I received an e-mail from a player who is planning to attend a tournament I am running soon. He used to live in a different state and now needed to renew his membership. He said when he went to do it online, he could not find any place to enter his new address or e-mail and gave up. So, he sent his dues with his entry fee and asked me to renew him.
I logged in to my dashboard, went to the affiliate area and started the renewal. I was able to correct his e-mail but there were no mailing address fields given for renewing members. I finished renewing his membership but without the address change.
Did I miss a step somewhere or are the developers of this “new” membership submission page assuming that any renewing member is just naturally at the same address as ten years ago?
Looks like this person might have gotten thrown off-kilter when the system asked him to create a log-in for his member record. That’s more likely if he rejoined after 10 years.
When I go to Join, then click on join/renew, it leads to a screen that says “To join or renew your US Chess Federation membership, please log in or create an account.”
After I log-in to my account I see a page labeled Membership and “contact information.” There I can change my email address and mailing address.
So I think the new site design, with a log-in for each ID number/member, might be what confused the person who contacted you. Now that his membership is current, he can create an account/log-in for his ID#, and change his contact information at his dashboard.
The email address in the member record might not be his current one, and it also must be unique. He will need to contact the office to have them resolve either of those issues.
You may be right about what threw him off. I checked my own dashboard and verified that there is a way to change contact information, including mailing address. I will pass this along to the player. However, why can’t affiliates do this?
What if I had 20-30 memberships to submit from a big scholastic and half a dozen were returning members who had new addresses? In the old system for submitting a large number of memberships, when you typed in the ID number for a returning member, all the fields (including mailing address) were available. The old address would be filled in by default but you could change it. What am I supposed to do now, tell them all to do it themselves? Isn’t part of the reason folks renew through an affiliate so that everything is done for them - they fill out a membership form, hand it in with the money and they’re done?
I did an online renewal last week. While the website is slower, it helped me to see a possible reason for this issue. On the page where you can enter a new membership, the template includes all the fields expected. When I moved to the renewal page, it briefly presented the same template. Within about 1 second, it updated the page with a template without the address field, among others. It’s pretty clear this is intentional but why not just use one template, populate it with current data, make some fields required for submission and let the user do the rest? I don’t see a reason for a shorter template, and it probably cost more to implement it this way.
Presumably you were renewing a membership for someone other than yourself, since you’re a life member.
I assume they don’t show member information like addresses and birthdates unless you’re logged in as that member or as part of the member’s family. This would be for privacy reasons, otherwise someone could find out your address and birthdate just by checking your member renewal page.
Allowing address changes to existing members during a renewal by a third party also raises security issues, because that third party could hijack someone’s membership by changing the address or email. (Don’t ask me WHY someone would want to do that, but we’ve seen attempts.)
I’ve passed a suggestion on to the office that the membership renewal form should have a note explaining why third parties cannot see or update sensitive data fields and explaining how members can create a login and update those fields themselves.
I can’t guarantee that the office will accept this suggestion or when it might be added to the development schedule.
Authorized users are doing the renewals so at least we have an audit trail. That might not count for much if private data is publicized or used, but it’s something.
Authorized by whom, and how does US Chess know that the person doing the updates is the authorized person? The Internet has many people willing to do anything, break any rule, bypass any security procedure, to gain access to sensitive information.
I hate to throw a wrench into this discussion - but there has been a development.
This past weekend, I had to submit some memberships, including one for a player who was last a member ten years ago, in a distant state. To my surprise, when I got to that renewal, the address fields were visible, with the old address filled in. Not only that but I was able to replace that content with the new address. Subsequently, the new state showed in his member record in MSA.
However, when I did the rating report, this player was flagged with an alert as having no address information. There was nothing I could do about it at that point, so I just finished the report and paid the rating fee. Bottom line, I have no idea at all what is going on in the member submission area.
I can’t address the membership renewal form issue, in fact I’ve not even looked at it, since I don’t run tournaments these days.
The validation report normally uses membership data that gets updated twice a day. If a member is not present or current in that table, it will check the Civi-CRM system for current membership information (a much slower query), but that source wouldn’t have updated address information.
From what I’ve seen when entering renewals if there is missing information (usually it’s birth date), then those fields appear giving you a chance to get updated information in. Perhaps that’s what happened here. Though I’ve never seen those extra fields with anything in them, so I don’t know.
Yeah, “authorized” isn’t right; it’s “authenticated,” as in I have to log in with credentials to process the renewal. That’s the audit trail I mention is the minimum protection.
I don't recall this happening either.
When I submit renewals for memberships which have lapsed a number of years, the program usually assumes that the last address on file must still be correct.
Authorized means the person purchasing the membership has authorized the person entering the information to have access to (existing) membership information. This authorization might be implicit in the task, not explicitly requested and granted.
Authenticated means US Chess’s membership system thinks the person entering the information is who he/she says he/she is.
Just because the TD is authenticated, that doesn’t mean the TD has been authorized to have access to a member’s private data, much less to that information for all members.
Now the Membership Batch Processing program now seems to have reverted to requiring addresses for renewals as well. Instead of defaulting to the US, you must also specify the country (which is a new feature).
You have to submit the ID and email information (and sometimes the phone number) in the first pass (there’s usually nothing else requested by the program). When you submit that and then try to proceed to payment, the program will fail every time and go back to the original input screen, but this time it will also ask for the birthdate, gender and address.
I’ve been submitting memberships one at a time, because when I try to submit more than that, the program will re-flag errors in previous members which appeared to have been fixed in the second pass on that membership.
I wonder if anyone else has experienced similar problems?