How much practice can I do on submitting rating reports and processing new memberships? I don’t want to do something that will cause bad data, so I haven’t explored it much. Can I go through a whole process of a fake tournament and then delete it before it is finalized without any adverse impact?
I looked at the FAQ’s, but most of them deal with login issues. (There is one that talks about uploading DBF files or editing online, but it wasn’t clear if I would be affecting things by practicing.)
Also, I’ll assume that the DBF files are generated by Win TD or Swiss Sys (which I don’t have). Is there any software that I can download from USCF for preparing rating reports?
(Sorry if this post is dealing with things that everyone else thinks is 'Obvious")
Until you submit a membership batch or a rating report for processing, which is the point at which you pay for it, nothing happens: No IDs are assigned, no ratings are posted, etc.
So, you can play with them to your hearts content. All we ask is that you delete your test batches and events. Otherwise we’ll start sending you weekly nag notes about them.
In fact, we strongly encourage people new to the area to try uploading a test event or two before doing one when the ‘clock is running’.
You can also upload events before they’re complete and use the validation process to check all the memberships before the event ends, while you still have time to collect memberships from your players.
When I first starting out, I did a number of practice tournaments. Made sure the practice tournaments were called ‘TESTS’ so I know what was the real events and the practice events. The practice tournaments did give me a number of ideas for match events! Some of the ideas even Nolan had to change the system.
