A friend of mine keeps trying to submit results of a tournament he directed via the online tournament report form, but the system has whammied him. The problem is one I dealt with two years ago; in that case I just deleted the event ID and started over—which is what my friend will do here, if no one can help us.
Here’s the deal: There is no way to change the “end date” for the tournament—not the section, but the overall event—once it has been saved. In this case, the tournament had one section and ran for four weeks, Oct. 3 through Oct. 24.
Those dates were correctly entered in the Section field, but for some reason the end date of the overall event was listed as Oct. 3—making it look like a one-day event rather than a one-game per week club tournament. Meantime, the system will not accept the event for submittal until the end date is fixed—which the system will not allow. It’s almost funny.
There seems to be no way to change the end date for the overall event. The box is grayed out and nothing can be done to change that; I tried pretty hard. We could change the end date of the Section to match the incorrect end date of the event, but that is clearly a bad option: apart from simply not being accurate, it could affect ratings for active players.
Thus, it looks like we will need to re-do the whole report form from scratch, unless someone has a better idea. This is pretty annoying…and I hope it gets fixed in the new form, due for beta any day now.
It always helps to start by checking the Frequent Questions document:
PS. The new online rating report data entry form uses a different data structure, and it will be possible to change the event ending date before the event is rated. (Doing this will still change the 12 digit event ID, of course.)
However, once the event is rated, the only way to change the event ending date is to delete that event and resubmit it with the correct ending date.
But…I looked long and hard for a way to fix this problem, including forum archives and online searches. I have much experience with the online TRF and cyber-sleuthing in general.
It never occurred to me to log out of the tournament report edit field, go back to the general TD/A page and surf through the FAQ. Perhaps I am weird, but that does not seem at all intuitive to me.
Going forward, it might be well to bear in mind that it is a Good Thing to offer guidance in potentially confusing areas on the relevant page the person will be working on at that time. See Mr. Hammond’s excellent suggestion to include notice that time controls must be entered in minutes, not hours, on the new improved form…as in ON THE FORM, as opposed to in a FAQ on a generic TD/A page.