I have a mother who just bought a USCF membership for each of her two girls. The USCF sent a separate welcoming note to each of the girls. But the problem is that each girl was given the same registration ID.
Now, they joined so that they could participate in a tournament tonight. I don’t see any way to submit the tournament report when two people have the same membership ID. My idea is to go ahead and run the tournament and assume that eventually each girl will be given a unique ID. The only thing that makes me nervous is that the other children are anxious to see how their ratings will change, and I don’t want to wait around for two weeks or more for the membership# problem to be resolved.
Does anyone have any experience advice with such a situation?
With the names from a PM I found two different US Chess ID numbers and PM’d them back. It might have been erroneous manual entry in the tournament entry software when signing up for the tournament, or the office may have fixed it after they were first alerted, or something else.
I encountered this same problem with a family at the tournament I ran last Saturday: They had twin boys, and had gotten memberships for them in advance of the tournament. But when they looked at the USCF ID cards they had been sent online, the ID#s on the cards were the same! They and I have both contacted the USCF office to get this resolved, but in the meantime, we can’t get the tournament rated. I suspect that it’s some kind of bug in the new membership system.
Other problems I’ve found with the new system:
There currently appears to be no way, when a TD is entering memberships, to specify whether it’s a 1-year or a 2-year membership. This should just be a matter of adding some extra entries in their membership type menu.
While the email that the USCF sent out on May 18th indicated that it should be possible for people to request a mail subscription either to Chess Life, or to Chess Life for Kids, or to both, there currently appears to be no way, when a TD is entering memberships, to specify that the member wants a mail subscription to both magazines. This should just be a matter of adding another entry to the selection menu for print subscriptions.
While the USCF rulebook says that it’s legal to use someone who isn’t a USCF member as a House player (as a means of avoiding byes), the new system doesn’t provide a way to do this. In the old system, you created a non-member ID and then made an exception request, specifying House player, when submitting the tournament to be rated. You can still do this, if you’re reusing someone who already has a non-member ID#, but the new system doesn’t provide any way to create a non-member ID# (again, this should just be a matter of adding an extra entry to the membership type menu).
I just had yet another amazing experience with the new membership system: There was a boy who had played in several online tournaments (rated 2020!) who came to our tournament last Saturday with his sister, who had never played in a USCF tournament before. Her parents filled out a membership form for her, but when I tried to create her membership, instead of creating a new membership, it modified her brother’s membership and put in her name and gender (while leaving his tournament history)! And it still hasn’t created a USCF ID# for her, so I still can’t submit the tournament to be rated!
The USCF really needs to test software changes before installing them!
There are many problems with the new IT system. Partly this seems to be due to the programmers not being chess people, and partly to the limited amount of money that US Chess could spend on this. When the pandemic hit and US Chess revenues started declining severely it was prudent not to do more than necessary with the IT upgrade. But now that things seem to be trending better US Chess needs to take a look at fixing the myriad bugs in phase I before they even think about proceeding with phase II.
That’s just a variation on the old saying, “We do three kinds of jobs here: good, fast, and cheap. You may pick any two. Good and fast won’t be cheap. Good and cheap won’t be fast. Fast and cheap won’t be good.” And, as you say, you’re doing well if you actually get two.
There are two aspects to speed. One is how fast the job gets done. That’s probably not the most important part here. The other is how fast the system performs. IMHO, that is very important. The response time for an MSA query needs to be fast enough that TDs can look up their entrants without spending hours at it.
My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that it may be related to the email address. I believe each member needs to have a unique email address. This can be a problem with kids. One parent with two kids would normally put her own email address in for both. By using the same email address for the second, the system may have assumed it was dealing with the first.
I suspect that the requirement for a unique email address for access to member data by that member is an inherent limitation in Civi-CRM. There could be other places where uniqueness is a key attribute.
One aspect of using email addresses is that according to net experts about 10% of email users change their email address each year. (That’s actually somewhat lower than the number of people who change their postal address each year.)
Turns out I am dealing with a same issue as reported in this thread earlier. There were two brothers. One already had ID 30125809. The other joined US Chess but instead of creating a unique ID for them, it created the same ID as his brother and added on another year to his membership.
The unique email address requirement needs to be eliminated NOW or this issue is going to keep on popping up!
U.S. Chess should indeed test software changes before installing them, but I’m willing to be a little more forgiving.
The entire website re-do is a huge job, performed by a small staff, and as the saying goes, there’s always one more bug. I’m familiar enough with software writing that I knew from the start that there would be tons of problems.
I shudder to think what might happen to the Forums when the re-programmers get their hands on it. I’m sure we’ll lose many valuable features, and I’m skeptical whether any improvements will be worth it. Keep your fingers crossed.
The Forums, assuming they survive the technology upgrade, will probably use a forums package designed to work with CIVI-CRM and Drupal. I believe there are several existing packages, similar to how the package we now use, phpBB, is an existing package with its own development group.
Among the challenges with moving a forums package are deciding whether to transfer all the existing user IDs and messages. That’s very time-consuming and time costs money when dealing with developers, because the file structures are likely to be completely different. And a lot of administrative policies will need to be reviewed, because the new package might not have the same types of controls on who can read or post and how to deal with things like content review and disciplinary matters.
And if, as was the case with the current Forums, custom changes are made to the forums data structure and code base, it may make it difficult to keep up with improvements made by that package’s development community. (That’s why the current forums haven’t been upgraded in over 15 years.)
I am a participant in a couple of other Forums (not related to chess) which also use the phpbb technology. Both of them use versions more recent (I believe) than ours, but I don’t like them as well. Let’s keep our older version of phpbb.
Among other problems, on these newer phpbb forums, the First Unread Post button doesn’t work, unless there is already at least one full page of posts (15 posts). On our older one, it works fine.