How often is the tournament listing updated? I just took a peek and saw November events listed and a “last update” of November 29. And I haven’t found the tool we used to have where we could do a tournament search. I realize this area isn’t heavily used, though I happen to like it. If it runs a month behind, it never will become popular.
The page of upcoming tournaments lists information from two sources: first, the Chess Life TLA, which are handled by USCF staff and were last updated on the indicated date (usually monthly, based on Chess Life, plus an occasional change in between issues); and second, the events entered directly by affiliates online, which can be entered any time, are always current, and which do not end up in the Chess Life TLAs unless submitted to the office seperately, too.
Using Pennsylvania as an example, you can scroll down to where it the following statements show where data from the first source ends, and data from the second source begins.
Because the tool that searched only the much smaller (and for many states, almost barren) online system doesn’t search the Chess Life TLAs, it produces results that omit most events meeting the search criteria. We were not in a position to integrate the search, so we dropped the form, and did our best to make sure the output of both systems could be found reliably.
Integration needs to happen upstream from where the web site gets the data now. That’s a separate project, and I don’t know what plans are for that at the current time.
Thanks for your feedback, Hal.
I found it interesting that the page now shows it was updated on December 20, considering that I posted on December 25, at which time it showed the November date. Was the update made on the 20th but not visible until today?
Was that for the same state search or for a different one, as they could have different file dates?
Also, I suspect Hal’s module uses the file timestamp, and the file could well have been generated by the publications department on the 20th but not uploaded to the website until today, since the USCF office was closed Dec 22nd through the 25th.
Hal sent me a PM asking the same question. You are both right on target. Yesterday I looked at national events, which were updated. The state I looked at before has not been. Being web-site challenged, I didn’t realize that each page within that section had its own “last updated” record. Thanks, Mike and Hal.