I’m trying to upload a tournament rating report (produced from WinTD) and I’m getting an error that the file format is invalid. Well, actually several errors. See below. Wondering if I did something wrong somewhere I tried upload the rating files from a tournament that I had already submitted successfully and received the same error. So, I’m fairly confident something is broken on the USCF side. I know it was still working Monday as that was when I submitted my last tournament successfully.
Hey Bill,
It isn’t you — I called Susan Kantor this morning and she said it might a connection issues with the servers. Mike Nolan is on-call but currently away at a seminar, but hopefully it will be fixed by Monday.
I especially liked the error, “You are not authorized to submit events from affiliate” when it’s my own affiliate 
Best,
~Ybriang
Brian Yang
i would guess that a lot of TDs would hope that we can find Mike before Monday.
It should be fixed.
However, it is worth noting that the proper way to report problems is to contact the office via phone or email. I’m in the process of turning system administration duties over to the consultants that US Chess has hired. If the office needs to set up a 24x7 trouble reporting system, especially since problems often seem to occur at night or over the weekend, when most tournaments are held, that’s something that needs to be on Carol’s agenda, as she needs to work out what is needed and who will monitor it. Long term, that won’t be me.
I’m sure that Brian was not the only one to call the office Friday morning and I wasn’t the only one to e-mail the office Friday morning since by lunch they’d already handled a few tournaments manually well before the OP started this thread. I only had a four-quads tournament to do so the on-line entry system was usable enough for me to do data entry Thursday night to get it rated.
I think that the lack of a forum thread until Friday afternoon is an indication that <1> most people do contact the office and <2> most people have enough confidence in the office that they can be patient while waiting for something to get fixed.
The challenge with setting up any kind of 24x7 reporting/monitoring system is that the overwhelming majority of the problems TD and members encounter are chess-related.
Most of the TD-related problems (at least based on the emails I see) are ones that can generally wait until the next business day to be resolved. (Probably 80% of them are things that the TD needs to learn how to correct, not things that the office needs to intervene in.)
It’s the 1% or so of issues that require technical assistance that I’m not sure how to handle.
So the real question is how to handle triage. I doubt US Chess is willing to pay outside IT consultants (who do have 24x7 coverage) to develop sufficient expertise in chess related matters to sift through problem reports to figure out whether they’re chess related (99%) or technical (1%).
I had the same problem Friday evening and resorted to inputting it all directly on the website manually, which worked. Glad to hear it wasn’t just me.
If you train someone for the chess issues at an IT company you waste a lot of time and money when they have turnover.
I tend to agree, Allen, but is US Chess big enough to be able to afford to have staff on call 24x7?
Can’t we get the batphone and wake you up?
No. We probably could if sharply increased ratings fees to pay for it. I’m not sure that would fly. By that I mean an increase of a multiple of 3-5 and I’m not sure that would be enough. That would be for a dedicated staffed help desk.
But I doubt we need 24/7. We do meeting someone paying attention on the weekend in some manner because it is a high use time for us. I know Carol is aware of that.