Two new TD/A features coming soon

Running Chess Tournaments
1

There will be two new features on the TD/Affiliate Support Area menu soon, probably later this week.

The first will enable affiliates (or someone designated as the contact for an event, presumably the chief TD or organizer) to pay for a TLA (or group of TLAs) online using a credit card. That person will need to have access to the TD/Affiliate Support Area.

The second will enable TDs to hand off the submission of an event to the sponsoring affiliate for payment. The affiliate will not be able to make any changes in the event crosstable, but will be able to submit it for rating using a credit card.

2

This sounds great!

What are the chances of this happening in two days? I’d love to try feature #2. :smiley:

  • Enrique
3

Not sure, Enrique, I was hoping to get the TLA payment code done first (because it’s easier for me to test), but people keep finding higher priority things for me to work on.

4

Yeah. :confused: I know how that goes.

I understand. I was just excited about that possibility because we just finished our State Scholastic Championships and I’m trying to get it submitted for rating. The hosting affiliate is in the North and I’m trying to figure out the easiest way for me to submit it, and for them to pay. :wink:

Oh well… keep up the good work and I’ll still look forward to the feature when it comes.

  • Enrique
5

I may have it ready for testing later today.

Update at noon: I’m half way there, I think I’ve got the code in place for the TD to release the event to the affiliate, now I need to make it possible for the affiliate to access and submit those released events.

The submitting TD will still be able to submit the event, or to edit it. (Of course, editing it removes it from the ‘Ready to Submit’ category so it would have to be released to the affiliate again once it has been re-validated and is free from errors.) The USCF office staff will NOT have the ability to release an event to the affiliate for submission.

6

Normally I like to test things like this on myself, but the only event I’m running these days isn’t until July. I think I’ve got the affiliate submission/payment code ready to test, but I need a willing victim to test it.

7

Mike-- One of my friends is running a tournament this Saturday. He submits under my Affiliate. We could probably arrange for a test of this if you need it. I guess PM me if you would like us to try, and I will see if my friend is willing to give it a go.

8

:laughing:

Mike I understand but I don’t think you make many victims!

9

Not everything I’ve done for the USCF has been a smashing success, Allen. (Online TLAs are one sad example. I think their 2nd incarnation will work better, but we’re taking it one small step at a time, starting with what the office needs and working outward from that, the ability to pay for TLAs online is the first externally visible portion.)

Now, if I can just come up with a way for organizers to upload formatted TLAS without having to type everything into an online form. (The one I was using doesn’t work with Firefox 2, apparently they disabled cut/paste of ‘rich text’ as a security risk.)

10

My problem with this is that an awful lot of organizers don’t have a clue about proper TLA formatting. (E.g., they put the playing site and time control six lines down, somewhere after the raffles and free donuts.) The whole point of a TLA is that it should be in a standard format, so that anyone can find the information he’s looking for without any trouble. There are only three ways to do this: a) Have someone in the office who knows what he’s doing format them, b) Have the submitter enter the data into a form, or c) Raise the minimum competence level of TDs/organizers. The first is what we do now, the second is what you tried before (and most TDs found it too much trouble), and the third isn’t going to happen. Perhaps you can come up with a more user-friendly input form, but I’m not sanguine.

11

d) Charge extra for TLAs which the Office has to reformat so they will fit into a standard format.

12

A little tricky to implement – you couldn’t allow the submitter to pay on line at the time of submission, since the cost would not yet be known – but maybe worth a try.

13

John, I agree with you that we need more standardization in terms of the things that most TLAs have, like where to find the site information, registration times, etc.

But the problem is there are many fields that few TLAs need. (How many TLAs need airline or car rental information?) A second problem is that the complicated stuff nearly defies categorization. (Think about the possible restrictions on who can enter an event, rating, age, geographical area, etc. Then you get into multiple schedules, re-entries, free or reduced entries, etc.)

The current plan is to try to get some, hopefully the best, of both worlds.

For ‘simple’ events, there should be a fill-in-the-blanks form. Simple also probably means no more than a few sections, maybe three? Only about 15% of tournaments rated since 1/1/2007 had more than three sections in them (and some of those were quads), over half had just one section.

For more complicated ones, the organizer should be able to create and upload or paste in some kind of formatted TLA, hopefully one that I can parse enough to be able to find ehough key pieces of information to populate the online TLA search system. (I still think the concept has merit.)

It may even be possible to have the fill-in-the-blanks form be a lead-in to the formatted TLA portion so that the organizer can add some non-standard things to a TLA. But that’s the point at which the border between standardizing and customizing gets fuzzy.

One thing I was able to get (mostly) working on the 1st online TLA form was the ability to generate a PDF of the TLA. (It isn’t 100% accurate, but neither is the one you get from the old Access-based program.) In my trials I was able to compute the correct number of lines the TLA will have once formatted about 98% of the time. (The exceptions had mostly to do with some font metric issues and Quark’s ability to manipulate kerning and other typographical details more than a PDF can.)

And I think SOME review of the TLAs by the office may always be needed, to make sure people don’t claim to be running the California State Championship in Missouri, etc.

14

I think a certain number of fixed fields combined with a freeform section could be helpful. For example when we run 80 percent of entries guareenteed as prizes, it was difficult to enter with current online TLA. When we ran Sectionals as an experiment again a certain difficulty in describing the tournament.

15

Um, well … When I used the first version of the on-line TLA system, I generally found it easier to ignore most of the fields and use the “Additional Information” block to plug in the print TLA.

16

Think of it from the user point of few, the person hunting for a chess tournament to go play in. I would want to first narrow down by location, so fields for State and Zipcode make sense. Then maybe fields for Entry costs that could be preset like Under 20,+20,+30, etc Time controls could also be presented similiarly. Everything else could then be presented like one big rich text file.

17

Wouldn’t this only be really important if you had to weed through hundreds and hundreds of tournaments to figure out which one you wanted to enter? Until that day comes, it seems like it would be better just to have the TLAs viewable as they are, in chronological order and maybe also within each state, without worrying too much about filtering out “unwanted” events.

18

When we asked players what they wanted to be able to search for, they asked for geographical proximity, entry fee, prize fund, number of rounds and entry restrictions, in roughly that order. The scholastic community asked to be able to find scholastic-only events, there wasn’t much call for finding Grand Prix events online.

This was 3-4 years ago, before the Junior Grand Prix, JGP eligibility MIGHT be something younger players would want to be able to find, especially as we get towards the end of the year and some of the leaders are looking to lock up their leads.

Aside from quick-only events, time controls weren’t mentioned, other than 1 day vs longer or weekly/monthly events. I guess people felt that if they knew it was a one-day five-round event they could figure out that it couldn’t be Game/120.

19

Basically that is what I was trying to say. Keep it as simple as possible. With the current system I could do a search for tournament within 50 miles of Peoria in the month of May and maybe come up with 1 or 2 for example.

I think certain bits of information need to be mandatory. Date of tournament.
Location of tournament. Contact for more information.

I think it would be nice if a checklist of common items was presented to the person posting the TLA.
Something like
Most TLA’s include the following
Number of Rounds
Prizes
Time Control
etc

20

Unfortunately, even the simple elements can add up to something complex when you have multiple sections. I’m running a tournament in July with 4 sections:

Open, 2 days, 5 rounds, JGP eligible
Reserve (U/1800), 1 day, 5 rounds
Junior (U/19), 1 day, 4 rounds or RR depending on entries
Scholastic (U/13), 1 day, 5 rounds

The only factor that doesn’t vary is zip code of the site. Each section has a different entry fee. (There are no cash prizes, but the top 2 in the Open get seeded into the 2009 Nebraska Closed.) And to complicate matters further, all entries are restricted to Nebraska residents.