Correcting Tournament names.

[ESchlich]

Hi Mike Nolan:

I was checking out MSA for the Charlottesville Open using the tournament search function. Did not see the 3rd annual held in '93 or the 7th in '97. I checked under the affiliate search for the affiliate that ran the 1994 event and found that the word Charlottesville was spelled Charlottsville for '93 and Charlottsville for '97. Is there any way to allow minor corrections to data such as this so searches work better?

The process may be a bit complicated for older events as the submitting affiliate and or TD may no longer be active or current. This does not seem important enough to bother staff with the correction so I suspect that if it is to be allowed, it should be an automated process. What do you think?

One other question, is there any way to sort theMSA tournament search function so events are listed in date order?

Regards, Ernie

[nolan]

‘Minor’ spelling errors are far easier for humans to spot than for computers to spot. While it would be possible to put in a ‘near miss’ search, it would be rather time consuming to do such a search. (When we search for potential duplicate members at the USCF office, for example, each search takes 20-30 seconds.)

Sometimes spelling errors can be gotten around by looking for parts of words. A search on ‘charlott’ produces 41 hits, for example. It finds Port Charlotte (FL) and Charlotte-Mecklenberg (NC) events as well as Charlottesville (VA) events, of course

Walter can correct the event name, but only the TD or organizer can request such a change.

Corrections such as that are also a rather low priority, and since Walter’s been out of the office most of the last two weeks I suspect he’s got a bit of a backlog in his e-mail.

I changed the sort to sort by state and event ID, I"m not sure if that’s an improvement but we’ll see if anyone complains. (I thought about making that change when MSA first came out, but it wasn’t practical to do so until the event ID was changed to include all 4 digits of the year.)