filters. The specific question was handicap debutants on the Flat in Ireland rated 55 or lower, which is five rules and returns around 1,500 runs from 2018 onwards.

Distance change two and three runs back. The filters already existed as the Distance Change vs 2-LTO and 3-LTO rules.

Genuine gaps, two of them

Runners with no Collateral Score or Future Form Score. These showed as Unknown with no way to select them. Two Yes/No filters were added — No Collateral Score and No Future Form Score — rather than inventing a zero rank.

Missing range breakdowns on the RaceMetrics Ratings tab. That tab had eleven rank breakdowns but only five range ones, so Sire, Damsire and Collateral each had a rank with no matching range. The missing ranges were added.

What the request for the 2 and 3 Runs Back tab produced

One request asked for a profit-and-loss overlay on distance changes two and three runs back. The filters existed; the breakdown did not. Building the breakdown side turned a rule you had to know about into a table you can read and click.

That is the shape of most of these. The capability is there, the route to it is not obvious, and the fix is usually a button in the place people already look.

The route worth knowing

The Ask box in the System Builder takes plain English. Describing what you want in a sentence will build the rules, which is often faster than hunting for the rule by name — and it is how you find out the rule exists.

If you think something is missing, write in. Five times out of seven last week the answer was a two-line reply, and twice it was a new filter the same day.