I recently tried to renew my membership for a tournament coming up this weekend and I could not. It was saying that I don’t meet the requirements for an adult membership. My DOB field is empty (reading mm/dd/yyyy) and my gender is incorrect as well. Are these new fields? How soon can I expect a response to change them?
US Chess has been collecting birthdates and gender for a long time, probably since they were first computerized in 1977.
Strange. I wonder how I was able to register with both fields blank. Thank you for your response. Looks like it’s all set now.
Thanks,
Jayson A.
I’m not sure the membership module REQUIRES either piece of information. While a birthdate should be required to get an age-specific membership, like a youth or senior membership, gender is only used for statistical purposes and things like the Top 100 female lists.
In order to appear on an age or gender-specific Top 100 list, the member’s birthdate and gender need to be verified. Emails generally go out a few weeks before the next Top 100 list is published to contact those whose may be eligible for such a list but whose birthdate and gender has not been verified as accurate. Unless a response is received, that member will not be included in any Top 100 lists for which those fields determine eligibility.
The new interface might very well require that information. More perturbing is that a profile is needed to update an existing membership and two members cannot share the same e-mail address. If somebody does not remember the username and password created for the member record when the membership was first created then it is difficult for the member to renew. I’ve handled such issues on-site at tournaments by having the memberships go through the TD/Affiliate option that does not require knowing the username/password.
I would hope that if the information has never been entered then it could simply be entered during the renewal process.
The unique email requirement is probably a Drupal issue (for logins), not a CIVI-CRM requirement. I raised that as a design issue back in 2020, given that we had THOUSANDS of members who shared an email address with another member, but they went ahead with that requirement anyway.
It would be nice to have a ‘renew this ID–no changes’ option so that logging in isn’t necessary, but that probably runs into issues with members who are no longer eligible for the rate they were at because they’re older now.
And it could create a means whereby someone can find out some information about a member’s age or birthdate by trying to renew that membership.
We had a few attempts to hijack someone’s membership with the system I wrote in 2004/5, though I don’t know why anybody would want to do that.