As of this morning, MSA now shows the ‘Current Published Rating’ for all players. If a player will also be in the April supplement, that ratings information is now shown in a separate column, labeled ‘Published Rating Effective on 2005-04-01’;
I have also added the following note to the top of the ‘general’ tab:
On the “Member Search List” results page, it gives the April rating. If USCF is encouraging use of the current list instead of the upcoming one, it should probably have the February rating instead.
And let me congratulate you on the whole new system! It’s very very nice to see the results from a tournament I played in last weekend in MSA already.
-ed g.
Good point, I’ll look at that this afternoon.
BTW, it isn’t a case of ‘encouraging’ TDs to use the current published rating, THAT’S WHAT THE RULEBOOK STATES THEY SHOULD DO UNLESS THEY HAVE ANNOUNCED OTHERWISE!
On the other hand, it certainly does no harm to encourage TDs to do what they are supposed to be doing!
Bill Smythe
The members search list now also shows the current published rating rather than the April supplement.
This is an excellent change.
It might be even a wee bit more excellent with the following column headings:
“Current Published Rating (until 2005-04-01)”
and
“Published Rating Beginning 2005-04-01”.
Here you could say:
“Tournament directors should use Current Published Rating for tournaments held before 2005-04-01, unless otherwise announced in all pre-tournament publicity. For unofficial” etc.
Bill Smythe
Your way requires much more programming.
One thing I’ve learned many times is that there is no unambiguous way to write anything.
Your suggestion would like raise the question, “If we aren’t supposed to use the current published rating after April 1st, what are we supposed to use?”
A specific date, instead of fixed text, would have to be included in three places (both headings and the note at the bottom) instead of one (one of the headings). If this is “much more programming”, I’ll have to take your word for it.
The answer, of course, is “You’re supposed to use the rating in the ‘Published Rating Beginning 2005-04-01’ column.”
Bill Smythe
Is there any way to do a search of MSA when you know the player joined the USCF (cashed check # 1904 for $17 written 12/23) but who lost his card? It isn’t under his correct name (Ryan Mc Keown, PA, unr), but presumably under some minor mispelling. I’ve tried every misspelling that I can think of, but I’m sure there are many more. I have address, birthdate, phone number, and email if any of those would help with the search.
Try ID# 13086363 (MC KEOUN, RYAN P)
I happen to have a co-employee of the same last name and I almost always mispelled her last name with “U” instead of “W”.
One of the lesser known features of the membership module in the TD/Affiliate Support Area is the ‘lookup’ feature.
Intended to help you find IDs for renewing members who don’t know their USCF ID, it can actually be used to find IDs for anyone.
Put in what you have: name, address, birthdate and it’ll try to find IDs that match some or all of that information. It uses the same algorithm we use to try to identify duplicate IDs. (Grant Perks wrote me last week that he put in a batch of 35 players that he was assured were all 1st time USCF members, it found 4 obvious matches and one more that he wasn’t sure of.)
Tryit and see if it finds your player.
(Don’t try searching for Michael Smith, though, we have nearly 150 of them in our database.)
Thanks. That’s him. Now I get to submit the last section of our state scholastics and try out the spelling correction abilities of the TD/Support Area.
Sometimes a partial-name search will work. In this case you could have tried “McK” or “McKe” or “McKeo”. If, however, you enter only a partial last name, you should omit the first name entirely.
Bill Smythe