Consider why you want to see a birthdate. It’s to identify an individual, correct? Well, that is the reason that the USCF should not disclose birthdates. You can ask the person in front of you what his birthdate is, and compare that with your records to verify a match - but you can’t tell people the birthdates of others.
It’s not allowed to reveal birthdates PRECISELY because the birthdate is useful!
These issues become more serious when a major percentage of the individuals in the database are minors.
To keep the office staff from getting bored, when they won’t have any players whose ratings need to be fixed because they were incorrectly credited with the rating loss from the other John Smith?
But don’t stop here! Do you know that it’s possible for a TD to submit a rating report with fictitious players and real players, who gain or lose points even though they never played?! I know this sounds incredible, but I think it might even have happened before! The only way to put a stop to this flagrant abuse of the rating system is for Mike Nolan to finally plug this loophole and just stop TDs from being able to submit rating reports online. If TDs might abuse the ability to check to see if a “new” player is really a former member (if they have the same birth month and day of the month), how do we know they won’t go ahead and submit doctored rating reports using innocent USCF members’ ratings? At least when a rating report is submitted on paper or on disk, the office staff can contact all the players in the tournament, before rating the tournament, to make sure that everyone really did play in the tournament, and finished with the score indicated on the rating report.
(For the record I’ve always submitted via cd that aside) Do you think most TD’s would pay the 15 cents per game extra for filing per disk/cd than upload the files? I’d be curious, you hold lots of tournaments how do you file? The next TD could argue they have a life than be filing on a disk/cd. Technology has made some people lazy. I’m not opposed to eliminating uploading files, don’t see it happening but not opposed either or given how I submit could care less at the moment. But if changed, the prices should go back down once more.
I think Steve should start put those little [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] quotes around some of his posts!
I believe he was trying to drive home the point that just because some (one or two?) TD’s abuse a useful tool it doesn’t mean that everyone will and if every useful tool that may have the option to be abused somehow, e.g. submitting online rating reports, was removed then we might never see another useful tool again.
I must say I have to agree with Steve on this one, sarcasm or not, and the people that abused the system should be dealt with appropriately rather than making those willing to play by the rules suffer.
Mr. Immitt goes too far here in expecting the office to handle that. Besides, how do we know that the real players will answer the phone. Far better is to require every tournament to have a notary public on site and require the TD to send in notarized statements, signed by the players, that the result reported was their actual result. This, at least, would have put a stop to Mike Swatek’s not-nearly-notorious-enough Missouri Fall Open.
Wow!! Given the number of events Steve submits annually, the office would be swamped just
keeping up with his tournaments, much less the rest of the nation!! Must be sarcasm.
