I was recently awarded “Member” status. The badge description reads:
“Member
This badge is granted when you reach trust level 2. Thanks for participating over a period of weeks to truly join our community. You can now send invitations from your user page or individual topics, create group personal messages, and have more likes per day.”
What caught my attention was the ability to invite members. I did a little digging and found there are currently 4427 forum members and 113117 US Chess members per the February 1 report. That means less than 4% of us chess players are forum users.
I spoke with some tournament directors recently at a tournament and learned that many are unaware of the US Chess forums and others don’t know how to access the forums. Some seemed genuinely interested and I told them there is a link at the bottom of USChess.org webpage amongst the multiple menu choices and also on the top of the msa page.
Do “MEMBERS” of the forum actually have invite capability or is that a residual statement from discourse forum boilerplate text? I see the “PROMOTER” badge has only been awarded once to @SysAdmin so either it is not available or underutilized.
I do know there are many social apps with active discussions related to chess, some directed at local interest and some at special interests (TDs, Organizers…)
PS - user and member are used interchangeably but member is a subset of all users as I understand it.
Other than the US Chess Issues category, the Forums are open to the public for reading. But posting privileges and access to US Chess Issues are limited to current adult members, who have to be in the Adult Members forum group (because the Forums software doesn’t know who is a member or who is over 16.)
Because we use a single-sign-on process from the member dashboard, I don’t think invitations to the Forums are useful these days, That probably dates back to when we were in beta test on the Discourse-hosted forums. Discourse has a lot of features we don’t use, but that was true for phpBB (the previous forum package) as well. There’s a real-time chat feature, but I"m not sure there’s much demand for it among chess players.
I think Publications has people who maintain our social media presence (Facebook, etc.) I’m not sure if reddit is one of our social media sites.
I don’t know what percentage of members have created a login at new.uschess.org, that’s the front door to the Forums now.
I am always getting asked chess questions and some of them are quite appropriate the USCF forum. I even go as far as saying my opinion is but they should go out to the forum to ask/discuss. Most have no idea that they even existed, maybe they even got a bit interested, but they do not follow through. Some said they knew about it but there was seldom anything out there about which they cared. A few say they get more out of the facebook groups. On a few occasions I got to say that their topic has been discussed out on the USCF forum – usually a USCF sucks why don’t they just do A instead of B.
Our NC site has a forum part that probably hasn’t gotten used in a few years and I think even back then no answers to the posts.
Many people think they have an idea of how to make things better, too many of those ideas run into privacy and security issues as well as budgetary and staff time usage issues. (Anything that potentially exposes non-public member data like addresses, phone numbers or birthdates is both a privacy and a security issue.)
And just so folks don’t feel ‘outside’ ideas are the only ones rejected, I’ve been pushing internally for years to get the printed rating supplement reports scanned and released as PDF files, it has never made the list of approved projects.
Some of them ARE good ideas, though, I’ve probably implemented or pushed for a dozen or more good ideas that arose in the Forums. I know the Forums were part of the reason we created a lot more Top 100 lists a few years back, and the Leader Boards (which are updated every day) came from a Forums discussion as well.
Well you touch on two things on my mind in your reply.
The scanning of the old printed copies is not a thing, yet. Also, I thought there was an effort to somehow scan old tournament results – although everyday there are less folks interested in seeing that happen.
The leader boards are ok but I think that an entire suite of stats would be great and not terribly difficult - but of course a lot of the interesting stats touch on privacy - especially in the area of minors - even when they are aggregated you can figure out who some people are when the numbers are low - I assume that there is some kind of privacy mitigation on the age or sex based lists - I once was asked to remove a photo I posted/captioned with too much info (I just did as they requested)
As far as I know the forum usage reports are only visible to the admins, I’m not sure if moderators can see them or not. There are a few statistics in the ‘about’ and ‘group’ pages.
There are e-document groups that can scan printed pamphlets and books, though they have to cut the binding off in the process, so it is usually a destructive process. I did get a bid for doing that about 10 years ago when I was the IT director, it was in the $5K-$10K range, as I recall.
The Gutenberg Project has been scanning out-of-copyright books in college libraries, but I understand that is a largely manual process, taking photos of books page by page, some more easily read than others because the pages don’t all lay flat. And sometimes they skip pages.
A lot of the printed rating reports from 1991 and earlier were stored in a trailer outside the New Windsor office and were not in great shape, so I think they didn’t make the move to TN. Joan had about a 6 foot stack of rating reports, mostly from the late 80’s in her office, I don’t know if those got moved to MO or not. They are computer printouts, on a variety of grades of paper, somewhat dog-eared and done on several different printers over the years, sometimes with ribbons that were running low on ink, so some of them are harder to read than others.
The scanning companies I talked to thought they could probably be scanned but wouldn’t give a quote before actually seeing them, so that would have been made when they came out to do the rating supplement scanning. But the project never got approved during the budgeting process.
I thought there was a project to ship all of the old tournament rating reports to a company in Michigan to scan them all and to create PDFs of them. In my visits to the Crossville office, there was a storeroom that contained numerous binders of the old computer printouts that were pre-MSA. Did that not happen?
No such project was approved when I was the IT director (but I retired from that position in 2016), if one has been approved since then, I’m not aware of it. Not sure who at the office would know the status of that.
I meant the “reports” category like the “Issues” category not reports on forum usage. I like the reports category (guess I am a data nerd) but when I shared a report link it was not viewable by a non forum reader.
It may be that Discourse limits downloads to signed-in users.
Confirmed, only signed-in users can access the reports pages. Historically (meaning the original paper system and the online BINFO system) we’ve only made reports available to members.
I haven’t tried it, but you may be able to save/download the data and send it to a non-member.
The API can access some non-public information (and apparently no way to limit access to only certain information) so there are no plans to make it available to members.
I am a little confused by the answer. If a logged in user can see the restricted information that is hidden from a non logged in user on the website why would it be different in the app. I can see USChess public info in the discourse app without logging in. The error I pasted previously was from attempting to log in on the USChess page within the discourse app via the login button on that page.
I believe the problem is you sent a link to the report, and that link is to a category (reports) that is not visible to non-members. If you copy/paste the data itself, you should be fine.
