Issues submitting tournament reports?

Chicago Chess Center (A6037696) had two small events yesterday. Club TD, my friend 14040236, tried to upload one; he was not authorized. Immediately after submitting the three DB files, he received a “not authorized to submit on behaf of affiliate” error message on the reply screen. He has been on our TD list for several weeks. I am a manager of affiliate & confirmed by logging in.

I tried to upload using my credentials as placeholder (thinking we would call office on Wed to correct). 10152763 (that’s me) got the same message, even when using me as placeholder TD.

All dues are up to date.

Is anyone else experiencing this glitch? Suggestions?

I’m wondering if it is an issue with the upload files or the upload process, because if I create an event manually with those IDs, I don’t get that error.

Can you send me the 3 DBF files? (mnolan@uschess.org)

Followup: I think I may have found them in the upload archives, 2 sections, ‘Saturday Swiss’?

If that’s the event (section 1 won by Jorn Dammann with a 4.0 score?), I was able to upload and validate it, though I had to enter the TD for section 2 by hand. But I wasn’t using your affiliate or TD ID, as I can’t do that these days. (The ratings staff should have that capability.)

But I don’t see an issue with either the affiliate or the chief TD ID, so I’m not sure what failed where.

Best thing I can suggest at the moment is to generate a new set up upload files. I don’t see any evidence that others are having problems uploading/submitting events.

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I see that this tournament has now been rated. What was the magic bullet that finally allowed it to go through? What error, if any, did its submitters make that caused the problem? Or, what bug was there at the U.S. Chess end, and has it been fixed or what work-around was used?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Bill Smythe

I don’t believe anything was changed at the US Chess end. Bill Brock will have to address the issue of what he may have done differently to resolve the problem. (I’m glad to hear the event is rated, I was curious about its status.)

Before the tournament started, I noticed two of the TD staff (neither of them Bill Brock) trying to teach each other how to set up the tournament with WinTD. I heard one of them saying they had two versions of WinTD running at the same time – versions 4 and 5, or something like that. I could easily believe that a lot of confusion could result from that duality. It looked like a case of the blind leading the blind.

I’m guessing that Bill Brock (who was not present at the start of the tournament, but came later) took your advice VERY seriously and simply reconstructed everything from scratch a couple of days later.

For one of the two TDs present initially, I think this was his first experience with pairing software.

Bill Smythe

Version 5 had some initial bugs and some things done differently. Getting the latest (letter) update of version 5 (you have to buy 5 but letter updates are free) should be done if using it. I reported one but that only occurred in fixed board team events with weighted boards and I almost reported another bug until reading the help manual and finding that it was not really a bug but simply that the setting was now in a different place (the manual link is pretty good).

Version 4 creates a .pto file while version 5 can create a .pto or a .ptoz file.

Last night at my club I had a person come for WinTD instruction and was surprised by something happening until I saw that it was WinTD version 4.02. 4.03 fixed a number of bugs (leaving a few). 4.11 fixed almost all the bugs (but introduced a bug in adding people to very large weighted fixed board team events) and 4.20 had everything fixed. Version 5 adds a lot of new functionality but not everybody can use it so I keep both versions on my laptop so that organizers without version 5 can still use my files.

Bill Brock had nothing to do with the successful resolution, but is grateful for the help!