I submitted two memberships for two new players at around 5pm Pacific time on Thursday for the tournament I am helping out with this weekend. When you search for them, it finds them but when you click on their name, it doesn’t bring up their MSA page. Will the tournament still be able to be rated or is this going to cause an error?
This looks to be a different issue.
Based on the past, Micah has probably already reported it to the office (the people who can actually do something).
Same issue. Mr. Nolan said that it took some time to sync the membership data to all the places.
Alex Relyea
It appears there was an update affecting thousands of members recently and the resync with MSA may still in catch-up mode, although I do see updates occurring every few minutes, as I would have expected to see.
As noted elsewhere, if the validation report says the tournament is OK to submit, you can submit it, but that doesn’t help people trying to look up things on MSA.
I ran a check on what records in the ratings server database are not in the MSA database and have forwarded it to staff for review and possible forwarding to our development team.
Yes, I reported it to the office early Friday morning. I was hoping to get a response on Friday but didn’t. As I write this, the issue is still present.
I also sent a detailed note to the office staff, it looked to me like updates from the membership database are still occurring but there may have been a gap involving around 3 dozen records around the end of August. If that’s a developer issue, it usually takes several days to get it reported, diagnosed, budgeted and scheduled.
Now the MSA page displays for one of the players but not the other.
Were you able to get your tournament rated?
Alex Relyea
I’m not the one submitting it for rating.
Memberships that aren’t on MSA but are in the primary membership database should also be in the ratings database and thus should not affect the ability to submit these events for rating or to rate these events.
There seems to be something causing periodic gaps in updating MSA, it may be some kind of recurring failure with the log-and-update process that is used to keep MSA in sync. I’ve sent detailed information (with timestamps) on to Boyd for forwarding to our developers.
Mike, your quick responses and help in this thread is much appreciated, thank you.
The tournament was able to be rated, uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?202209055782.0, but shows “[Error-unknown]” for the player whose MSA page doesn’t work (the top player in the U1400 section).
Keeping multiple databases in sync is an ongoing challenge. Addressing that will be one of the biggest issues in designing a rewrite of the tournament/ratings subsystems. (Performance is another, and one I’m quite concerned about.)
I noticed another issue with a membership I submitted for this tournament. This players updated expiration date is still not showing on his MSA page, uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?16488212. I don’t have the time or inclination to look at the rest of the memberships I submitted for this tournament but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are issues with some of the other memberships.
The thin client tends to be more up-to-date than the MSA:
The live membership data is in the Civi-CRM system, which uses MySQL. The thin client draws its data from the memmast table in the PostgreSQL database on Gambit, which gets a full update from Civi-CRM twice a day, at around 4AM and again around 6:30PM. MSA’s data comes from the MbrMain table in the MySQL database at AWS, which is updated from the Civi-CRM database using a log-and-update process that runs every five minutes but appears to have some gaps in it, I suspect there’s a data leak somewhere. (That’s the problem with using log files, they can be incomplete.)
The tournament validation program also checks a foreign data wrapper that connects to the Civi-CRM system if a membership isn’t present or valid in the memmast table, so it has access to live membership data, but the thin clients haven’t been updated to do that.
On onlineregistration.cc, when you register for an event, the US Chess membership expiration date listed for players is based on the information in the last US Chess rating supplement. If a player has renewed their membership after the creation of the latest US Chess rating supplement, there is a button they can click on to have the system look online and update their US Chess membership expiration date. If you do this for the player I cited, it lists his expiration date as “2022-09-30” instead of his current expiration date of “2024-09-30” so it must get the data from a players MSA page since his MSA page still lists his old expiration date of “2022-09-30”.
They may be using Al Losoff’s thin client (I can’t imagine scraping the expiration date out of the MSA page) which is still showing the old expiration date. The official US Chess thin client used to be “too” thin, which is why Al put together his own database; which now may not be as up-to-date as it used to be. WinTD switched to using the US Chess version (for the US Chess—Update from Web Site operation) about two years ago.
Based on server activity, there seems to be a lot of web-scraping going on.
The downside of third party data sites is that their data may not be either current or accurate.
There isn’t currently a good thin client. It would be nice if there was something that reads from the Civi-CRM data that gives enough information to be useful. I face the same problem with my site. It’s hard to get good accurate up to date information. Scraping off the main player lookup page is pretty much a no go. It’s often painfully slow and doesn’t provide enough information anyway.