Shame on me if I haven’t been paying attention, BUT, I just noticed something, and I hope I can explain this in a comprehend-able manner…
On the old web site (i.e., the most recent past format of the site), if you were looking for a tournament, you could either go directly to tournament search and enter parameters (which yielded Chess Life TLAs and online TLAs) OR go to the state listings, which had the Chess Life TLAs.
On the new site you can’t get directly to the tournament search. On line TLAs are only accessible at the bottom of the page for each individual state. So, if someone’s looking for tournaments in Illinois in September, they wouldn’t necessarily see that my club was running one on 9/29, because it was at the bottom of the page instead of in with the September listings.
I can’t find the tournament search from the regular USCF web site.
We run small, extremely low cost ($5 entry fee, no prizes) community-based, USCF-rated tournaments. At this point, we plan about two months out, and that’s not far enough in advance to do print TLAs. You are putting us at a huge disadvantage if people can’t easily find our tournaments on line.
Is there a justification for doing it this way? Or might you be able to fix the state listings so they include BOTH online and print TLAs sequentially by month? Or at least put the full tournament search up front on the web site, where players can easily find and use it?
Currently the TLAs that appear in Chess Life in the coded format used in the magazine are in a set of text files generated by the office each month and the TLAs entered through the online form in the TD/Affiliate Support Area are in a separate database, which is why the “Upcoming Tourneys” page shows them separately. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s also temporary.
We’re working on merging the two TLA repositories into one unified database, which Joan has been updating since some time this summer. In fact, one of the things I’m checking on today is how well the TLAs scheduled to be in the November issue match up with the entries in that unified database.
The next phase of this project will be to have an ‘organizer’ interface into this new TLA tracking system, so that organizers can enter, check and pay for their TLAs online. This may be ready later this month but more likely will become available in November as part of the moved/updated TD/Affiliate Support Area. In this new version of the online TLA entry system, organizers should be able to cut and paste in a ‘formatted’ TLA (ie from a Word document) for their complex events, there will still be a ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ form for simpler events (probably limited to events with no more than 2 or 3 sections.)
You can still get to the Online TLA search page, uschess.org/tlas.
The search page will need to be rewritten a bit because we’re probably going to have to simplify the searching capabilities, since it’s not clear we will be able to extract all the search terms we’ve been using from a ‘formatted’ TLA. Whether we will be able to take a ‘formatted’ TLA and turn it into some kind of flyer is also up in the air.
The rewrite should also make it more easily reachable from the home page.
We will “stay tuned for NEW AND IMPROVED.” Sounds good.
In the meantime, would it be possible to put the above link to the online TLA Search in that “Clubs & Tourneys” submenu on the left side of the home page? Like, underneath “Upcoming Tourneys” have “Tourney Search” that is connected to the above link?
I think that’s a question for the website team headed by Bogner.
BTW, here are the results of my comparisons between the TLA Tracking System and the proof pages for the November issue:
I found 4 TLAs that were in the proof pages but not in the tracking system (or maybe are there but were not coded to appear in the November issue), one that was missing a ‘tag’ entry (ie, an entry that refers you to the full TLA under another section or state), a couple that looked like other types of mis-codings, and some that were sorted in a slightly different order than the order they appear in the proof pages, probably due to an error on my part.
Not a bad first run, if you ask me. I’m encouraged enough to start working on seeing if I can extract enough detail from the tracking system data to put all those TLAs in the current Online TLA Search Service.