OK, I tried creating an account for myself as a TD and my club with me as the reporting officer. Both account are refused! How do I get an account?
TIA,
AJG
Send email to: mnolan@uschess.org
I just had the same experience. In my case it was because I left off “Ave” in the street address (nobody in Chicago uses St or Ave anyway, because unlike some other towns, you can’t tell whether a street runs north-south or east-west by whether it is St or Ave), or maybe because I tried to use a pound # sign instead of Apt before the apartment number.
The second try worked, but I guess you have to follow VERY literally the website’s advice to type in name, address, and zip code EXACTLY as it appears on your magazine label. This left me wondering: Are differences in case (uppercase vs lowercase) important? (I guess not.) What about name order (“Smythe, Bill” vs “Bill Smythe”)? (I guess it’s the latter.) Do you need the full 9-digit zip code? (It seems OK to use it, but I don’t know whether it’s required.)
And then, there’s always the possibility that the printing house’s address-cleaning program may create a difference that wasn’t there to begin with – in which case, I have NO idea how a TD/affiliate could figure out what to type. There are just too many combinations of possibilities to try them all, especially since you must start over from the beginning each time.
Looks like this is another re-programming job for Mike Nolan, after he gets all the membership / rating stuff up and running. For example, in doing the address comparison, everything after the main word in the street name could be ignored. And the website could ask specifically for last name and first name as two separate fields, instead of combining them. And the zip code comparison could be performed using only the first 5 digits. And … and … and … etc.
Bill Smythe
The first release of the signup program was VERY literal, it needed an exact match on everything.
However, we’ve relaxed that a bit because it appears Quebecor (our printer/mailer) does occasionally change the street address and city as well as the zip code.
There are limits as to how loose I’m willing to let it get, most people seem to be getting through on the 1st or 2nd attempt. (It won’t always help to copy it straight off your Chess Life, but it usually improves the odds it works.) All comparisons are done in upper case.
We’re working on running the USCF mailing list through a list cleaning/standardizing service in the hopes that it resolves most of those inconsistencies. However, that may not provide immediate relief because the labels for the September Chess Life are already at the printer, and if we don’t have this done by about Labor Day we’ll be ready to run the October labels by then.
As of a few minutes ago, about 150 TD’s have signed up for access, though 40 have not yet logged in for the first time. Over 70 affiliates have signed up, 18 haven’t logged in yet.
The biggest challenge has been that our records on affiliates are in very poor shape. The old system had fields for the ID’s for 3 officers but not for the contact. The new one has six ID fields (Contact, 4 officers and a sponsor) plus an open-ended field for other officers names and ID’s, since there is a wide variation in what officers clubs have.
As a result, probably half of the affiliate ID requests have required someone (usually me) to update the affiliate record to add an ID so it could match against it.
Nolan:
Have signed up as a tournament director, and the Grand Rapids Area Chess Club A6020393.
Yep, I saw both requests go through on the first try, too.
(I get copies of the messages on all request, including the rejects. About a third of those that reject are for administrative reasons, the rest are data matching problems.)
For example, quite a few of the affiliate requests have rejected initially because we didn’t have the submitting officer’s ID listed as a club officer.
Sometimes I can insert it, but if that person’s name isn’t listed at all, I am reluctant to update the USCF’s records to add it unless I can somehow verify that the person does have a relationship with that affiliate.
Similarly, some reject because we don’t have a birthdate on file for the member. Most of the time I just add it and rerun the request. (I think we’ve had two people so far who have declined to supply a birthdate for our records, so I had to create those login accounts manually.)
The other common reason is that the member isn’t listed as a current TD. Those have to be resolved by Larry Pond.
I tried to register for the area and was told that my birthdate was not on record thus I could not register.
Call the USCF office and have the membership department update your membership record to add your birthdate, then resubmit the request.
You can reach them at 931-787-1234.
I also submitted the information using the online address change. Clogged that too, it said the information would have to be manually verified. Since that was a few days ago I’ll check the online listing again and see if I can then get in.
If we don’t have a birthdate on file, you will have to contact the membership department to have them update your records.