Is it okay to submit say 3 tournaments on one disk by creating subdirectories?
People do it, but it isn’t really recommended.
If you do so, be VERY EXPLICIT AND PRECISE in how you label everything, otherwise you run the risk that they process something incorrectly.
Thanks Nolan.
Assuming I have three tournaments, just don’t put any in the root folder, right?
As I understand it, the old USCF software is so locked-in that it cannot even read tournament files from the C drive, only from the A drive. If this is so, I’m guessing it could also have trouble reading from subdirectories.
I suppose somebody at the office could use the CHDIR command from DOS, but is there any guarantee that will work either? The programs may be specifically looking on the root directory of the A drive.
And even if the CHDIR trick would work, does anybody in the office know DOS anymore?
Bill Smythe
What’s the big deal about the program only reading files from the A drive? If a rating report arrives in some other medium, copy it to (the root of) a floppy disk and run it. When this software was written in the early 90s, the problem was that hardly anyone in the office knew how to run a DOS command. (One of our – happily long departed – senior staff members used to respond to requests for training with “You don’t need to know how to do that.”) Surely that’s not still the case.
If you think about doing that for a single event, yeah, it seems like no big deal.
However, the USCF received 288 events on diskette in September, which actually was a fairly light month. In March they received over 400 events on diskette.
Either the USCF would have to start buying pre-formatted diskettes in bulk and spend the time labeling them so they could find them if needed, or they’d have to re-use diskettes, deleting the old files off them first.
I’m not sure either procedure would reduce the amount of time events spend in the queue waiting to be processed. Coupled with the probability of introducing a new kind of clerical error, I just don’t see how this would be a step forward, even on an interim basis.
Also, very few events are processable straight from diskette. Most require some editing of missing or inconsistent information, and I think there are some fields that aren’t on the diskette at all.
But the vast majority of rating reports do come in on 3.5 inch disks. To say (as several have) that the USCF “can’t” process rating reports that arrive in any other way is obviously false. A more honest statement would be that the USCF doesn’t want to for practical reasons, and doesn’t want to make exceptions because TDs would abuse it. (And how long does it take to copy three files to a floppy disk and label it? One minute?)
I hope that I never said that the USCF “can’t” receive events via e-mail.
I know of people who have done it (some with permission, several without), it just isn’t an officially sanctioned method at this time. (BTW, when the new ratings module in TD/A is completed, that won’t technically be an e-mail submission, either.)
It would almost certainly take more than a minute to copy an event from e-mail to diskette, because first you have to extract the files from e-mail and probably save them on disk before copying them to a diskette.
This means getting them into a proper .DBF format from whatever they’re sent as. The files might be zipped, they might be uuencoded, they might be coming from a Mac and be binhexed, they might be some other format.
I’ve seen someone try to send them as a text file, which didn’t work because a .DBF file is NOT a text file.
Since the files are (almost) always named the same, you can either only do one event at a time or you have to create a new directory for each new event, at least temporarily, to keep from getting two events mixed up.
The procedures for this would have to be sufficiently structured to make sure that we don’t lose, mangle, intermingle or cross-identify any data, and to make sure we retain the ability to recreate a section or event if there are problems with the event or the diskette.
There is also the matter of having a human-readable crosstable. That would have to be printed out, I suppose.
Sending the rating report by e-mail but the check by snail mail would seem to defeat the whole purpose, so the ratings fees would probably have to be handled by credit card or by deposit account as has been discussed elsewhere on the forums.
This isn’t a HUGE problem, but it isn’t a totally trivial programming task either, and it takes a bit of time to do a charge authorization.
Let’s suppose that copying the files to diskettes, printing the rating report and processing the credit card charge can be done in three minutes, though I think four or five is probably more realistic.
Let’s also suppose that if the USCF sanctioned this that we would get 100 events per month. That’s 300 minutes of additional staff time that has to come from SOMEWHERE. That probably means that there would be five hours less time available to process other rating reports. If we had five extra hours of staff time to devote to processing rating reports every month, we’d probably be less behind than we are today.
Bill and I had a conversation today about revising the priority of several projects, including the new ratings system, which is now several weeks behind schedule because the programming has turned out to be a bit more involved than I had originally guessed at.
I’m more or less thinking out loud here, but one of the possibilities I am likely to recommend would be to implement as an medium-term solution (no more than a few months, until the new ratings computation module is ready) a kind of hybrid online submission method wherein:
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The events are uploaded through the TD/Affiliate Support Area. (This appears to work fairly well now according to my alpha testers.)
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The events are validated and the TD is e-mailed an exception report. (This probably needs a bit more work to catch more errors.).
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The TD can either correct the data on his PC and create a new set of files to upload or edit them online. (The former would be the TD’s choice, the latter method more or less works now, though it would benefit from a bit more testing.)
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Once the report has passed this validation stage, we would then create a corrected set of files in the old dBase format and notify the ratings department that they’re ready to be transferred. (This step has not been programmed yet.)
We would then create a diskette and the rest of the processing would be done on the old ratings system.
I haven’t quite figured out where uploading and printing a crosstable fits into this scheme and we don’t have a credit card module for this yet, but those are not major obstacles.
Why is this likely to be better than just accepting reports via e-mail? Because it does what we DESPERATELY need to do with the rating system, bring the TD into the data validation process.
It has always struck me as inconsistent that the USCF considers the TD the party responsible for accurate rating reports but has never really given the TD much of a role in the data validation process. By the time the TD gets a rating report, any errors are likely to be very labor-intensive to correct, at least on the old ratings system.
Another advantage of this is that when we are ready to switch over to the new ratings programming, it will only affect what happens AFTER the event has passed the TD validation stages, so TDs would not have to learn another set of procedures to submit events online.
I’m going to send my tournaments on an 5 1/4" floppy just for nolan 
Gee, why not an 8" floppy?
I’m guessing you guys probably have an 8" drive there? I saw one of those at the Microsoft Museum in Redmond.
What does USCF’s main system run on anyway? I’m assuming it’s not all Microsoft stuff…
I think you’ve got about an equal chance of finding a working 8" floppy drive and a working 5 1/4" floppy drive at the USCF office, which is to say little or none.
The old ratings system was written in Clipper, which is a DOS program. The new programming, including the ratings system, uses the PostgreSQL database package and the PHP scripting language running on a Linux Redhat 9 system.
So if the ratings system is running off of a Dos system, I assume USCF doesn’t have massive data servers, etc?
Are they in the process of upgrading hardware as well? Are they going to buy new equipment or lease it?
I think considering a content management system is a great idea, you open the doors to allowing many people to write chess columns to help complement the magazine. I’ve also worked with it where I used to work, though it was all Micro$oft stuff.
The whole concept with an approval system was implemented over our intranet (which had around 10,000 users).
I’d offer my help as well, but unfortuately, I’m a Microsoft guy. I’ve done a ton of C and C++ stuff in Unix, if needed, and would be happy to work for free to help out USCF.
The USCF still uses a Novell 3.5 fileserver, though not for the new programming. It’s quite old at this point, having been installed in the mid 1990’s, so I don’t know if it meets a current definition of ‘massive’, whatever that might be. 
The new database server is a Dell Poweredge 1600SC with two Xeon processors, 1GB of memory and 320 GB of RAID 1+0 disk. It cost around $2500 and was purchased in January.
All that the office staff need to access the new database system is a web browser, so we haven’t had to upgrade any desktop systems specifically so they could access the database.
Whether or not to use a content management system for the website is independent of what’s being used in-house, since the website is at our ISP (Intenet Nebraska), mostly because we don’t have the bandwidth in-house to support the web traffic it generates.
This is the best information I’ve seen yet!
Steve
Hey there folks,
Just wondering if I could use a CD instead of a floppy for the tournament reports yet. I talked to someone on the phone , and even tho they said yes , they did not sound to sure of themsleves. Thnks-- Don
I don’t think the current programming would handle files on a CD.
We should be able to handle events on CD in a few weeks, but why not submit them online now?
Oh , I thought online submission was still a long way off…hmm.
Now all i need to know is how to get my password again. My computer had it stored and it got wiped out when i had to reinstall windows. Any suggestions ?
Assuming you know your login ID and you’ve registered an e-mail address (which is now required to get past the signup process), you can request a new password from the link on the TD/A login page.
secure.uschess.org/TD_Affill
Because passwords are stored in encrypted form, the USCF office cannot tell you what your current password is. They can tell you what your login ID is, but we’re still trying to figure out a secure way to automate that process, so at present you have to request it via e-mail or on the phone.