I currently use the the MSA Tournament page for an member’s ID to pick up the most current regular rating and date of the tournament from an automated script. Is there an easy way to do this for the new system? Out of luck for now?
e.g.
curl --ssl-no-revoke -s US Chess MSA - Member Details (Tournament History) > tinfo.txt
ugg discord formatting …
curl --ssl-no-revoke -s https ://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlTnmtHst.php?12000880
That kind of webscraping is one of the things we’re hoping to discourage, by offering an API that will get you a more direct (less cluttered) response that can be built in to pairing programs, etc.
To be honest, I haven’t tried to find a way to pull up that information yet, so I don’t know what the equivalent URL would be to bring up a list of a player’s most recent events to find their current rating, or if it’s even possible, but in the long term we’d much rather give programmers a more structured way to get to that kind of information, possibly with a separate URL so we can do things like load balancing and rate limiting.
I did go ahead and open a support ticket on this, just to get it on the list of things to do.
It is currently quite possible for a handful of people sending in requests like that to tie up MSA so that it basically stops functioning. It happened again last weekend.
If you bring up a player’s page on MUIR then click on ‘more’ next to ‘tournaments’ on the right-hand side, you get this page:
I noticed that & my guess is I need an in-between tool to do a true screen actions/scrapes versus the simple curl to get the page source query directly.
I note that the start and end for all of these tournaments is October 2, 2025; I hope that’s a loading issue?
Apparently it is not too hard to replace the curl with a pretty simple python/selenium script to simulate the more button press. I might try it out for my next tournament if the api is not available.
Yeah, the beta system was last refreshed on October 2nd. When MUIR goes live, it will have all events submitted ahead of the cutoff for TD/A, which is 9PM on Wednesday, October 29th.
I don’t have a timeline for the API, it won’t be out ahead of launch, that much I’m sure of.
Once the API is released, there will be a process for signing up for an API key and we will give TDs, affiliates and software developers some time to update their systems before we start doing severe rate limiting on access to player data through webscraping the MUIR web pages.
The ‘thin client’ and related interfaces will continue to be available during the transition to MUIR, but while they should continue to provide current membership information they will not have any updated tournament or ratings information after October 29th, and we hope to be able to remove these systems from service in early 2026.
