Mike,
When an event gets rerated, apparently the tournament ID# changes (or at least the #used in the url for MSA) and this leads to bunches of broken links on websites that have linked to MSA’s crosstables. For instance, I have about 20 or more archived crosstables (older events) on my website where the link takes me to MSA which gives me the following error:
Is there a fix possible for this? Why does the tournament ID need to change?
Terry
OK, I see that if I enter 20 at the front, and place a 0 at the end (if it’s not already there) in the url, I get the crosstable. So, we are renumbering them to, for instance, 2004###0 instead of 04#####)?
Wonderful news 
I checked my web site and half the USCF crosstable links are busted. I thought that linking to the USCF crosstables was more appropriate than just grabbing the information and dumping it into an html table. Who woulda thunk that rerating an event actually made it a different event?
Wasn’t too difficult for me to fix. The rerating renumbers the url to a 12 digit number, beginning with the full year, i.e. 2003 and then ends with a 0 (whether or not the original ended with 0).
For instance, one of my events was renumbered to: uschess.org/msa/XtblMain.php?200307198700
Originally, the ID was: ?030719870 (a 9 digit number following the [?]), so I just inserted 20 at the beginning and a 0 at the end in each of my links - was pretty quick. Thankfully, I didn’t have that many to renumber!
I’m guessing that adding at a 0 at the end allows 9999 events to be rated per day, instead of 999, and that adding the 20 at the beginning allows events to be sorted by date even when some of them occurred before the year 2000.
Maybe it would be a good idea to do a one-time sweep, changing ALL event numbers to 12 digits, whether they are re-rated or not.
Bill Smythe
I did a complete reload of all events some weeks ago, they now all have 12 digit IDs.
In addition to changing the date portion from 6 digits to 8 digits to accomodate the century, the 12th digit currently represents the source of the event:
0 - Event was from the old rating system, ie, one initially rated prior to February of 2005.
1 - Event is from the new rating system
2-9 - Event is a transition event (one entered under the old rating system but rated under the new rating system)
The 12th digit also gives us the ability to accomodate more than 999 events ending on the same date.
Static links to dynamically generated pages on 3rd party sites are in general a bad idea, because I cannot guarantee that we won’t change how MSA works in some form that would break alll your links again.
serious question from a newbie: so is there a better way i.e is there some kind of dynamic link i should be investigating?
Short answer: No.
The problem is that you cannot generate a dynamic link, you can only generate a static one, then check it against the other site periodically so that continues to match whatever is happening on the dynamic site. (That’s how the best of the search sites keep themselves up-to-date.)
Suppose, for example, that you put up a site that has links to all of your tournaments. If we change an event that has your ID in it by mistake or that SHOULD have had your ID, you would have to correct your links. But you wouldn’t know to do that unless you checked all your links and also checked for new ones, would you?
Similarly, suppose you have a link to an event that is subsequently deleted, perhaps because it was a duplicate of another event.
Your link is now no good.
For the most part, I don’t expect to have to change the USCF ID again, so links to those should continue to work; I would also expect any rewrite of MSA to continue to use the ‘GET’ method so that shouldn’t break your links, either.
But if we were to change the program names in a rewrite, that would break all of those links.
Depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If what you want is the crosstable with results, copy and paste it into a new HTML file and stick it somewhere on your web page. If you want to display the “dynamically updated” ratings after every rerate – well, as Mike pointed out, you can’t.
A point that many posters don’t seem to grasp is that single-digit “unofficial” rating changes are completely insignificant – they have zero predictive value, and hardly anyone uses them for pairing purposes. Better than 95% of all “rerate” changes can (and should) be ignored.
Grabbing the MSA info, dumping into an html table, and adding a disclaimer that the information was accurate at the time it was available may be the easiest and most reliable thing to do. If people are serious about following their rating over past events, they will want to (and be astute enough to) check the USCF MSA area. Just having accurate crosstables to see who played who and the order of finish is enough for most people and there shouldn’t be too many corrections in that area.
Is USCF’s source code copyrighted? Or can that be answered here?
Terry
Can HTML source code be copyrighted? In any case, that’s irrelevant here, since the results of a tournament are facts, which definitely cannot be copyrighted.
rfeditor& tombr, thanks for the feedback.