I just directed my first tournament since the new electronic rating report system was put into place, and I went to apply for the electronic TD user access to the site. Unfortunately, my application was denied because my birthdate (05/21/1973) was not on file with the USCF. I tried to change my information to let the USCF know what my birthdate is, but my attempt failed.
What is the quickest way to get my information to the USCF so I can get access as a TD online? I am directing another tournament tomorrow, so getting it done as soon as possible is important to me.
Thanks for your attention. I appreciate any help you can give.
I’ll see if I can get it changed on Sunday while I’m working on installing the phone server in the Crossville office, I don’t have access set up from my hotel room tonight.
One of the things I hope to do while I’m in Crossville this week is to redo the e-mail distribution lists so that there is a clear line of responsibility for who is supposed to read and respond to e-mails sent to various USCF administrative addresses.
Just a bit of advice for anyone who hasn’t signed up for access or submitted an event online yet: Give yourself some time to get familiar with the online system and to resolve any procedural issues with the signup process.
You wouldn’t order your first pairing program the day before you planned to direct an event using it, you should use the reasoning and give yourself some lead time before submitting your first online event.
Always good advice but it works really well once you are familiar with it. When I first tried to get in and register for online use of my TD and Affiliate IDs, it didn’t work because I had just renewed and the PIN on my Chess Life wasn’t the one associated with my renewal. Once I got my next Chess Life (and proper PIN) the registering went fairly smoothly. It seemed a bit odd to set up 2 different IDs but the reasons made sense (there are plenty of helps & comments along the way for people who bother to read them). I was able to enter my first tournament results (very small Swiss) in about half an hour and it showed up in MSA a few hours later. I recall having an issue doing it thu Safari on my Mac but switched over to IE and all was well. (Mike - I’ll try again on Safari in a couple of weeks and note any issues. It may have just been the unfamiliarity of entering my first event.)
All in all - It worked great! Results posted fast! Kudos! Now all I need is to be able to go in and make correction (reenter?) a previous one when that ability goes live. Mike, I’ll be glad to ßeta for you
I don’t recall having had any problems with either Safari or Netscape on my wife’s Mac laptop, I’ve had far more problems with IE in general, to the point where I tend to recommend replacing the browser as the first step in solving problems people have accessing TD/A. (There are also problems with browsers older than Netscape 4, but most people using a browser that old are going to have problems accessing large portions of the web these days.)
The USCF office uses Mozilla Firefox, and I strongly recommend it personally. (It has one IMHO major reported but uncorrected javascript problem that is common with all Netscape-based products, but I can live with that one. My guess is that the fix would require a complete rewrite of the Javascript engine which is why the Mozilla team isn’t eager to tackle it.)
I believe there are two bugs we’re seeing in IE, one involving cookies that isn’t significant with regards to the online area but does affect the way the internal office apps work, and another that leads to major problems with signing on or transmitting forms in the online area that appears to be a problem with how the POST data is transmitted to the web server.
One of these days I want our ISP to run a tcpdump on it and see if the data is even getting transmitted, that would virtually eliminate the ISP’s end as the source of the problem. (However, most of the people with the problem are mostly interested in a workaround and I cannot get the problem to happen on any system I’ve ever tried.)
How long does it take to get a response when you sign up for the TD/affiliate area? I signed up yesterday and no rejection or acceptance e-mail, even though it says it will reply in a few minutes.
The USCF is having a problem with SPAM. It has been up a few days in the TD/AFFILIATE, only gives the warning if you are in your account. The warning states, it can take an hour or more for emails. Just checked my account (04/22/05), the warning has been removed.
We got the spam problem back under control on Wednesday. (It was taking over 15 hours for some e-mail to get through the USCF mail server!)
Most of the time when there is no response from a request for access to the TD/Affiliate Support Area it is because of an e-mail problem. This could be a bad e-mail address (about 10% of the ones people give us are bad), it could also be a problems with a spam-blocker.
Earthlink is particularly notorious for this. You MUST pre-authorize mail from uscf@uschess.org, because there is no way for us to automate their ‘permission’ form. I dislike spam, but I dislike poorly designed/braindead anti-spam applications like that nearly as much.
