I would appreciate feedback from anyone who is using third party event registration for their chess events. My affiliate is starting to dip their toe into that water and are having mixed experiences. I am aware of onlineregistration.cc (used by CCA and others) and also events4chess in Arizona. I would appreciate feedback about either or those sites, information about others, and any pitfalls or words or wisdom with respect to using third party registration sites.
On a somewhat related topic, part of me wishes that US Chess offered the service. Something where I can submit an online TLA, provide a link, players click on the link and come to the US Chess website, register for the event (and buy memberships or get membership ID numbers if needed), the online registrations can be downloaded into my pairing software (which could even perhaps be incorporated into the process), and I then submit the rating report afterwards? The entry fees either go into my account and/or US Chess settles up with me afterwards. They can of course take a reasonable fee. I’m sure this is harder than it looks, but is this a realistic option? I would hope this kind of functionality would lead to more tournaments overall and especially more US Chess rated events. I will post separately on JTP, but one important aspect of such a system would be the ability of the software to create membership IDs for new JTP players rather than having the TDs do it “manually” in the TD/A site.
The third-party registration system that has just come into use by Kevin Bachler at cavemanchess.com seems really nice. I think it may be an improved version of the one Sevan Muradian has used. (Both of them come out of Kansas City, I think.) It lets you see who is already registered, then enter your data, pay through PayPal, and bingo – your name is instantly added to the registration list. It looks up your ID on the USCF website and everything.
My system (http://www.reg4chess.com) is still not completely finished, but TDs in 3 states are using it regularly to do registration for tournaments, camps, and clubs.
My experience is that these registration systems work fine, except for any event that requires a team code. Since my experience is limited I was wondering if anyone else had that observation?
onlineregistration.cc can generate team codes. One problem is that, for a scholastic tournament, all the players on a team have to enter the name of the school and the name of the town/city exactly the same way or the website will consider them to be on different teams and generate different team codes for them. There is a page where the TD can merge teams together. Also, onlineregistration.cc generates SwissSys files, not WinTD.
I believe Jen Ogle’s system can work with team codes, although I haven’t tested that yet. Bill Smythe’s reference to the system I am using is Jen’s system. She has posted in this thread.
I have incorporated a School/Team editor, so TDs can create a list of teams with codes that players can pick from in a dropdown. Players can select Other and enter a school that’s not in the list, which the TD can add to their database later.
I also have a functioning Tennessee-style team registration system, that lets coaches pay for a team to register, then add up to 4 players and 2 alternates to a team. We’ve used that for TN regional and state scholastics the last 3 years.
Another option would be to allow the TD to enter either the team code or the full team name, and in either case to auto-complete and ultimately display both, such as “UTNRR – University of Tennessee at Nashville Romping Rooks”, when the Enter key is pressed.
If there’s any problem you haven’t solved yet, I’m sure you soon will. From the listings under Ogle in player-rating lookup, and from what I’ve seen of your software from the standpoint of using it to enter a tournament, I’d say you are a super-chess-mom / player / TD / organizer / coach / really-great-software-developer, and I’m sure I’ve left out a few things.
USCF has been known to adopt software written by individual USCF members, and make it available online. The rating estimator is a good example. With any luck they’ll be knocking on your door soon.
I generate a PayPal button that asks for USCF ID(s) in addition to a payment drop down menu.
From there, I manually enter into SwissSys. The process meets my needs, but I salute efforts to further automate. The positive things I have heard about Ms. Ogle’s system here make me want to check it out.
If an organizer is serious about customer service, s/he must find a way to at least accept online payments. The market demands it, and will pay a few dollars more to take advantage of it. The mechanics of registration from there are transparent to the player, and are more of concern to organizers and TDs.
Many people are happy with just a PayPal button, and for small tournaments that is fine, but data entry is time-consuming, plus it can be a source of errors. My system exports data to WinTD import files so I don’t have to do ANY double data entry to run my tournaments. The last tournament I ran (about 3 weeks ago) had 123 players in 8 sections, with only about 10 mail-ins and a dozen walk-ins. My system allows me to register players manually by first searching to see if I have their data from a prior event, and auto-copying it into the current event. So it still saves time with the data entry, except for brand-new players. I entered the mail-ins to my system as I received them, and walk-ins the day of the event, then exported the list to WinTD and was ready to pair.
BTW, I don’t have a copy of SwissSys, but if anyone has the import file formats for SwissSys and can send them to me, I’ll add that capability to my system.
Thanks to everybody. I especially look forward to learning more about Jen’s system.
Online.cc does support a download into WinTD (as well as SwissSys, although that process seems to me to be unnecessarily hard) and it does have team functionality, although that is again more difficult to manage than I would like.