To whom it may concern;
I downloaded the May Golden DB for reg & blitz, installed it, registered players for our May blitz tournament, and the rating numbers are wrong.
Players listed on the search page with established ratings (all 3) are listed in the database as “unr.”
How about giving a specific example, including what you installed it into?
I installed it into Swisssys 10.29.
I entered these players;
Brooks, Bill D [12561638]
Vetter, Charles [12441450]
Ohlman, Scott [14723380]
Newbury, Gordia [10506034]
who all have established ratings.
all unrated.
So, to be clear, the problem is that SwisSys 10.29 isn’t showing those players as rated? MSA and both lookup programs seem to be working for me.
Have you tried loading the database a second time?
I have let Thad Suits know, but I don’t have a way to reproduce the problem myself. But others who read this might.
SwissSys made some pretty significant changes to how it handles player registration. Did you get other players registered correctly?
Alex Relyea
Not sure if this is a problem due to using an older version of Swisssys but you should upgrade to Swisssys 10.45 anyway.
On a related note, are the gmsreg, etc. fields now being set? In the March edition of the allratings file, it looks like those are all zeros, but in the May edition, it looks like they are now showing something (I assume games rated in that system since the previous month??). That should have no effect on the OP (since those aren’t being used in either the regular GDB or the one that Bill Buklis has been building).
I had the April DB loaded when I began the process. I shut the progam down, downloaded the May DB, installed and set it up as usual.
When I encountered the problenm I went back to the April DB.
I posted here. In reponce to Nolan, I reloaded the May DB, here is the Wall Chart text;
Wall Chart. PBCC May Blitz 2022: open (Standings (no tiebrk))
1 CHARLES VETTER
unr. 12441450 (1837) 0.0
2 Keyan Chaudhri
unr. 30574838 0.0
3 WYATT AIDAN BUSBY
unr. 30565967 0.0
4 BILL D BROOKS
unr. 12561638 (1150) 0.0
5 SCOTT D OHLMAN
unr. 14723380 (1472) 0.0
6 PAUL NEWBURY
unr. 10506034 (2044) 0.0
I reloaded the April DB, here is the Text from THAT wall chart;
Wall Chart. PBCC May Blitz 2022: Open
1 PAUL NEWBURY
2044 10506034 (2002) 0.0
2 CHARLES VETTER
1829 12441450 (1845) 0.0
3 SCOTT D OHLMAN
1472 14723380 (1453) 0.0
4 BILL D BROOKS
1209 12561638 (1334) 0.0
5 Keyan Chaudhri
unr. 30574838 0.0
6 Wyatt Aidan Busby
unr. 30565967 0.0
We hold a tournament almost every month, I have used Swisssys several years, I download the Golden DB and set it up every time.
First time I have had a problem.
To answer Tom’s question, there haven’t been any recent programming changes to the supplement files, so if something changed in any fields, I don’t know what would have caused it.
Thanks for the additional information, Steve. I did let Thad know there was a problem reported, but I haven’t heard back from him yet, and so far nobody else has reported having similar issues, so I’m not sure what’s happening.
For what it’s worth, in SwissSys 10.37 these players come in correctly for me from the May Golden Database (Regular/Blitz).
So I did a little bit of detective work (very little) and the alternate ratings appear to be the May Regular ratings. Not sure what setting was checked to have them show up as Primary unrated and Secondary regular, but I’m sure it’s easy to duplicate.
Strange. I mean I assume you were following your usual procedure.
Alex Relyea
You can choose which of the two ratings to use as the primary rating. This option is presented when you initially set up the section. I usually gloss over it but in this case remembered and made the switch. As I said, I got the blitz ratings to show up properly as the primary ratings for all four individuals.
Upgrading to a newer version is free, no? I’d be curious whether that solves the issues.
Thad suggests that the problem may be that you need to create the index files manually in SwisSys these days. (They used to be created automatically.)
If the index files are still the ones for the April data, that could explain why reinstalling the April file got ratings again.
For my part, no.
I ALWAYS delete all the DB folder files and start from scratch
The DBF file only has two ratings, either regular OTB and quick OTB or regular OTB and blitz OTB, and they are probably labeled something like ‘rating 1’ and ‘rating 2’, because SwisSys doesn’t know which rating is which, there’s nothing in the file to tell it that.
The allratings file has all 6 OTB and ONL ratings as well as some FIDE ID information and membership status (active, duplicate, deceased, inactive), but I don’t know if either major pairing program uses it yet, and it will have the same problem the other files have with having too many records for Excel to be able to load it all.
You may want to contact Thad Suits directly (suits at initco dot net). He says there weren’t any changes between 10.29 and the current version that might cause this problem.
I will try to do some additional testing of the April and May files when I can, but at this point I’m out of ideas.
My concern from the start was that I can load the April DB and it works fine, and I load the May DB and it does not, so logically it must be a DB problem.
Well, with experiment #4 I watch as I entered the ID# in the “search database” tab. When you hit the ID# and the field (name) comes up, BOTH ratings are clearly displayed. You hit the “accept” button, drop out of the registration dialog and the wall chart and the tinker for that player both show the “unr.” in one if the ratings field.
So (sorry this is getting so long), I go back and change the setting in the “Envronment Options” “Ratings” and in “Ratings to use in searches for this section”
I pick Regular instead of Blitz.
Now when I load a player from the database BOTH ratings show up!
Now all I have to do is figure out if the program is still using the Blitz ratings in the parings.
A job for Mr. Suits.
Here’s what I get when I dump the dBase records (downloaded from the website) using a short PHP script, I don’t see any data issues here. (Note that there are no values in any of the NRM-DAT fields, I checked every record in both the April and May files.)
BTW, the reason that the RSUPP_NUM value is 2 for the regular OTB rating in April is that it hadn’t changed since the February list, though other ratings did change in March or April. This is a weakness in the way the data is stored in the supplement databases, it should really have a separate RSUPP_NUM value for each ratings type. The all_ratings file has the same weakness.
April Blitz:
[MEM_ID] => 12561638
[MEM_NAME] => BROOKS,BILL D
[EXPIRED] => 20231031
[STATE] => TX
[RSUPP_YR] => 2022
[RSUPP_NUM] => 02
[R_PLR_TYP] => E
[R_LPB_RAT] => 1209
[R_NRM_DAT] =>
[Q_PLR_TYP] => E
[Q_LPB_RAT] => 1334
[Q_NRM_DAT] =>
[deleted] => 0
May Blitz:
[MEM_ID] => 12561638
[MEM_NAME] => BROOKS,BILL D
[EXPIRED] => 20231031
[STATE] => TX
[RSUPP_YR] => 2022
[RSUPP_NUM] => 05
[R_PLR_TYP] => E
[R_LPB_RAT] => 1150
[R_NRM_DAT] =>
[Q_PLR_TYP] => E
[Q_LPB_RAT] => 1334
[Q_NRM_DAT] =>
[deleted] => 0
April Quick:
[MEM_ID] => 12561638
[MEM_NAME] => BROOKS,BILL D
[EXPIRED] => 20231031
[STATE] => TX
[RSUPP_YR] => 2022
[RSUPP_NUM] => 02
[R_PLR_TYP] => E
[R_LPB_RAT] => 1209
[R_NRM_DAT] =>
[Q_PLR_TYP] => E
[Q_LPB_RAT] => 1221
[Q_NRM_DAT] =>
[deleted] => 0
May Quick:
[MEM_ID] => 12561638
[MEM_NAME] => BROOKS,BILL D
[EXPIRED] => 20231031
[STATE] => TX
[RSUPP_YR] => 2022
[RSUPP_NUM] => 05
[R_PLR_TYP] => E
[R_LPB_RAT] => 1150
[R_NRM_DAT] =>
[Q_PLR_TYP] => E
[Q_LPB_RAT] => 1200
[Q_NRM_DAT] =>
[deleted] => 0
Why is this a job for Mr. Suits? It seems to me as though this is something you can (trivially) test yourself.
Question: Which ratings did you want to use, Regular or Blitz?
It appears that either you have set up the fields differently between the April and May events, or that you chose different ratings when setting this tournament up. I’d be inclined to agree with that, except that you’ve said that you’ve plugged the April database, which is obviously using the same settings, so I don’t know what to tell you.
Is there someone else in Odessa who uses SwissSys who you can walk through this with and see if he has any idea what you might be doing?
Understand that I’m not blaming you, but literally no one else has had this problem, which makes me think there is something strange going on in your computer.
Alex Relyea
Nobody should ever have to apologize for providing too much detail about a problem, you never know what little tidbit will be the key!
There could still be data issues with the file, but nothing looks out of whack when I process or dump the records. An upgrade/reinstall seems like the next logical step.
WinTD 5 uses the allratings file (directly as a text file) rather than the GDB’s. It rewrites the fields of interest as a DBF file (random access has its advantages). Bill Buklis took up the project of repackaging the allratings file also into a DBF for use with SwisSys—I don’t know how SwisSys deals with the extra field names.