You know you want to grumble if entering your tournament into the USCF computer takes longer to do than to actually run the tournament, as it happened to me earlier this week. But honestly, I can’t. Even though I had to register an ID login for the affiliate, assign myself as a TD for the affiliate, process 21 JTP memberships complete with address and birthdate, update my tournament with those new ID #s, enter the tournament info, submit it, and pay for it (whew…), each of those steps was so logically implemented by the USCF computer. Tedious? Yes, by nature. However, good job by Nolan and whoever else feeds the USCF hamsters running those computers for having such a good system.
(My only suggested improvement is that when processing a membership batch with multiple errors in it, that when you click save, it somehow automatically loads the next name in the list with an error (instead of a blank form) so that you don’t have to make another couple of clicks with more pages to load to select it manually.)
I understand & agree completely with you, Ben. Several tournaments I’ve worked with have been long headaches to upload (especially when my computer decides to hate me–but that’s another story), but the system is only getting better and more user-friendly over time. Congratulations are in order to the developers, as allowing the TDs to rate tournaments quickly and efficiently is one of the USCF member benefits that OTB players are thrilled about having–just so they can get their updated rating more expediently. In regards to same-day post-tournament ratings, monthly official ratings, and better tournament histories (for both players and TD experience–I love the new feature of that under the TD/A, as it saves me a lot of time entering data into an Excel file like I was doing), the USCF has emerged into the online age with great success for its members.
The TD/A ‘membership batch’ concept is overdue for an overhaul, probably a complete rewrite. (We didn’t have family membership plans when it was first written, for example, so they’ve been grafted on, and IMHO not all that well. I think the way the webstore handles family membership plans is better, but it could still be improved.)
Recently I had someone grumbling (politely) about having to enter addresses and birthdates for new JTP or Tournament Member players, but as I pointed out if we don’t get that information up front we’ll never get it, and then we’ll wind up with 300 'Michael Smith’s instead of 150 of them.
We have over 25000 non-member records in our database with a state but no street address or city in them. Only 164 of them have been identified as a duplicate ID, I’m fairly sure there are quite a few others that could or should be. The good news is that while in 2003 we created over 2000 non-member records that had no address or city, in 2007 we created just 42 of them.
One TD told me in no uncertain terms that one new membership he was trying to put in was ABSOLUTELY someone who had never played in a USCF rated event before, both his coach and his mom were sure of it.
The only problem was we had someone in our database with the same name (including middle initial), same address and same date of birth. So the membership module kept rejecting it as a potential duplicate membership.