None of the tournaments I’ve submitted during the last two months has been processes. Is it just me or any other TD has similar issues? Any ideas, what causing delays?
There was a note in the April Supplement about the status of our systems conversion and upgrade.
Some things are working fairly well, others are, well, not. We were unable to rate events for about two weeks during the changeover from the old membership system to the new one. More recently we’ve been having problems getting the crosstables from the latest rates posted to the USCF website at msa.uschess.org.
As a result, there were no events rated during the last three weeks in March. (After the crunch to get a ratings supplement out, there’s usually a week where they try to get caught up on other things.)
There have been two rates so far in April and they’re hoping to be able to run another one this week, but only the April 1st rate has been posted to MSA. (I’m doing some additional tests on the April 7th rate and hope to have it posted within a day or two.)
The April 7th rate included over 40 events from the last weekend in February and around a dozen from the first week in March. Most of the events in the April 7th rate were received at the USCF office the week of March 12th, which means that there was about a four week lag between when they were received and when they were rated, about a week slower than normal for this time of year.
Nolan,
I have three tournaments from February (22, 28 and 29) that have not been rated. Considering that your have processed some of the March events, is it possible these February events were overlooked?
Events aren’t always rated in perfect chronological order either by the date played or the date received. (That’s likely to be more commonplace under the new ratings system, since the goal will be to rate events submitted using a new format for online submissions much faster.)
Looking at the ratings data through the 7th, the most recent events of yours that have been rated appears to be the ones on February 15th. I do show several events from the end of February for you as having been received.
I don’t have access to the details or status of events that have not yet been rated, so I can’t answer the question of why some events have been rated and others have not, and this forum is probably not the best place to discuss the status of specific events anyway.
I’m not sure what advice to offer. If the events are just stuck in the backlog of events at the USCF office, which seems likely, then contacting the ratings department to check on them cuts into staff time to do that processing. If they have gotten misplaced somehow or are the victims of a systems failure of some kind, then the office may not know to contact you about them. I’d guess if it was my events, I’d wait for another ratings cycle or two then contact the ratings manager to see what their status is.
Here’s a listing of the problems we have had with the ratings system in the past several weeks. (This list may not be comprehensive and is probably not in chronological order):
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A file problem erased around 23 events that had been entered but not yet rated. However, it appears that two sections that were thought to have been erased were still there but were entered and rated a second time, affecting over 50 members.
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A problem with updating the old dBase membership file from the new membership database caused problems with the March 25th rate, all the files for that rate had to be restored and the rate rerun.
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The old COBOL membership file is not being updated properly from
the new membership database, and it appears that the file has also been corrupted again, something that has happened several times during the past two years. This may be affecting the updating of correspondence ratings, or at least the updating of the correspondence ratings information on MSA. -
A few members with existing ratings who rejoined the USCF after a lapse of nearly a decade were treated as if they were unrated. It isn’t clear if this is a clerical error or a computer problem.
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We’ve been having problems with the batch job that transfers data from the old rating system to the new database server, it just stopped running last week. This has kept us from updating the MSA ratings and crosstable history records promptly.
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Some TD’s have been sending in duplicate copies of ratings reports without clearly marking them as duplicate submissions. Some of these events were rated more than once, sometimes under slightly different event names.
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Several events that should have been dual-rated were rated twice under the same ratings system. (I think most of them were rated twice as regular rather than as both regular and quick.)
All of this is in addition to the ongoing stream of reports of crosstables with errors in them, usually incorrect ID’s. Since MSA went live in September, the number of reports of incorrect crosstables has skyrocketed. In cases where the member (or a parent) reports an error, the TD has to be contacted to verify the claim of incorrect data, since the TD is the person responsible for the accuracy of the data on the rating report.
I am in the same situation as Mr. Kitsis. Our club (West Geauga Chess Club) has submitted two tournaments, dated 2/28 and 3/27, that have not been rated yet. I saw a website posting about the 2/28 tournament being received, but not the 3/27 event.
I am not usually worried, as I know that it takes about 3 weeks for our events to be rated, but when I saw the replies about March events being rated I became concerned. When should I contact the ratings department?
John Zeitler
West Geauga Chess Club
The choices are still the same. If every TD with an event pending from the last few weeks calls the USCF office to ask about it that’s a fair amount of staff time on the phone.
It doesn’t appear that they’re logged very many events in this week, so I guess that’s backed up too.
Its a lousy answer, but I think I’d assume rating reports are going to take about six weeks to process and wait until then to make an inquiry.
I completely understand the need to correct any relevant errors in the calculation of player’s ratings and to ensure that tournament results are as accurate as possible.
An item that does concern me however is that I usually include either new memberships or renewals with my tournament report and these are not showing as being updated in the members information. Does this paperwork usually get removed from tournament reports and get processed immediately, or does it wait until someone gets around to looking at the tournament, presumably once all the correction work is done?
Regards,
Chris
There are good reasons to keep the memberships with the rest of the rating report, but that shouldn’t significantly delay when the memberships are processed.
It might add a few hours under the redesigned office workflow, because of the need to record the checks and other funds received with the rating report before doing any other processing. Once that’s done, the next step should probably be to log in the event as having been received, and after that to process the memberships.
In an ideal world, all memberships would be processed the day they are received or by the end of the next business day.
Right now the USCF has a big backlog of work in every department. On Friday (4/16/04) they were working on memberships received in the mail on April 6th.
We have two employees trained on the new membership system and a third who started training on Thursday. Two other employees will be trained later this month. When there are sufficient employees trained, the goal is to process memberships received on the phone in real-time, WHILE THE MEMBER IS ON THE PHONE!!
There will be a redesigned membership signup form on the USCF website, hopefully later this month, that will link into the new membership system for real-time processing of memberships.
Do not worry way to much with the thought of the United States Chess Federation being behind on processing; the federation has there good times and there bad times – with rating reports. With Nancy Evens as the rating manager it has improved. We do know the federation has some short falls, the staff cut, the new rating program. This slump on taking care of rating tournaments, will take care of itself in a few weeks.
With tournament directors, some times we feel that our tournaments should be rated on the same day. Does it matter if the tournament is rated this week, or rated the next week, it would not be official till June 1, 2004. Myself have a tournament that was received eight weeks ago, and some that I have not received my return letter, or have seen it on the received list. That does bother me the most, then not having my tournaments rated as fast as possible. Its’ a fear that my tournaments being lost in the mail, as it takes the office weeks before getting any information back in the mail.
For that reason, from this day on will be sending all my tournaments certified mail, knowing there will be a returned postcard that is signed from someone in the office.
Earnest
Douglas M. Forsythe, local td
I wish everyone else were as patient or as understanding. (There are some of us who remember when the ratings system went down for six months back in the 70’s, and as I recall it was down for several months in 1991, too.)
The office did get a ratings batch run on Friday, (4/23), I’m going to be checking it VERY carefully before uploading it, as in my opinion posting bad data is far worse than posting no data at all.
Hope the federation will start to post tournaments faster and sooner. At this time there are a number of my tournaments that are out. Sending mine on paper, was woundering if the federation is taking the ones on disk faster to be rated then the ones sent on paper. As my tournaments are almost all trainning tournaments, as of tonight had two of my students want a tournament, will be sending in a tournament with six sections, it will be on paper. The tournament name will be called Quick XI, do hope that it will be on the receive list soon.
Earnest,
Douglas M. Forsythe, local td
We had a long conference call on this the other day.
The consensus is that that the biggest delay is for crosstables that are missing ID’s, either because the person is playing in his first tournament or because he joined recently (at another tournament) and his ID hasn’t been issued yet. This can cause some sections of a tournament to get rated one or more batches ahead of other sections of the same event.
With the membership department being very backed up too, that probably makes this situation even worse, because the crosstable can get set aside while they wait for those missing memberships to get processed.
We’ve now got it set up so that new memberships show up on MSA within a few hours of when they are entered onto the USCF’s computer, and we’re working on some other ways to speed up the issuance of ID’s for new members and make it easier for TD’s to look up ID’s for existing members.
Mike,
On the subject of missing member IDs. Would it be helpful to the ratings department if we e-mailed an updated tournament report files with updated ID numbers, once they show up on MSA? I would be willing to do this, but I do not want to cause any confusion at the office. This could be a good temporary solution until on-line submission is ready to go.
I have one section of an event from 3/13 outstanding where I sold several NEW memberships. All of the memberships have been on MSA for several weeks. Two of the sections were rated a couple of weeks ago. We also just had another event from 3/24 rated in this last batch.
Thanks,
Jeff Aldrich
12448994
Hi Jeff:
Should be up to one of your tournaments this Summer. One of the ways to make sure of the id number, make a hard copy of the person(s) rating history; if you feel the federation might have a hard time with the player(s) of the event, a hard copy with the report would show the person(s) you are talking about. Have done that in the past, if the person has been gone for a long time, or has more then one membership number, or they are family members, as family members have been mixed up for rating.
Earnest,
Douglas M. Forsythe, local td
12313120
The problem is that corrections are VERY time-consuming under the current system and the system cannot easily just re-rate an event, so what usually winds up happening is someone at the office MANUALLY computes the correct ratings for individuals and then updates the member and crosstable records.
The USCF has stacks of corrections going back months, and they aren’t making much headway on them.
Under the new system, corrections will be much easier to process. That’s also the primary reason for building in a re-rating capability. That it gives us the ability to retroactively put events into true chronological order is something of a fringe benefit, though one with the potential for controversy.
TD’s doing online submissions should be able to get back a preliminary report on an event, check for problems and submit a correction, all within a period of a few hours.
When I asked about sending in updated tournament report files, I was referring to events that have yet to be rated. When I hold an event that has new or pending memberships, I have to send in the tournament report with missing ID numbers. If I keep an eye for when those player ID numbers show up on MSA, I could output the tournament report for disk and then e-mail the updated files to the ratings department. It was just an idea for a temporary solution to the missing ID number problem.
Jeff