Have been thinking of this issue for years, when starting as a member of the federation was given a number – my number is 12313120. Started to be part of the federation back in the early 1980’s. Even have a hard time thinking of the year of my first federation tournament.
As the years have gone, the numbers keep going up: as with me its 123, anyone with number lower then 123 is a older member then myself; anyone with numbers higher then 123 is a newer member of the federation. As the federation has around 90,000 members why so many number for a ID. The federation is one number short of 100 million, what is there a formula for the numbers, with the first three numbers or better yet the second and third, as there are not that many with a number that starts with a two then a one – gives the general year they became a member.
What are the last five numbers, as my last five numbers are 13120, do they show the state, do they show the month of my membership, how does the federation make up its’ mind when they issue membership ID numbers. As a number of times had siblings join from the same household and their numbers were only off by one number.
Hope someone from the office can explain why our ID numbers are in the first place.
The initial ID numbers, when the USCF began them in the early 1970’s, were assigned geographically by ZIP code. (Since I was in Massachusetts, I got a number starting with 1001.) Nowadays, I believe the numbers are simply issued in order – I have seen several siblings, who joined at the same time, with consecutive IDs.
Silly question…why is it necessary to include both the name of the player (as shown on the USCF card) and the ID #? Seems to me that the ID # should be sufficient
Because of errors. We get reports of errors every day. Since MSA went public we’ve been getting them for results going back 12 years!
(Somtimes the pessimist in me worries that perhaps 1 in 20 crosstables have at least one ID or result error in them.)
Recently the USCF received an e-mail from a chess coach in Indiana who was wondering why one of his 3rd grade students was listed as having played in the HS Reserve section of the state championship in another state.
We checked both the ratings diskette and the computer-printed crosstable that were submitted by the TD. The player’s name was right on the crosstable but the ID was wrong on both the crosstable and the ratings diskette, a ‘4’ had been turned into a ‘9’.
Had we had both the ID and the player’s name in the ratings file that the TD submitted, this could have been caught rather easily.
Oh, and to add to the answers others have given on the question regarding ID’s, ID’s are currently assigned sequentially, we’re about to cross over from ID’s starting with 1293 to ones starting with 1294. In an average year we assign in excess of 50,000 ID’s.
However, we may not continue to assign ID’s sequentially. (In fact, we already don’t because we’re still getting ID’s on those green pre-numbered forms that we printed up a decade ago for JTP’s. Those ID’s all start with the number 2.)
We’ve also been looking into ways to assign ID numbers faster. One way that has been proposed is to give TD’s blocks of ID’s that they can assign as they sign up new members. I don’t think we’ll do this, because it may create a lot more duplicate ID’s than we get now.
nolan,
I had this same idea, but also thought it might cause duplication. Many new scholastic players who signed up with the JTP number assigned by the TD, were not aware that they had a permanent number, and when it came time for them to pay for a renewal, they would submit a membership without that number. I could never understand why that happened, because I, along with many other TDs in my area, would specifically tell the players, and their parents and coaches, that those ID# were theirs for life.
This might not be a problem, though, for new adult players. Give the TDs and organizers blocks of ID#s to assign just as they did with the JTPs, with one change: USCF should send a regular ID card to each new member. When we assigned a JTP#, the student was told to keep the receipt as proof. But USCF never sent them an ID card. Maybe the issuance of an ID card would have been enough to avoid some of the duplicate ID#s.
Given our financial situation, I don’t think sending a card is appropriate unless we at least charge enough to cover the processing costs.
I also think one of the flaws in the JTP program was that it had no cost, hence it had no value. (It had other flaws, but that’s a subject for another time and maybe another place.)
I suppose different areas handled things differently.
Around here, I think the TD’s were the primary cause of JTP duplications. I personally know of a few TD’s who filled out a new green JTP form for players every time they showed up at their event without knowing their number. (That’s OK, we’ll just give you another number!)
Kids are NOTORIOUSLY bad at keeping track of things like membership cards, so unless we send them one fairly frequently, they won’t have one. Annually might not be often enough!
With our downloadable and online records, sometimes I wonder if we need to send anybody a card anymore.
I think that if the USCF’s computer issues the ID number we can do a reasonable job of checking for duplicates, probably far better than the office can do manually. That’s a large part of the reason why I’ve moved away from the idea of pre-issuing blocks of numbers to TD’s, I think the TD/Affiliate Support Area’s membership batch entry process will do a better job and save both time and money.
Currently we check every day’s maintenance for possible new members, and usually find a few likely candidates.
‘New’ memberships that come in from the website are checked before they’re processed. About 5% are being referred to the staff because of a potential duplicate ID.
The only reason we don’t do that for ones as they’re being entered by the staff is that it takes 15-20 seconds and that’s too long a delay.
7 seconds is the usual standard for online processing, any response time longer than that and people complain about how slow the computer is. If I can get the search time down to 7 seconds, I’ll probably add it to the list of things that get done before we issue a new member ID.
Memberships that will be submitted via the TD/Affiliate Support Area can go through the same duplicate check as ones from the webstore.
