Could it be something to do with one of the players’ 8-digit U.S. Chess ID numbers, maybe? In the case of an affiliate, the first “digit” would be the letter A rather than a digit.
Then again, an affiliate should not be “playing in” the tournament.to begin with, so that’s probably not it.
Did you also play in the tournament yourself? If so, you probably have both a personal 8-digit membership number, and an affiliate number beginning with the letter A followed by 7 digits. You should use your 8-digit number to identify yourself as a player, but the affiliate number to identify yourself as the sponsoring affiliate.
Or, most likely, all of this is nonsense and isn’t really what’s happening. Maybe somebody else on this forum can be more helpful to you…
The options offered when you go go the ‘participant coding’ field are:
non-scholastic, scholastic, JTP Primary and JTP K-12. (The last option will only be offered if the affiliate is a scholastic affiliate, one that begins with the letter H.)
Since an adult event will often have younger players in it, we chose to define events as ‘scholastic’ and ‘non-scholastic’, because some people objected to calling them ‘adult’ events, though the ‘A’ coding remains.
We get frequent questions asking how many ‘scholastic’ or ‘adult’ events we rate. (Potential donors or grant administrators often want to know things like this.) We’re not there, so we can’t really say what the intent was. So, we added a field for the TD to report the type of event, then we take a guess as to what it was based on the participants.
The underlying question is this: Suppose you run an event with 50 kids in it and one or two parents fill in for a game to keep from giving kids a bye. Is this an ‘adult’ or ‘non-scholastic’ event? I don’t think so.
But suppose you run quads and one section just happens to have 4 kids in it. Now, is THAT a ‘scholastic’ event, even though the other quads have a mix of adults and kids?
(Note, in a JTP event, which is exempt from membership requirements, adult house players are NOT allowed.)
It’s a legacy from the original coding of adult/scholastic. (People objected to calling events that can have kids in them but aren’t intended as scholastic events an ‘adult’ event.) Think of it as ‘any’, I guess. :sigh:
I don’t keep up with what programming has been done, what will be done, when it was done, etc, but it would be nice if, when there are selections, a list is available like the question about a TLA. The submission form becomes easier to use with practice but the first (and second, third?) time, or late at night, or some other time with distractions, it can be confusing.
When we get started on the new interface, which should happen soon, a lot of things are likely to change. There could be fields we currently ask for that get dropped and new ones added, and the validation process will certainly be affected. Personally I’d like to see a newer upload format created, one that deals with issues the current one doesn’t, but I don’t know if that will happen.
There are two variants of this message, one is a missing code warning (which should not happen) and the other is an alert as to the best guess as to the proper coding, which does not require action. (But we do suggest TDs look at the alerts in their validation reports to see if any of them might warrant revisions.)
Alaska, did you click the button to validate it? If it gets successfully validated then you can submit it for processing. Then select it for payment. And finally pay for it.
When I work for another affiliate I will often do the validation and submission for processing. Then the affiliate can select it for payment and pay for it from their funds (not from mine).
Player names are the province of the membership module, not the tournament module. Or are you referring to non-Latin characters in event names? That’s largely a database issue.
I know I’ve hit issues with non-ASCII (I’m pretty sure I was still in Latin-1, although I’d have to look it up) characters in event names, but I would think it would also be an issue for player names in each of the TD / TH / TSEXPORT.DBF files unless those are ignored in favor of the names looked up by USCF id number?
I don’t honestly know if the DBF format support non-ASCII characters. I’d think it unlikely, given how old that format is.
The player name fields in the DBF files aren’t used much, they may show up in some error messages dealing with potential ID issues. (There weren’t player name fields in the original upload format, created in 1991, they were added in the draft format created about 20 years ago, but without really thinking through what we’d do with that information.)
