There are no tournaments which were rated on Saturday February 3rd displayed on MSA. Is this due to the preparation of the March rating supplement?
I was looking for one specific event which ended Saturday for which I received a confirmation as having been submitted for rating:
Charge has been approved
February 3, 2007 18:05:42
Crosstable for 20TH ANNUAL SUPER SATURDAY IN NY!
USCF Event ID: 200702034431
The rerate for the March list didn’t finish until around 11PM Saturday.
(Someone submitted an event on Friday from December 2004, so we had to rerate all of 2005 and 2006.)
We started rating new events again this morning, the next crosstable update pass should include your event.
It may be time to start placing some limits on how far back TDs can submit events online without office approval. Any suggestions as to what is a reasonable limit?
The problem is that the expectations of the level of service here have raised so high. Yesterday I discovered they had new wireless capability at the museum where we hold most of our tournaments. So during the fourth round of our 58 player scholastic I entered all the new memberships and the renewals. Then as they were handing out awards I submitted the tournament at 2:30 in the afternoon.
I fully expected to see it on the MSA by 4:00 at the latest. It didn’t make it until just now a little after 11am on Sunday.
tch tch tch 
The next set of changes to the ratings programming should give us the ability to continue rating new events while working on a rating supplement. They wont be included in that supplement, of course. (I’m still trying to work out how to deal with changes. Currently the office is told not to make any changes for events more than a few months back during the last day or two ahead of a rating list cutoff date.)
I wonder what the TDCC's position is on TD's asserting "carte blance" (presumably no sanction or penalty was applied, so the TD just does as he wishes) to submit events whenever they feel like it (e.g., two years late)?
Our official position is still the same as it was before the advent of on-line submissions; i.e., a TD has two weeks to send in the event. Enforcement is problimatical. No one gets suspended as a TD for violating this policy one time, they should get a polite warning (I am not sure what procedures the office uses to send out that warning). If the policy gets violated often by the same TD, then a TD suspension is considered.
Tim Just
TDCC Chair
Maybe we should ask the ratings committee… It seems to me that most players with games played after an event two years old would get little change from the rerate.
How about this for a proposal?
This can also be applied to corrections.
I assume regular players are going to be on the case of TDs who have not submitted after a few weeks nowadays, and escalate to the USCF or others (maybe without much effect, but this is where we have to work on enforcement once notified).
As far as enforcement is concerned, any TD submitting an event more than 6 months late should be stripped of their certification. The USCF should be able to rate the event (per the above proposal) if two or more players provide reasonable verifiable evidence supporting a crosstable submitted by someone other than the TD.
The TD suspension idea sounds good. I am not clear as to how anyone would get their hands on a crosstable to make a submission.
Tim
The interval between freezing and unfreezing should be just a few seconds (the time it takes to copy a few files). So, nobody would notice that ratings have stopped being calculated.
That should take care of both rating new events and making changes (such as re-rates) from previous events.
Bill Smythe
I don’t think your procedure would work, Bill. These aren’t flat files, they’re tables in a relational database, which is used for many different things at the same time, such as handling memberships and tournament registrations, validating tournaments that aren’t ready to be submitted for rating yet, responding to queries for custom ratings lists, updating the MSA, etc.
Making a complete copy of the database would involve copying 20 gigabytes of database files. Copying just the crosstable records is a couple of gigabytes, and then you’d have to copy everything that changed back to the ‘live’ database again.
Isn’t there a good chance that the td who actually is submitting the report is the good guy - cleaning up a mess that somebody else caused when they didn’t send the report in a timely manner. It seems more likely to me that it will be the affiliate who is the one at fault - though again not necessarily.
That is the real challange; i.e., getting at the truth of who is guilty of what. And making sure that we don’t violate anyone’s real world legal rights!?
Tim
That’s why I think the easiest procedure might be to require that any event older than some threshhold (6 months sounds about right) has to have office approval before it can be submitted online.
That approval would require an explanation of why the event is tardy.
It could be difficult to pin the blame on late submissions.
Just have a penalty (which will benefit the USCF) by having a larger rating fee if an event is submitted beyond a certain date. Ex: Double if more than 6 months old, Triple if more than a year, Quadruple if more than 2 years.
Wouldn’t that encourage the scofflaw to, um, never submit the late report at all?
The participants would not be very happy if the event never got rated.
Or even lie about when the event was held?
My guess is that if an event was submitted with an ending date 2 years different from the actual ending date, we’d hear about it in short order.
It’s a rare day when the USCF doesn’t receive at least one email from a player (or the player’s parents) pointing out an error in his or her latest event on MSA.
Agreed.
Start penalizing the late submitters by charging more to rate their tourneys!
Jon, that really doesn’t provide a lot of incentives for TDs who are already behind in their paperwork.
Moreover, the number of really late events is fairly small. Nearly 8000 events held in 2006 or 2007 have been received and rated. Of those, only 47 were received more than 90 days after they ended.
2/3 of events sent to the USCF office are received within two weeks of when they ended. 2/3 of events submitted online are submitted within 2 days of when they ended.