Was there a special minimal fee, $25 or so, a TD can pay for a person who plays in a tournament who is not a USCF member? Or is the standard practice to charge the player a full membership fee? Is the special minimal fee no longer used in practice?
A TD can pay $10 to ignore membership status for some number of identified but expired players.
A TD can also purchase a two month membership for $20.
Ulmont. . .Is the 2 month member treated as a full member during his 2 months?
I have not actually tested the matter but I have no reason to believe that the two month membership is anything other than a two month membership.
The $10 fee is to handle unintentional errors and oversights, such as having a player with a common name that is entered with the wrong but currently active ID, and doing a mid-tournament correction to the correct ID without noticing that it is expired.
Also, an ID number is still needed.
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At one point in time they use to send a magazine??
I just recently confirmed there was no upgrade path after the fact which I think was a also a thing in the past?
Recently at a college tournament there were 5 or 6 college students who opted for the two month $20 over 1 year for $30 - one and done and only 3 games so they will also never see the rating posted. I tried to offer a free entry into any of my tournaments while they were still provisionally rated, but no takers. I did not want to be too pushy since it wasn’t my tournament.
The $20 option is just a two-month membership, nothing more or less. I believe these days it does not include a magazine, since magazines were unbundled from memberships several years ago and must be purchased as an add-on to a membership transaction. But I am not involved in generating magazine labels so I’m not 100% sure of that.
The $10 fee is intended for corrections and oversights discovered after the tournament is over. If a TD knows before the tournament is over that a player does not have a current membership, it is the TD’s responsibility to inform the player that a membership purchase is required.
The still-unresolved membership sync issue between the membership system and MUIR increases the possibility of such an oversight happening.
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The odd part here is that the manual sync usually works; what is it doing differently from the theoretically triggered sync?
Mike. . .do TDs have permission to manual sync with MUIR someone’s membership data if he or she is joining our tournament?
I’m not sure it’s doing anything differently. My data suggests we’re seeing a failure rate of 3-4%. That’s much higher than I would expect just from network issues, so it may be some kind of race or resource allocation condition in the CIVI-CRM code that only occurs when something else happens, such as multiple independent attempts to sync data.
We do thousands of automated syncs every day, so that means perhaps 100-300 failures a day.
And that means when you do a manual sync you’ve got about a 96% chance it works.
The failures also tend to occur in bunches, which also supports my software conflict theory, and it also suggests that they may be more likely to occur on a TD’s batch memberships, since that generates multiple transactions in rapid-fire order. And that’s consistent with the anecdotal evidence based on emails I see.
I’ve been pushing for a Plan B approach, some kind of automated check to see what recently updated records haven’t been synced that could run every hour or so. But so far that approach hasn’t been scheduled.
I guess I’ve been lucky so far with these then; I haven’t seen any failures with a manual sync.
Well, if I’m right and you have a 96% chance of success (probably higher than that if the root cause is more likely to occur with batch membership transactions), then you shouldn’t see a lot of failures with manual syncs.
There are two data issues that will keep a membership sync from happening. One is if there is no birthdate in the membership record in CIVI-CRM, as that is now required data for all membership or dues transactions (other than affiliates, where a birthdate is meaningless.)
The other is if there is no gender coding in the member record (which is also meaningless for an affiliate.)