Does anyone know what an average wait time is for the “Swift Quads” to begin is? I played one of these a while back, but don’t remember how long I waited to be paired. Also, I guess there’s no space in the MSA to show Correspondence results?
It looks like we get 2-5 entries into E-Swift Quads per month. Sometimes we get multiple entries from the same person, obviously those need to go in separate quads. There are other factors that could slow up pairing an event, for example if some of the entries are from members currently in prison. If you need more detail, I suggest you contact Alex Dunne, he handles the pairings for CC events.
MSA was not designed with correspondence events in mind. Part of the challenge is that correspondence games are rated individually as each one finishes, so the MSA crosstable format wouldn’t work because it only has space for a pre-event and post-event rating. That also creates a lot of ‘yet to be completed’ holes in the crosstables, though that’s easier to deal with.
Correspondence players can use this link to see their rated games:
main.uschess.org/datapage/corr-history.php
Here’s a stupid, but on topic question.
How does one go about signing up for one of these USCF email tournaments?
You gotta go thru the uscf shop. http://main.uschess.org/content/view/7523/397/
click enter tournament, then click register for tournament, yadda yadda yadda. Yeah it took me more than a reasonable amount of time to find it, and I already did it once before.
Information here:
[b]The United States Chess Federation
signup up here:
[b]https://secure2.uschess.org/webstore/tournament.php[/b]
Yes, it is in the USCF membership and tournament webstore.
Out of curiosity, where else would you expect to find it?
If I knew there was such a thing as a tournament webstore, i would have looked there first. Surely, you can see where “tournament webstore” is a little discordant.
Does the big box in the right hand column of the USCF home page that says:
help?
Was that always there? If so, then obviously no, it was not helpful. Putting links on the right hand side of the page is bad design. Stuff on that side is usually just noise that people tend to ignore.
That box or something similar (the text in it changes depending on which national events are open for registration) has been there for several years.
I added a link to the webstore in the ‘National Events’ section under 'Clubs & Tourney’s.
It probably doesn’t make any difference how many places we put such a link, someone will still complain that they couldn’t find it. 
Well, I DID find it, so I haven’t complained, only said it was a task.
I’d hate to guess how many times a month we get an email from someone wanting to know how to join or renew his membership, even though there’s a very clear (IMHO) ‘Join/Renew’ link at the top of nearly every page on the website.
Similarly, we sent out reminder notices by email on the 1st, I’ve already seen at least one note from someone wanting to know how to renew his membership, though the email has this text in it:
At one point on the old website design, we had no less that FIVE places on the home page where there was a ‘join/renew’ link on the home page, people STILL didn’t see it.
It’s true, though – there’s something about that right-hand column, and the upper right-hand corner in particular, such that people just don’t notice stuff that’s in it. I have to force my eye to go up there. It’s very different from conventional composition, in which things on the right and on the bottom are “heavier” and draw the eye straight to them. (Maybe it’s because we’re all habituated to the right-hand column being used for advertising, so we filter it out.)
What if you put it in the left-hand link list, in all caps, right underneath “USCF Home”? It would look like:
I am not a website designer and I didn’t design the website.
Changing it is not a simple task. It is one that requires both graphical design skills and a lot more experience with Joomla than I have. (My graphical skills are limited, though I can draw a straight line by holding down the shift key.)
It is also a task where few people will agree on what changes are needed. (EVERYBODY wants THEIR STUFF on the home page all the time.)
What happens with most website designs is what I call ‘home page creep’, where more and more stuff shows up on the home page over time (usually because someone DEMANDS it) until it is so busy and so long that it becomes unreadable, at which point someone is brought in to clean it up. Soon after that, the cycle starts over again.