The following announcement appears on page 63 of the June 2004 Chess Life:
The URL listed above will be updated regularly to provide details on the USCF’s new Tournament Director and Affiliate Support Area, a new part of the USCF website that is currently under development.
This support area will give TD’s a place to do the following:
Enter, validate and process memberships from events
Upload crosstables
(This will support the current TA reporting format, but fairly soon we hope to publish a new, more comprehensive, tournament reporting format.)
Glad the federation has started to update the software. It will take the federation the Summer to get this up and online. The full deployment of this software should speed up the new members on geting USCF ID numbers. My question, if someone does send the membership on paper and the rating department wants the USCF ID numbers on the reports. Is the seven days from the end of the event now removed? If a director needs to hold the final report of the event till the director gets all the current and new ID numbers, that could take more then the seven days.
With the use of the website to download a new membership, it could even take place at the site of the tournament. So if there is a new player at a three day event could get their membership ID number before the end of the last round.
Gee, I was thinking you could get the ID’s issued during the first round!
BTW, in case you haven’t noticed, individual memberships entered through the USCF website (under join/renew) are now being processed automatically. About 25% reject for various data and credit card issues, but the rest get their ID by e-mail within a few hours and will show up on MSA within a few hours too.
There’s been a lively debate about the new policy over on rec.games.chess.politics. It appears that for FIDE-rated events the 7 day rule will have to take precedence over the 'include all ID’s" rule, but there are only about 100 FIDE-rated events held each year, about 1% of the total, and they aren’t very likely to be generating lots of new memberships.
The ‘average’ tournament will get rated MUCH faster if it has all of the ID’s in it when you send it in.
This policy is just an interim step to help deal with the backlog at the office, once the new TD/Affiliate Support Area is up you will be able to get ID’s within a few hours and later this summer you will be able to submit rating reports online and get them validated within a few hours, too. (It hasn’t been decided yet whether we’ll rate them immediately after they pass validation or if we’ll continue to run them in batches, which could be more frequent than weekly.)
As of this afternoon (July 21st), the membership processing module in the USCF’s TD/Affiliate Support Area has been released for limited production use. It should be released for general use by the weekend.
TD’s willing to help with the production test should write to mnolan@uschess.org
Here’s an update on what the TD/Affiliate Support Area offers:
TDs: Enter memberships
Affiliates: Update mailing address and club directory.
We’re also letting affiliates test a form for entering TLA’s online. (At present this is JUST a test, there’s no way to submit a TLA through this form. That should change some time in August, probably after the US Open.)
How does a TD get authorized by an affiliate Can a Chess Coach send stuff in or does a Chess Coach need and affilliate too? Where can I get JTP forms???
Do have a affiliate, will sign you up for the ‘Greater Grand Rapids Chess Club’ if you want me to authorize you. Send me a email at: president_ggrcc@yahoo.com
Please send me your USCF number and the reason you want to use the affiliate. State the nature of the tournament(s), would not have a problem to authorize you’re number.
Well, let me ask a question. Suppose there was no TD/Affiliate Support Area and you wanted to run a rated tournament. What affiliate ID would you use on the rating report?
Presumably you have that affiliate’s approval to submit events under their ID. If so, then that affiliate can certainly authorize you to use the TD/Affiliate Support Area as well.
As to the question regarding RBO’s and free online TLA’s, we’re still working on the procedural aspects so I don’t know yet what limitations, if any, will be placed upon them. (In general, I would think that almost any USCF-rated event could be listed.)
However, it should be possible for you to enter and edit your TLA’s, what I don’t know yet is how the USCF office will be involved. There will need to be an ‘approve/release’ process even for free online TLA’s, and that may occasionally involve the office making some changes to those TLA’s.
The reason I ask is that I got the impression from the USCF office that once a TLA that is placed every month is submitted, they want to leave it alone for x number of months. Somehow, I don’t think they want to be bothered changing TLAs like that too often.
I placed my first Free RBO U1200 TLA last school year from Feb-Jun. I just resubmitted a slightly modified one for this Oct-May. My problem is that I just realized that I announced a weekly club event as 3RR or 3SS, depending on attendance, but I only listed the prizes for my 3RR!
$$12/Quad. EF: $6. Reg: 2:45. Rds: 3-3:20-3:40.
should have been $$12/Quad or $$24-12/Octo. EF: $6. Reg: 2:45. Rds: 3-3:20-3:40.
I’m figuring that the online TLA form would make it easier to fine tune the TLA on occassion without bothering the USCF office - especially for the free TLAs…
I can see not wanting to deal with changes to the printed TLA’s each month, but assuming that the review/release process isn’t all that complicated I don’t see any reason why online TLA’s can’t be updated or corrected if needed. (There wouild need to be a ‘this TLA has been corrected’ notice in it, of course.)
The goal is to get them up on the web cheaply, quickly and easily, so that the number of online TLA’s is far closer to the total number of rated events than the number of printed TLA’s currently is. (I think about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 events rated in 2003 had a printed TLA.)
Nope, I’ve been looking all over the available options for TDs and for Affiliates. It really looks like you’re taking the website in the right direction, Mike!
