New TD/Affiliate Support Area Feature

I’ve added a new feature to the TD/Affiliate Support Area, actually two related features.

TDs will now get a list of all their pending and recently rated events. It will be at the bottom of the screen that they use to upload a rating report.

This will show all (recent) events which have that TD as the chief TD.

Affiliates will see a new menu item, ‘Tournament Status Report for this Affiliate’. It will show all (recent) events which have been submitted using that affiliate ID.

In both cases, it will be possible to display the latest validation report for the event, which gives TDs and affiliates a way to check on the status of all their events, even those that were mailed to the USCF.

Here’s another new feature for the TD/Affiliate Support Area, the ability to order a copy of the crosstable for an event and receive it via e-mail. (It will be sent to the e-mail address we have on file for you and use for other e-mail from the TD/Affiliate Support Area.)

TDs can now order copies of crosstables for all events that they have served as the chief TD.

Affiliates can now order copies of crosstables for all events rated under that affiliate ID.

State Chapters can now order crosstables of all events held in the state in the last six months (plus, of course, all events rated under the state chapter’s Affiliate ID.)

Mike,

I tried to use the new “Request a crosstable for a rated tournament” feature and have received nothing. I tried one on Wednesday and 2 this morning. I am still receiving Tournament Checking e-mails.

Also, it would be nice to be able to select several tournaments at once and receive them in single e-mail. I used to receive crosstable e-mails from Traci for Michigan tournaments to put in our state magazine. Our state affiliate e-mails go to our president and I don’t want to have to burden him with downloading lots of crosstables for me. Is there a way to put in a second e-mail address for an affiliate?

Thanks,
Jeff

OK, problem fixed with not mailing crosstables out.

As to multiple e-mail addresses, I’ll see what I can do, but that won’t happen until next week at earliest. I’m at Supernationals until Monday.

I don’t know about multiple events in a single e-mail, browsers don’t support multiple selects on pulldowns consistently, that might introduce yet another browser-dependency issue.

Thanks. I now receive the crosstables requested. Personally, the other items are not a big rush as I just submitted the next issue of our magazine to the printer yesterday. I could probably have our president temporarily change the e-mail address while I download the crosstables, but multiple or directed e-mails would be a nice to have.

I don’t mean to be a pest, but there are a couple of items on these crosstables that I noticed. Add these items to your list and make the updates when you have time.

  1. The crosstables appear to be coming in original crosstable order. I would prefer to see them in score order, same as they are now on MSA.
  2. Unrated players are listed with a pre-rating including “/00”. This pre-rating appears to be a value based on age. These should probably be displayed as zero or unrated for these crosstables.

Thanks again. I appreciate every little piece of progress that you have been putting out there.

OK, I’ll put those on the work list, but I don’t think I’ll have much time to work on those until next week.

Any chance of getting the e-mail crosstables to sort in score order within the next 3-4 weeks. I use these to publish crosstables in our state magazine.

Thanks,
Jeff

Why are you limiting this to the chief TD? Why not allow anyone to order any crosstable? It’s not as if the information were secret; anybody who really wants to can copy and paste the crosstable from the MSA.

Two reasons, John. One is limited development time, a long list of ‘gotta haves’ and a longer list of ‘wants’; the other is to keep it from being used as a mailbomber.

If I change MSA so that people can order crosstables by e-mail sent to any address, someone could produce a web bot that sends you 1000 crosstables and fill up your mailbox, so it would need some kind of rate-limiting feature based on the recipient’s e-mail address. I think that’ll happen, eventually, probably as part of a thorough rewrite of MSA.

As long as it’s done within the context of TD/A, I could safely open it up to any crosstable, since it’s under login/password control and the crosstables would be sent to the e-mail address we have on file for you in USCF records.

But then I need to either have you type in the 12 digit event ID or include some kind of search engine to help you find that ID. The former is kind of a kludge, the latter takes some programming time.

As to the crosstable sorting fix, I’m getting ready to launch into the next major module, which is a complete rewrite of the online store for memberships and tournament registration. Usually when I get into a major task like that I tend to find little side tasks to do as a change of pace, so I may see about throwing the sort code into the crosstable output program during one of those breaks.

(A writer once wrote that her house was never as clean as when she had a deadline to meet, I think psychologists call it ‘avoidance therapy’.)

I grant the development-time problem. You would have to set it up to use a name (or partial) instead of the ID, and you would soon get demands for searches by date, state and so forth. The other objection seems kind of thin, since there are plenty of other ways to do that sort of thing already. Sort of like locking up your cutlery so the gang down the street won’t steal the knives to supplement their AK-47s.

One suggestion: If the crosstables were formatted with tab separations (as are the “custom rating lists”), they could be easily pasted into a spreadsheet and resorted by final score.

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That doesn’t alter the pairing numbers, which means that when it says you played player ‘2’ you’ll have to search the entire crosstable to find that pairing #. Think about doing that for the Amateur Team East!

True, but you could delete the individual results if all you wanted was the players in finish order. (There are some shortcuts possible, but I doubt they would be worth the trouble.) Apparently what the people asking for this want is the convenience of pairing software without having to install or use it. I’m not terribly sympathetic, but I suppose if there is enough demand for it someone will eventually supply such a service.

Mike,

I tried to change the e-mail address for our state affiliate so I can download crosstables from MI. I received no e-mail confirmation and our president’s e-mail is listed in the TD/A area. I also tried to change the one for my local club affiliate and that did not change either.

Thanks,
Jeff

If your state chapter has not already signed up for access to TD/A, I recommend someone listed as an officer do so.

Once you have access you can update the officer list, mailing and e-mail addresses, club directory information, etc.

Alternatively, an officer could call the USCF office and have them update
the e-mail address for the affiliate.

Yes, our state affiliate already has access.

I logged on to TD/A using MCA’s affiliate ID and tried to change the e-mail address. It is not working.

I made some changes to the USCF’s e-mail servers over the weekend, looks like those request weren’t getting serviced as a result. Fixed now, it should be caught up within an hour or so.

Thanks, the e-mail address change has been made.