Initial Listings on MSA

Running Chess Tournaments
1

Lets go through the process briefly, so I can clearly make my point:
A. One has to click on uschess.org
B. Then, one has to click on players and ratings
C. Then, one has to enter a name, say Farmer, Jack
D. then, one has to click on the name in blue to get to Jack Farmer’s individual MSA Page
E. then one has to click on tnmt HST to find the latest rating

Most new parents stop on C and give me a call “you left my kid out of the tournament”
A few make it to D, and then give me the same call as above
and very few make it all the way through.

The point is 5 steps to find out if the TD actually submitted the tournament, and used the right ID
number and their child was listed. Has there been much thought to streamlining this process, or do the
does the data base size simply make this too complicated??

Rob Jones

2

USCF policy is that TDs should be using published ratings, not unofficial ratings, which is why you have to drill down to the tournament level to get unofficial ratings. (Unofficial ratings can also change when an event is rerated.)

We could add more boilerplate to the member page on MSA about the differences between published ratings and unofficial ratings, but it’s pretty obvious that people don’t read what’s there now.

For those who really want to know when their latest tournament is rated, we offer a free service that will send them an email when their events are initially rated. For more information on this service, go to secure2.uschess.org/email/email-pref-update.php.

For convenience, any bulk email that we send out to members, including the email that includes information about someone’s latest membership transaction, has a shortcut link to another page where they can select this option and make other changes to their email profile.

In calendar 2013, we have sent emails about recently rated events to nearly 3100 members.

3

Go to uschess.org/ratings)

Also, once you get to the player’s page - bookmark it. Now the only steps are 1. click the bookmark, 2. click the tournament history tab.

4

The danger with bookmarking a dynamically generated page is that the saved link may not be complete or remain valid. That’s especially true of the MSA pages that can be reached through the left menu, which are a frame inside a page generated by Joomla, our content management system.

If it works today, great, but don’t expect it to work indefinitely.

5

I’m usually looking for the tournament as a whole instead of an individual, but what I do is

  1. go to uschess.org
  2. click on clubs & tournaments
  3. click on past event crosstables
  4. enter the end date (ccyymmdd format, leaving off one or both parts of dd if I’m uncertain about the ending date)
  5. scroll to the tournament and click on it
    5.5) sometimes click on the section to expand it
  6. scroll through the section to see the players

Note that in step five if you do a right-click and open in a new tab, you end up getting a link showing up in your browser that you can copy into a forum post or e-mail.
uschess.org/assets/msa_jooml … 1312015542

If you left-click the link is just a wrapper (which is still useful if you want to then skip steps 1 through 3 the next time)
uschess.org/component/option … temid,201/

6

Another useful page is this one, which produces a list of rated events in a given month in a given state (or list of states):

uschess.org/datapage/events-rated.php

To clarify, the month it uses for selection purposes is the month the event ended in (eg, the month in the event ID), not the month the event was first rated in. This might cause some confusion, though I don’t think anybody’s ever complained about it, if, for example, someone is looking for the Saturday-only section of an event which ended on Sunday and that Sunday was the first day of the next month.

7

When we post results on our club page, for example, gpcf.net/allresults/2013/Mon … dings.html

We usually add a direct link to the USCF’s MSA page. And if we happen to update the local page before the MSA page is ready we put a temporary link to the club MSA page saying results will show up here.

At one point in time we used to have direct links to club members USCF page but it got to be too time consuming keeping it up to date.

8

The various special tricks people have learned kind of miss the point of the OP. The OP is talking about what a new parent does when looking for her kid’s results.

However, I don’t see very much room for improvement in the way that process works. You have to enter the kid’s information to get to the right kid. It’s reasonably intuitive how to get to the right page to enter the kid’s identity. Once you enter the kid’s identity, you get a link to the specific kid’s page. That’s necessary because your kid isn’t the only John Smith in the database. (Of course, this is the 21st century, so they are more likely to be looking for Aiden Smith.)

Once you get to the page, it’s pretty clear what to do, with one exception. For a new player, which is what we are dealing with here because it’s a first time mom or dad looking for the rating, their page will show “unrated” for the rating. The user isn’t likely to understand any difference between the “official published rating” and the temporary estimated rating that is shown in the tournament history. In fact, they will have never seen the “tournament history” page at all. It’s just one of many tabs stuck at the top of the page. Once they see a piece of information that appears to be what they are looking for, they will assume that it is in fact what they are looking for, and it is at that point Rob will get a phone call from some parents. Most parents will figure out that the very sparse record they see on the front page is probably incomplete, and hunt around a bit, but some will instantly conclude that someone else must have made a mistake, and will set about correcting it.

You could get rid of a few phone calls by also including the temporary rating as of the last entered tournament along with the official, published, rating on the front page, but having two ratings will confuse people who don’t know the difference. They might think that Rob did something wrong that caused the tournament to be considered “unofficial”.

You could make things slightly easier by including a line underneath the official rating that said

Most Recent Tournament Date Rating Change
Friday Night Chess 11/15/2013 Unr->483P3

And maybe sticking in a line like

Official Rating (Updated monthly)
Unrated

That should be pretty easy, but the benefit probably wouldn’t be very great. It might be a slight improvement. Certainly not a high priority fix.

ETA: And just to check, I looked up Aiden Smith’s MSA page. It already has what I thought it ought to have with regard to the official rating. I could see some slight wording changes that would make marginal improvements, but they really are marginal. My idea for “most recent tournament” is complicated by the existence of three ratings. It’s still plausible, and might make a slight improvement, but not much. I think the people who make the sort of phone calls Rob has an issue with would just find some other reason to make a phone call.

9

You forgot, “Parent has to dismiss the pop-up ad.”

10

Actually, they don’t. You can just click on the players and ratings and ignore the pop-up ad.

11

I’m not sure we can do much about shortcutting the process of getting to a member page on MSA, because with over 800,000 names in the database there may not be an easier or faster way to find the right player, but I have added a ‘Last Rated Event’ entry to the MSA member page just below the player’s published ratings.

12

GREAT idea. Fantastic, and thank you. I received a call from a father of a child who played at an
event I directed in November, asking me why his kid was not listed in the tournament (he determined
that his child was not listed as on the main page, he saw UNR, and did not click further.
And this dad was certainly not the first to arrive at such an incorrect assumption.

Rob Jones

13

Greatest!! – especially since it includes a link to that event!

This new feature is a prime example of how far a suggestion from a member, together with a helpful attitude by an administrator, can go toward improving the website.

Now, I can’t verify (since it’s not yet the third Wednesday of the month), and I’ll admit I haven’t noticed in the past, but after the third Wednesday, in addition to the “Current Published Rating (December Supplement)” column, is there also a “Next Published Rating (January Supplement)” column?

Bill Smythe

14

Yes, that’s been there for years, Bill. It only appears between when the new supplement data is posted to MSA (within a few hours of when the supplement job is completed) and the last day of the month.

15

I had an inkling that had been there, and I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know for sure.

Having that additional column there sometimes and missing other times means that the display must be changed twice a month – on the third Wednesday, and on the last day of the month.

Slightly simpler, and perhaps neither better nor worse for the players, would be to change the display only on the third Wednesday. Before that, it could say, for example, “Official December rating (to be used in events starting in December)” and “Official January rating (to be used in events starting in January)”. After the third Wednesday, the display would show January and February instead of December and January.

This also has the advantage of getting rid of the obsolescent word “supplement”. The name of the “Rtg.Supp” tab could be changed to “Mnthly.Rtg”, too.

Bill Smythe

16

I thought it was the event (section) STARTING date that determined which rating list it should use.

17

You can see through the obscurement to “Players” on an iPhone screen? And maybe the average parent will know to do that… maybe.

18

You’re right, my bad. I’ve edited my post accordingly (and improved the wording a bit while I was at it).

I’m still trying to get rid of the word “supplement”, though. :slight_smile:

Bill Smythe

19

Linguistic anachronisms are hard to extinguish. I’ve had a DVR for years now, I still refer to it as ‘taping’ a show.

20

I wonder if this is confusing some people since a player’s ‘Last Rated Event’ might not be the last event they played in since some events get submitted and rated faster than others. The events get re-rated into chronological order but it still shows the players ‘Last Rated Event’ and not the last tournament they played in.