In another thread it was asked how to report duplicate IDs in your events using the Membership Exception Request form when submitting the event online.
Here’s how:
Use one of the IDs in your event. (Usually we keep the older of the two IDs, which is the lower numbered one if they both begin with a ‘1’, so I’d use that one.)
Once your ratings report has been uploaded, go to the online edit form and click the ‘Membership Exception Requests’ button at the bottom.
If the member is not current, it will automatically create an exception form record for him/her. Otherwise you can use the ‘ADD’ button to create an exception form record in the appropriate section. (You will need to enter the pairing number for that player.)
Select ‘USCF Office Action Required’ as the exception type, and use the ‘Comments’ field to give both IDs.
You will receive an e-mail when the office has adjusted the member records.
We expect to have someone in the TN offices trained on reviewing exception requests and reviewing them on a daily basis within a few days, so it should generally take only a day or two to get a response.
It occurs to me that, if it takes “a day or two” (or, more realistically, several days) to get a tournament rated when there is “'USCF Office Action Required”, many organizers will choose, instead, just to take the easy way out, in order to get their events rated immediately.
For example, I recently played in an Iowa tournament, partly to re-acquaint myself with a childhood friend who also played in the tournament. His membership expired in 1984, and when he re-joined recently, the office gave him a new membership instead of dredging up the old one. The TD at the tournament, although aware of the duplicate identity, apparently just used the new version when he submitted his rating report. Thus, the tournament was rated quickly, but the crosstable shows this player as unrated. Both of his identities are still on MSA, with his earlier rating attached to his older, expired membership.
Had the TD done what he was “supposed” to do, using the “Membership Exception Requests” feature, he might still be waiting for his event to be rated.
Maybe there should be a way to separate the rating report from the Exception Request procedure, so that the TD would not be tempted to take such shortcuts. In this case, for example, he could have simply submitted the report the way he did, and then sent in the info about the duplicate membership afterwards, as a separate communication. This would give the TD instant turnaround on the rating report, while still putting the duplicate identity problem near the top of the “to do” list. As it is, I’m guessing this player will retain his duplicate identity for a long time to come.
Once we flag an ID as being a duplicate, any rating report using it will not pass validation and the error report will list the correct ID.
Since we started identifying duplicate IDs on the new membership system a year ago, we have flagged 635 duplicates. Every day we identify several more potential duplicates.
A few months ago I pulled a random sample of around 500 IDs and did extensive duplicate checks on them. Based on that sample, I estimated that we may have over 10,000 duplicate IDs in our database (out of around 600,000 players).
Personally, I feel that unlinking the process of correcting a duplicate ID from the tournament in which it surfaces is a bad idea. It is more work (even with rerating) to fix the ratings from a duplicated ID after the fact than to correct it before that event ever gets rated.
My point is, I’m sure MANY duplicate IDs are going unreported because the TD would rather get his event rated right away than “do the right thing” by reporting the problem and then waiting days or weeks for the result.
Correcting the duplicate need not be “unlinked” from the tournament. The software could simply handle this particular situation differently. It could go ahead and rate the tournament assuming the two players are not the same, then flag the duplicate for the office. Then a repair by the office would trigger a change in the crosstable, which would then be re-rated automatically during the next re-rate.
I think a TD who submits an event KNOWING there is a membership error that could have an impact upon the post-event ratings, just because he or she wants it rated TODAY rather than having it rated correctly a day or two from now has commited a serious violation of his or her ethical responsibility to the players and to the USCF.
I think openly sanctioning such actions would be an even worse ethical breach on the USCF’s part.
Then, unless I miss my guess (and I emphasize this IS just a guess), there may already be dozens of TDs who have violated their ethical responsibilities, and there may be hundreds more in the coming weeks and months. It’s simply too tempting to take a simple short-cut like this, especially when the official “day or two” typically ends up being a week or three.
It’s as though you’ve done TOO good a job with recent software improvements, so that, by now, everyone expects instant gratification.
There ought to be a procedure that would accomplish both goals – immediate rating and error correction – without either TDs or USCF having to condone or commit ethical violations.
Maybe, in the case of a duplicate ID, there could be a software change along the following lines:
The TD could be instructed to use whichever ID corresponds to a current (non-expired) membership. (That way, his tournament will be rated immediately.)
The TD could flag the player as having a duplicate ID, listing the alternate ID number. (This flag could be set up NOT to stop the event from being rated immediately.)
The above action would trigger an action request to the office.
When the office combines the two records, the software would automatically update all sufficiently recent crosstables containing either of the two names. (This probably already happens, doesn’t it?)
The next re-rate will then make all remaining corrections automatically. (This, too, already happens, right?)
About the only disadvantage I can see is that a crosstable already known to contain an error would appear immediately (to be replaced within the now-famous “day or two”). But I think this disadvantage is minimal. Only the player himself, and perhaps his immediate opponents, would be significantly affected.
I’m suggesting this change only in the case of a duplicate ID, not in the myriad of other possible situations that could cause a problem.
Also, I’m not suggesting that this change be anywhere near the top of your to-do list. I’m sure there are more important things. But I hope you’ll keep it in mind for the future – I think you’ll catch a LOT more duplicate IDs.
Bill, when I say that the goal is to resolve membership exception requests within 2 working days, I really mean 2 WORKING DAYS. Except possibly during the days just ahead of a rating supplement cutoff, I don’t see how that short of a delay in rating an event will inconvenience any players or TDs.
Once we’ve got everyone trained on that process (in about a week), I will start generating statistics to track outstanding/unresolved requests.
Please give us the benefit of the doubt on that before trying to come up with something else for dealing with duplicate IDs.
When we move the phone system to TN inearly April, we will be redesigning the voice mail system as well.
During normal office hours I would hope that being put into voice mail becomes the exception rather than the norm.
Voice mails, e-mails, and snail mails should all get prompt responses and action.
This is NOT the same USCF we’ve all struggled to get a response from. Give us a chance to prove that.
Let’s hope TDs will see it that way too. There is often a difference between “the goal” and reality.
Let’s also hope TDs won’t remember the bad old days of a 3-week wait to resolve these things. If they don’t trust the 2-day proclamation, they may still be tempted to take short-cuts.
I really think, Mike, that eventually you will come to agree with me that there should be a way to handle this particular type of exception request in such a way that the event gets rated immediately, but the exception request still gets acted on within a few days.
Given that about 10% of the member or TD-reported duplicates don’t turn out to be correct and another 10-20% are not resolved in the conventional sense, I just cannot see why one or two days is critical here.
Would you also sanction sending in an event with IDs that are known to be incorrect for a few players to save a day or two in the initial rating of an event, or with the wrong results?
As the TD, don’t you have an obligation to report the rating information to the USCF both accurately and promptly?
It isn’t, of course, but I’m concerned that some TDs may not see it this way, especially if, in their experience, the “one or two days” has sometimes become three weeks.
I don’t understand your question. Unless you are talking about duplicate IDs (which reverts to our original debate), what motivation would a TD have to knowingly send in incorrect IDs? This would just slow down his rating report, defeating his supposed purpose in taking short-cuts.
Of course not, but again, I don’t see how this would speed things up for the TD, therefore I don’t see why this is a danger.
Of course, which is why I am suggesting that the way be paved for the TD to achieve promptness without sacrificing accuracy.
Somehow, I suspect my suggested software change is more difficult to implement than I at first thought, and that’s the main reason you’re resisting it. If that’s true, I’ll be the first to admit that that’s a GOOD reason for resisting – you have a lot of important things to do, and we all know it’s time to get the show on the road.
I really haven’t thought about the programmatical aspects, though I suspect they’re not trivial.
However, as far as I’m concerned an event SHOULD NOT BE RATED until all membership issues are resolved to some reasonable degree of tolerance.
The proper level of tolerance is a policy issue and mostly arises because of problems with memberships collected by 3rd parties or with our still-antiquated webstore technology. The duplicate issue is largely a function of that level of tolerance, the more non-members we let through before the membership questions are resolved the more duplicated IDs we have in the system. That’s why we have thousands of duplicates today, because we’ve been exceedingly lax on this issue for many years.
This is yet another membership issue, and (unlike the issue of missing IDs and/or payments from some other TD) is one that can generally be COMPLETELY resolved between the TD and the USCF office without significant delay. That makes it something that in my opinion should be completely resolved BEFORE the event is initially rated.
I was just informed of this area of the website specifically to address this issue since the tournament Bill mentions was mine. Bill makes lots of assumptions about how I handled the problem of the duplicate ID and most are 100% in error! First, If I was in such a hurry to get the event rated why did I use all 7 days allowed before submitting? The reason is I was working with Larry to try and get the duplicate ID straightened out BEFORE I submitted the report. Second, the member exception section would not work when I submitted this report, I informed Larry of this and got no response. So, hitting on the 7day barrier, I decided that it would be best to submit the tournament for rating and keep emailing the USCF office about fixing the problem of the duplicate ID. After submitting the report, I emailed at least 3 more times to REMIND them about the problem out there.
In the future before assuming things please ask the TD what they may be doing to solve the problem. I wonder how many people are viewing Iowa as an incapable state now and have decided not to attend some of our tournaments?
Larry was not the person you should have been working with, as duplicate IDs are primarily a membership issue, though one that can have ratings implications.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say the exception request wasn’t working, Larry was not the person to contact on that either, though.
At this point, Walter Brown is reviewing exception requests every day.
I submitted exception reports for duplicate IDs from tournaments in February and March. I realize this was during the transition period, but none of them appear to have updated on MSA. Is there any way to track these so the TD knows whether the duplicate submitted proves to be correct or not?
The tournaments are no longer in my list, so I cannot re-submit the requests. Should I just make up a tournament that I do not submit just for sending in duplicate IDs that I have found in old tournaments?
Thank you for the corrections, and my apologies for the errors. My intention was not to put anybody in a bad light, but rather to point out how tempting it must be (indeed, how necessary it may even seem) for a TD to do whatever it takes to get the tournament rated promptly, and let the errors get corrected later. In this case, the 7-day barrier virtually forced your hand. I probably would have done the same thing myself.
This case, in fact, is a perfect example to support my original point, which was that it might be a good idea to modify the USCF software to routinely handle duplicates in this manner. In the weeks since this tournament, however, things seem to have become better organized at the USCF office, with Walter Brown now handling these problems quickly. So there may no longer be a need for such a software change.
For anybody that may be thinking that, let me say that Mark ran a great tournament, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I would highly recommend Mark’s events to anybody who is looking to play in a well-run tournament.
Incidentally, the duplicate ID (and the crosstable for this event) was corrected a few weeks after the crosstable was first posted to MSA.
The reason I was working with Larry was that he was the one who answered the emails I sent originally, so I stuck with him during the whole issue. Behind the scenes he may have sent the stuff to more appropriate folks, but I did not know this. I am very glad it got resolved correctly.
Bill,
Thanks for your latest response and I understand you comments and context now. I appologize if you took offense to my remarks, I was just very concerned about how they might look to the average reader. We really try to run the best tournaments possilbe and we especially try to draw from out of state.
I have had some concerns that the new ratings programming may in effect make it TOO EASY to do corrections, which might actually make it more tempting for a TD to submit an event with some possible errors in it (IDs or results he isn’t sure about), knowing that he can fix it in a few days.
I also know some people are concerned that once TDs can make their own corrections that we might see results changed several times in an attempt to tinker with someone’s rating. There WILL be a record kept of all changes and who made them, in part to give us a permanent record to look for problems like that.
I’m currently leaning in the direction of having the TD’s changes to a rated evnet placed in a ‘pending changes’ file and sent to Walter for his review. If all he has to do is click on a ‘OK’ button to release them for processing, which is similar to what he now does for most membership exception requests, I don’t see that bogging down the process.
Maybe that’s the way to handle duplicate ID reports from TDs and players as well. (I’m VERY reluctant to make those changes without office review, because around 10% of the duplicate ID reports we get from players or TDs turn out to be cases of players with similar names that are not true duplicates.)
I would agree that it is important that office review duplicates before any changes are made. I sent in my list of duplicates from previous tournaments as you directed. One player appeared to have 3 ID numbers, but Walter told me that one of the ID had records indicating that the player is 38 years old. I based the duplicate submission on the fact that the ID number was used in a K-3 tournament in 2002.
On a related note, I was wondering how easy it is now to reconcile the tournament histories for these duplicate IDs. Or is this something where you want to leave these separate to avoid confusion because of the discontinuities in rating history?
I’m working on what I think will be the optimal solution to this issue. We can now update the tournament records to add a corrected ID (keeping the original ID just in case we were wrong, of course), but that’s only half of the task.
The other half is to combine the ratings, which requires knowing the furthest point in time that we will be rerating that player’s events.
For events that are before the point we are doing rerates we will have to combine the ratings as of the last events for both IDs. The Ratings Committee came up with a formula for doing this that uses the rating and the number of games.
For events that are within the rerating pool, once we correct the ID the next time those events are rerated they will be rerated under the proper ID.
The challenge is always knowing where the switchover point is.
Currently that’s any event that ended after or was rated after 12/31/2003. I hope we don’t have to keep going back that far forever, so that over time we can move that switchover point forward, perhaps to include the last 9 months or so worth of events.
