Well, I can certainly sympathize with KISS, and I certainly agree that expiration date would be the least useful among state, rating, and expiration date.
Here, though, is a case in point. In Illinois, there are two players with identical names – father and son, though neither is designated Sr or Jr on the membership file. The ratings are similar, and the IDs differ only in the last digit. The expiration date differs by four months. If a tournament report for one of these players comes in with no ID or incorrect ID, the expiration date would likely resolve the problem.
If you mean “Look Up a Member” under “MSA”, then I don’t understand your comment about deleting something. You must be talking about something I haven’t used.
Bill, you REALLY need to hike over to the Members Only page and get yourself signed up for access to the TD/Affiliate Support Area.
The ‘lookup’ features in the membership module of the TD/Affiliate Support Area are quite sophisticated. They’re intended to help resolve ID questions before submitting memberships for processing, but they work fairly well for looking up ratings ahead of an event, too.
However, keep in mind that these are only tools, the TD is still ultimately responsible for the accuracy of the events he or she submits for rating. It is better to catch ID errors before the event is held than after it is over. It is also better to catch ID errors before the event is rated than after it is rated. And those tasks are and will remain the responsibility of the TD, we’re just giving you more and better tools to help do it.
BTW, Laura Martz has been working on an update to MSA that she thinks is getting close to the point where we can release it.
For everything except the rating report, Chessbase works just as well. It is true that a round-robin of 16 players would be $24 cheaper if submitted on disk. I have no objection to adding the capacity for doing this, but if there were any significant demand for this I think we would have heard about it.
There are very few round robins. Only good a round robin would be, would only be for blitz. Think there is very little call for a 40/120 SD/60 32 player double round robin: unless Bill is looking for his club championship format.
I have read the posts in this thread and only see reference to the obsolete DBF file format. I thought that the file formats were going to changed to tab delimited, csv, fixed length, or some other standard ASCII format. Has that been changed?
I thought there was going to be a new way to enter reports online without using any files, neither the golden database nor the dbase. Is there to be an online form where we can hand enter all the data from our tourneys?
Yes it will be possible to use the edit form to create a rating report from scratch, using either the conventional crosstable/results format or for a round robin using a round robin table (one row and column for each player.)
The new file format, which will have a tab-delimited version and may have an XML version, has not been released yet.
I also haven’t heard back from the WinTD and Swiss-Sys developers regarding how quickly they would expect to be able to prepare files in those formats.
A few weeks ago I asked them if it would be easier and faster just to add a few fields to the existing dBase format. The response to this was positive, so that’s what we’re doing as an iinterim measure so that we can include the name, state and rating to help look for ID errors before rating an event.
The big advantage here is that those updated dBase files could be accepted by the current ratings programming. This may be moot if we can get the new programming into production next month as currently anticipated.