I have a couple of friends who may be interested in joining the USCF again after close to a 20+ year absence.
They had established ratings in the mid-1980s, but neither have been members since then.
How can they find their old USCF ID numbers and ratings? They are not in the msa.uschess.org lists.
Thanks.
Rob Bernard
They need to contact the USCF office and give them as much detail as they can about when and where they were last USCF members (including under what name, as trying to find John. Robert Smith as Robby Smith is difficult), so that the office can look them up in ratings supplements.
Thank you. I thought there might be a more automated way of doing this, that didn’t involve USCF staff time and resources.
I’ll let them know.
Nope, every current or former member for whom we have records in electronic form is already on MSA (around 640,000 of them)
One of the projects that the Board has set is to scan all the old Rating Supplements (from before 1992 when we started issuing them on diskette) and make them available as PDFs on a CD and on the website. (This does not include the microfilm of the old ratings cards, mostly because of the cost of having someone convert them to PDFs, I assume.) Thankfully that task is not on MY worklist!
That won’t get those IDs (probably around 100,000 of them) into the MSA system but it will make it possible for people to look up those members. (I tried scanning a few pages of the big 1986 annual supplement a few years ago and converting them to computer-readable files. Unless OCR software has made HUGE strides in the last couple of years the error rate for scanned supplements will be too high to be able to convert those scanned pages into computer-readable data.)