I know its the responsibility of the TD or affliate to report errors to the USCF in regards to crosstables. Is there anything a player can do to expedite the corrections?
Not at this time. I’ve been working on an error reporting form for members, but I’m not sure yet how we’ll get those reports to TDs who have not registered an e-mail address with the USCF. (We get reports of mistakes in events going all the way back to 1992.)
The issue is compounded by privacy issues. We do not give out snail/email addresses or phone numbers for our members. If someone is mistakenly listed as having played in an event, they may not have any way to contact the TD, and we cannot give them that information.
The only method I know of is to contact either the TD or the Affiliate running the event. It is, as you say, the TD’s responsibility to inform USCF and to confirm errors alledged by players. Unfortunately, some TDs don’t keep records of past events, and that can be a bummer.
Usually the TD can be found by looking at the TLA in Chess Life, if listed. Otherwise, due to the privacy isssues I guess the USCF office would have to inform the TD/Affiliate to contact the player, if the player agreed to exchange e-mail?
I recently submitted an event online. After it was rated, I realized that I reported the results of one game incorrectly. How do I fix that?
The rated event correction module isn’t quite ready for release to TDs, and I’m still working on a few access/control issues as well. (For example, what happens if the organizer and the chief TD have a falling out? Should the organizer be able to lock out the chief TD from making changes or vice versa?)
This was a March event, so it won’t affect a supplement rating until June. Should I just wait, or should I contact someone at USCF about getting my mistake corrected manually?
I would recommend you wait, you will be able to make the correction yourself before the June Supplement cutoff.
This suggests an online mechanism in the works. Can a correction just be submitted on paper from a TD? I’m trying to get a TD to have results corrected from a January tournament where a player is missing, another player listed twice, and nearly half of the results showing incorrect opponents paired. The longer it takes to correct this, the more events that will have to be re-rated as a result.
Oh… A possibly related questions (and I apologize if I’m hijacking the thread). All the crosstable I’ve looked at prior to the beginning of the year show the results in order of point per player. Crosstables from this year seem almost random. The order shown isn’t by points scored, alpha order by name, pre-event rating, post-event rating,… I’ve looked at a random number of recent events and haven’t found any in the order that would make sense if I want to see who won the event. Software “issue” that will get worked out at some point in the near future?
Thanks
Tom
Sorting crosstables by final score is on the todo list. We may do this at the MSA level rather than in the database because it offers the most flexibility and requires the least amount of updates to the database.
Several people have suggested the possibility that we offer other sort orders, such as by post event rating, player ID, or player name. (We don’t have team data and it isn’t part of the rating report upload data file, so unless we have a way to get that into the database we can’t sort team events by team.)
We’re really trying to empower the TD as much as possible, because it is faster and more accurate if the person in charge of the event is also in charge of the data.
However, just as we will continue to accept rating reports in the mail, we will continue to accept corrections from the TD to his or her events.
Right now the office staff doesn’t really have a good way to update the data in rated events, either, and they’ve got a HUGE backlog of corrections from other events waiting for them once they do have a good tool to make corrections.
They’ll probably get the online update form a week or so before TDs do, hopefully later this month or in April.
It becomes a policy question as to whether we should try to give priority to correcting those events that were duly reported in the past or to ones that are reported in the future.
I would suggest that this be very high on the list. I can look at the MSA crosstables from last year and immediately see who won. However, if I look at MSA crosstables from the last couple of months, it’s futile to try and determine the results on any but the smallest events. The most obvious question is “who won the event” but you can’t tell without scrolling through the entire player list. And there are events with hundreds of players!
Nice but certainly not high priority. In my book, at least 
That’s great if you want to make it a requirement that TDs are computer literate and totally eliminate paper. Mike, I’m from your neck of the woods where there are some (valuable) TDs that don’t have the least interest in getting an email address, much less figuring out how to manipulate their tournament submission through a browser. I think there’s a great risk to putting the formatting of tournament results in the hands of the TD. It’s gonna cost us TDs that can’t or won’t deal with it. It’s also gonna reduce any uniformity of results posted in the MSA area.
If the software isn’t able to take the results and put them, by default, in the order that makes the most sense (most points at the top, least points at the bottom), this is a bug and not an enhancement.
Tom
Right now a ‘high priority’ project is any project that affects the ability for the USCF to get work done promptly and accurately, especially memberships and ratings.
Sorting the crosstables, while important, does NOT affect the ratings themselves, and thus is more of a cosmetic issue.
I’d LOVE to jump into writing that code, it’s relatively stress-free coding compared to trying to get accurate ratings out with the clock ticking on the deadline for the April supplement.
Well, I had an hour to spare while watching an update pass, so I put in the code to resort the crosstables before posting them to MSA. All 2004 and 2005 events should be in point group order tomorrow morning. They’re in ID order within point groups because with dual rating of events that seemed less ambiguous than by rating.
I’m not sure if it’ll work right for matches and round robin events, there weren’t any in the test block I ran, but I’m sure someone will call them to my attention in the morning if they’re wrong.
Nolan - I just did some spot checking and order is, indeed, restored! This being an internet bulletin board, I should probably chastize you for taking nearly 10 hours to rewrite the code just to please me but I’ll restrain myself. Actually, I’ll offer to get you a mocha latte or a Mountain Dew or whatever you desire during the Cornhusker Games this Summer. The rest of the chess community also owes you this courtesy but I’ll leave it up to them to make arrangements with you.
Thanks
Tom
I thought he said 1 hour.
It might have taken 10 hours to run, though. For a programmer, it’s always a satisfying feeling to write a program that takes longer to run than to write.
Bill Smythe
How about:
A. For a regular-rated event, in order by regular rating.
B. For a quick-rated event, in order by quick rating.
C. For a dual-rated event, in order by regular rating.
Later, when a separate Blitz rating system is implemented:
D. For a blitz-rated event, in order by blitz rating.
E. For a dual-rated blitz-and-quick event, in order by quick rating.
Bill Smythe
Bill, take a large dose of castor oil!
Right now I’m hoping the Powers That Be have forgotten that we now have the ability to add a 3rd ratings system to the mix.
ID as the 2nd level sort will have to do for now, bigger fish to fry.
One of the challenges in this whole project is that many issues don’t show up in testing because of interaction effects. It now takes 7 hours to do a rerate back to January 2004, that’s a mightly long time to wait just to see if something worked. (And for some things, like the crosstable sort, I really can’t see if it worked until it’s on the website.)
Yum, yum.
You’d better hope you’re right that the Powers That Be don’t read this forum, and probably don’t even know it exists. Otherwise, you just blew it. 
I’ll second that.
Yeah, that’s the unfortunate thing about the real world. Good luck.
Bill Smythe
And we just discovered another serious error, all of the events that had gotten deleted because they had been double-rated got ‘undeleted’ by mistake. This included the entire Kings Island Open, one section of the Continental Open, and a few other biggies.
So, there will be one more rerate before the April Supplement is finalized. :sigh: