Since we were overrunning the Vega Chess discussion, I thought we should start a new discussion for Chessnut.club software @ngl5000 so as to have a cleaner thread.
For those just joining in, it is an online chess tournament software that can be found at: https://chessnut.club
I did notice another “issue” that either I am using improperly, or maybe is not as important, but if you run a round robin tournament, there are no tie break options. Normally, in the swiss tournament, you click on standings and it has the “tie break” toggle to turn on the tie breaks, but in a round robin it doesn’t show any option or toggle for that. Unless I just am using it wrong.
Per USCF rule 34F, the typical tie break is Sonneborn-Berger followed by direct encounter result between the tied players. Again, I am a pretty new TD, so I am not sure if that is a big issue or not, it could always be done manually if a tie exists, but it seems easy enough if they use tie breaks in the swiss to add tie breaks for the round robins.
Hi @alaskalinuxuser thanks for pointing out the issue! You are correct, tiebreaks haven’t been implemented yet for round robins. Let me know if it is something important to you and I can see if the team will accelerate it.
The thing being worked on right now is a custom ratings database for schools and for clubs that either 1) use their own rating system or 2) pull in the latest end of event post ratings for members because they feel like the supplement is too stale.
Up after that is member management for organizers to track dues and create private notes on members.
Enhancing tiebreaks is one of the next things after member management.
Then beefing up the public facing club pages to be a more suitable Wordpress replacement. I noticed you’ve created a pretty great landing page for your club, but there will be a lot of extra functionality/optionality coming soon there.
The group has been working on this as a side project since October of last year. There are some very strong developers so even they are working on it part time, I’d expect to see the platform get noticeably better in the weeks and months to come.
I think your teams efforts are really great! All of those features you are talking about are a good thing.
In my opinion, though, if it was my project, I would work on rule required functions first, before the gloss.
Making it cool and look great is really important, so people will want to use it.
However, again, just my opinion, but it should be more important that all the binding USCF rules are possible/doable, so everyone here can use it. For instance, I don’t plan to run a round robin anytime soon, but if I was going to do a round robin, I would probably choose not to use this program until that part is properly fixed, since my current software will do that proper. Likewise for tie breaks in Swiss, I know I could read the swiss tie breaks chart on the side, but I also know I can set my own tie breaks and have it list proper in my current software.
Again, I am not trying to nit-pic, I think this looks really great, and is certainly easy to use! I have really enjoyed playing around with it so far.
Another question:
I added a bunch of Alaska players to my club. Can they still log on and make their own accounts, even though I added them already? If I put in an email for them in my club listing for them, can they use a different email for logging in/setting up?
For the login question, if you add an email to a member you will then have the ability to invite them to join (both chess nut and your club). A person can belong to multiple clubs (i’m currently a member of 2 in my local area). If you invite someone with person-a@gmail.com and they create an account using that email then they will automatically be connected to your club (so they can see the list of upcoming private tournaments and the names of people in the club). If they sign up with a different email like person-a@hotmail.com then they will still connect to your club as long as they clicked the link in their email (which has a unique token that links to your club). If they don’t do that, it gets a little trickier. You’d have to re-invite them with the email they used. You can delete the existing invitation and send a new one with the address they used to sign up. That unhappy path rarely happens (and it is something that will become more friendly soon)
I have run into another problem with the emails and logins for players.
In this case, a mother is signing up her two sons. Her sons do not have email addresses, but she has one. If you enter her email address for one son, I, nor she, can use it for the other son’s email address.
Since the players have a unique Chessnut.club ID number, can they change it so it is possible to have the same email address?
Thanks.
By the way, is there a spot on the website for submitting feedback?
Chessnut may be trying to be consistent with the US Chess CiviCRM system. US Chess requires a unique e-mail address for each ID and that mother would have exactly the same problems trying to manage US Chess memberships for multiple children.
Can I ask a little bit more about what you are trying to achieve? There are some pros and cons to requiring unique email addresses for members in a club. You’re definitely highlighting one of the drawbacks in flexibility. It would help us to solve the problem if we had more detail about what this is preventing you from achieving (beyond the stated of entering the email twice). Put another way, let’s say you have the same email on both members, then what does that allow you to do that you can’t now? Thanks!
I think US Chess also has a unique email requirement when registering for the Drupal-based member dashboard. I don’t know if that applies to the CIVI-CRM membership signup page, though.
One possibility, which may not work for all applications (including US Chess’s member dashboard), is to add an extension to the email address.
For example instead of jones@foo.bar juse jones+joe@foo.bar and jones+bob@foo.bar.
That is a great point. Chess Nut would treat that as two different emails but messages sent would go to the same root address. I’d still be interested to know more about the use case though if you are willing to share
Well, the primary use case for having unique email addresses is that it means you know what address to contact for THAT user, and when you get an email from an email address, you know which user it is from. It’s a weak form of authentication, but better than no authentication at all.
I think ngl was asking for the use case in favor of multiple players per e-mail address. The most obvious one is a parent with multiple children that doesn’t want to have to go into multiple e-mail accounts to see the e-mails from US Chess.
The most obvious work-around is to set up something to forward every such e-mail to the parent’s base e-mail account.
Shared email addresses have some plusses, for example for customer support. And I could see where parents might want to monitor their children’s email for a variety of reasons. (And I can see the children not wanting their parents seeing those emails, too.)
We didn’t exactly monitor our younger son’s email when he was in HS, but we did find out he had been in contact with someone online who was subsequently arrested for murdering and dismembering a young woman and is currently on death row in Nebraska.
Well, the way I understand how your system works is this:
I have a club with members who all have email addresses. When I make a new event, each email addressed user is sent a unique invite link to join the event. They click on it and can register as a user and join the event.
In this case mom will get an email for son A, clicks link registers an account, signs him up for the tournament.
How can son B sign up for the tournament? He does not get an invite link, he cannot create an account without a separate email address.
In short, mom has to email me to ask me to sign up son B for the tournament, or have multiple email accounts.
But some moms have multiple kids. I have 5 children, will I need five email addresses to get them accounts to sign up for tournaments? (Not my tournaments, since I am the TD and will add as many as appropriate.)
I can’t guarantee it will work for every program (chess or non-chess) that wants a ‘unique’ email address, because I’ve seen some apps that strip off the ‘+xxxx’ stuff, possibly because of their preference for a truly unique email address.
But it is certainly worth trying.
One of the challenging things about programs that utilize or generate email is that the major players keep changing the rules. AOL recently implemented some changes, which probably means Yahoo did, too, since they have the same ownership and share some facilities, that broke a number of email server software programs because AOL now rejects most if not all of the email that is being sent. This affects a sports list I’ve been running since 1991!
Creating an event doesn’t trigger any invitations; though if you sent a message to everyone in the club about this event they would get an invitation.
Connected members can see mostly a read-only view of the club (public/private events upcoming, member list without sensitive info like emails or phone numbers, etc.). Club members cannot join private events. Private events can only be managed by administrators of the club.
To join a public event though, you would need a Chess Nut account which would require unique emails (at least for now). We’ve run a few public events and had the problem you are describing in which a parent need to sign up two kids. In one case, they used the other parents email address. In another, they reached out and I manually added them. It isn’t ideal, but it is a valid workaround which is why the team hasn’t made addressing it a top priority yet. I agree with you though that a parent should be able to register multiple people for an event
Really enjoying Chess Nut so far. We have a Quad in July and two tournaments planned for August. (Only one open on Chess Nut at present.)
I did have a thought, or question:
There appears to be no way to just email members of your club to tell them general information. If there is, I’ve missed it. So what I have done is opened a fake event, called “Upcoming Events” and I use that to email the members of my club general information.
It would be really handy if when you click on your club that you are manager of, if there was a message button there, so you can send quick information to your club members… e.g., “Meeting at such and such coffee shop this time.” “Save the date of August 3rd for such and such.” “Quick announcement, we are giving away chess sets.” etc.
If that exists and I don’t see it, sorry for bothering you about it. Currently, the only way I know to message my club members is to start an event and message them through that.
I could, of course, download the members list, which includes their emails, and email them the old fashioned way, but this integrated club software seems to really work well, and I think it would be a decent feature.
I love how you creatively found a way to accomplish this! I agree it is functionality that the app should have (but does not yet). I think we can definitely prioritize that. I’d expect something in a week or two. I’ll reach back here when it’s ready to try out then maybe you can let us know how it’s working or could be tweaked. Thanks!!
@alaskalinuxuser the team just finished working on a public API (I’m mentioning it because I believe you said you were a developer so it may give you some additional flexibility with the platform (e.g. it would give you a way to get standings, members, events, etc. out of the system in a json format) i think some folks might be using it to create a wordpress plugin too which would be a nice addition to the ecosystem.
For the feature you mentioned above around announcements, would you be open to discussing what you’d expect there? I’m thinking like a 15 minute phone or video chat in the next couple of days. In its simplest form you could just create an announcement and it would send out to members. I’d like to pick your brain about some of the nice to have flexibility e.g.:
should this messages persist in the UI for some time (and have an expiration)
should members be able to comment on them or like/acknowledge them
how precise do you need to be in selecting members to send to (send all, send to participants of events x,y,z, send to member x,y,z)
would you expect these messages to trigger an invitation to the club as well?
would you expect the messages to include rich markdown or just plain text?
I think we are 1 or 2 features away from working on this so your feedback would go directly into the process.
