Proposed changed to Chess Life Mailing Label

Running Chess Tournaments
1

We are considering a change to the Chess Life Mailing Label to add two fields, the member’s TD certification and the member’s state for governance purposes when that differs from his/her mailing address, primarily for Northern and Southern California.

The only place we have room to add this information is on the line that has the USCF rating information, by changing what’s on that line. Since this may affect TDs as well as organizers who order mailing labels from the USCF, I thought I’d bring it up here.

Currently this line might look like this:

USCF2376+0004Q2241+0007C2301

The ‘2376+0004’ is someone’s official regular USCF rating, the ‘+0004’ part
is the adjustment needed to get from their official published rating to
their current unofficial rating as of when that mailing list was created.

Similarly the ‘Q2241+0007’ is that player’s quick rating.

The ‘C2301’ is that player’s correspondence rating.

Since we now issue official ratings every month, I’m not sure that the adjustment between official and unofficial ratings is needed, and for an active player the adjustment could change several times between when we run a mailing list and when the organizer ordering that list uses it for a mailing.

What I am considering changing this line to is:

RTG:R2376Q2241C2301 C0806 CA-N

This would be a player with a current published regular rating of 2376, a current published quick rating of 2241, a correspondence rating of 2301 who is a Club TD through June of 2008 and who lives in Northern California.

If the rating to be shown will be an unofficial rating (which would be used only for mailing list orders and then only on request), we would drop the correspondence rating, TD information and governance state information, so this line might read:

UNOFFICIAL: R1501/15 Q1621/3

Note that I’ve added the number of games (for those who are provisionally rated.)

2

Sounds fine by me.

Why the change?

  • Enrique
3

Other than the postal service, does anyone even look at their Chess Life label? IMHO the only thing useful on it is the PIN code. All of the ratings info is more current online.

Michael Aigner

4

Wouldn’t this be about 99th on the list of pending projects?

Hopefully this won’t change the format of the text files created when producing the player address orders?

5

It will change the ‘ratings’ line of those formats as well.

While I agree that in general there is more current membership and ratings information online, there are several reasons behind the change. One is that we now do official rating lists every month, not every other month, so the +0004 part is largely meaningless. (It’s also dependent on when the list is generated, so we could do two runs a few hours apart and they would have different unofficial ratings.)

We need the ‘CA-N/CA-S’ information periodically, such as for the upcoming ballot mailing, since we’re doing a 4 page ‘cover wrap’ ballot with all 52 states on it and we need to make sure that the voters from CA vote in their correct ‘state’. NY has a much simpler split based on a few zip codes.

Bill Hall has requested the TD information be on the labels, and I’m working on that program this week anyway because I need to generate the labels for the 2008 ballots, so I’m working on both areas of it (as well as a few other maintenance issues on the label generator program to give us a few options we’ve needed.)

Other changes to that may affect organizers and TDs are coming, too. For example, we’re working on a way to help affiliates find TDs for their events by making more information available online. There is a strong possibility that the USCF will discontinue sending out TD cards when the current supply of them runs out later this year. I’m looking into a program that automatically renews Local, Senior and ANTD certification providing the TD has sufficient work credits listed in his/her MSA record. We will also give TDs a way to generate a TD card online for themselves through the TD/Affiliate Support Area. Bill Hall has also authorized letting members sign up as Club TDs online. (Currently all they need to do is send in a form anyway.)

6

I’d suggest one minor change:

The TD thing is a bit confusing. In the case of a club TD, for example, it looks like a second correspondence rating.

How about:

– adding “TD:”, and (if necessary to save space) eliminating “RTG:”, which is obvious enough anyway.

Bill Smythe

7

Bill, your suggestion seems reasonable to me, since it stays within the 30 character limit that we have for that field.

8

I suggest

as a couple of spaces make the ratings easier to read.

9

I like the spaces too, but you have to stay under the 30 character limit.

R2376 Q2241 C2301 TD:C0806 C-N
5 + 1 + 5 + 1 + 5 + 1 + 8 + 1 + 3 = 30 characters

This assumes that C-N is acceptable for Northern California and C-S for Southern California.
Maybe CAN or CAS is better because of New York or potentially other states forming separate districts.

10

I wonder if ‘CAN’ might be mistaken for ‘Canada’? As I recall, that’s one of the reasons we went with CA-N and CA-S in the first place.

I don’t know if I can squeeze in 31 characters, though. It probably isn’t a problem with the Chess Life labels (I’ll have to check with the printers to be sure), it might be a problem with laser printer labels or with whatever people do with the files when we email them out.

11

30 characters.

29 characters.

30 characters.

30 characters.

I don’t like C-N or CAN. Leave it at CA-N and omit the R in front, per Eric Hammond.

Bill Smythe

12

meh, i really like the 5-character symmetry in the first three groups, keeping the initial ‘r’.

Mike, I’m not sure about fonts and things, but can you perhaps make a character?

This argument of preferences probably would cease to exist if you could make a user-defined character of ‘-N’ and ‘-S’ then ‘CA-N’, etc. would be three characters, not 4. or if you could reduce ‘D:’ into one character, that would do the trick too.

Sorry if this is a dumb idea. BB

13

Nope, I’m limited to the usual character set.

14

You could just do NCA or SCA. But those are probably acronyms for some chess club or association.

15

I had to finalize this today in order to get the labels for the June Chess Life to the printer, so I went with ones that would look like this:

2000 1990Q 1995C TD:L0912 CA-N

(Also, the ballot, which went to the printer over a week ago, specified that ‘CA-N’ and ‘CA-S’ would be used.)

16

I sorta pity the person rated 2008. Anyways, what’s done is done.

17

Looks fine to me.

18

Any bets on how many TDs (or Chess Life writers) will think that “CA-N” means Canada?

19

And…if you are going to change the label, TAKE THE PIN OFF!

It’s an embarrassment.

20

Some areas of the web page still require it for access. Mind you, I think it’s pretty pointless to have to log in to download rating supplements or read the BINFOs, but if you take the PIN off the mailing label you had better redesign the web interface first.