That gives me another idea. What about online TLAs? If they, too, are rendered on the fly, the following ought to be feasible:
On entry, allow the user to specify one or more states.
Allow the user to specify a date range.
Allow the user to specify one or more of rated tournaments, simuls, lectures, or “all of the above”.
Do not include listings for events in other states.
The event list would then be prepared on the fly, and displayed in date order.
Comments:
Allowing the user to specify multiple states would end the age-old argument of “I only want to see what I asked for” vs “I live close to the state line”.
The default date range should be from “today’s date” to “as far as it goes”. By overriding the defaults, the user could still see recent past events, or view only those future events coming up within the next month or so.
Some users are interested only in tournaments, others would like to attend lectures and simuls as well.
If organizers of large tournaments insist, their events could (at extra cost to the organizer) be given one-line listings in other states. That would be far less obnoxious than having to scroll through 30 lines of unwanted detail. The one line could include a link to the full listing in the appropriate state. Or, the one line could include a “view details” option which would expand the listing, and then a “hide details” option which would shrink it back.
Yes, I know. This would be about number 900 on SysAdmin’s (or somebody else’s) to-do list. Obviously, there are more pressing ideas waiting in line.
I think this is a great idea. Unfortunately, the online TLAs have been very unpopular, and I believe the USCF is phasing them out. Most organizers don’t like filling out the form, I guess.
The form being used for online TLAs was initially designed as a replacement for all TLAs, and has a lot of stuff that only applies to a few large events. A simpler form specific to smaller events might increase the utility of the online TLA system.
There have also been some abuses of the online TLA system by some organizers who put the same event in multiple times, presumably so that they get multiple exposures in the event by state listings online and in TLA Mail. Based on complaints the USCF office gets about this, these organizers may actually be hurting their events.
This type of abuse does not occur (at least not in the same way) in the print TLA system because organizers have to pay for print TLAs, and if they want to be listed under two states there is an additional fee for that.
Currently there are THREE places that have to be searched when displaying events by state on the website, the events from the current issue of Chess Life (which are stored in text form on the website), the upcoming events from future issues of Chess Life (which are kept in the TLA database) and the free TLAs (which are kept in a different database table.) This is cumbersome, at best, and does not lend itself to adding search parameters such as selection by ZIP code.
Merging the print TLA and online TLA information into a unified table structure might help prevent this abuse and simplify the task of displaying TLAs online and including them in TLA Mail. Eliminating (or at least modernizing) the way that the TLAs from the current issue of Chess Life are accessed would also simplify matters and could speed up posting those TLAS online.
However, while Bill Hall has been sent a recommendation on at least two occasions that the online TLA system be phased out as part of a redesign of the TLA system, there has been no response to those recommendations.
Bill Hall has in the past stated that the USCF may need to start charging for online-only TLAs.
That would be a real shame. The Route 20 Chess Club got some good response out of its online TLAs, while its print TLAs never brought in a single player.
Please give a thought to the small affiliates that can’t afford to spend $20 a pop on contact lists.
The intention would be to reinvent online-only TLAs to try to make them more popular and effective, not to eliminate them, and to make it easier to correlate them with print TLAs to eliminate duplication and the potential for conflicting information.
Whether they would continue to be free is a policy issue, not a design one.
When I referred to “online TLAs” in my original post, apparently I really meant “all TLAs”. For example, if I go to “Upcoming Tourneys” (I hate that word) and select Illinois, as of January 16 I see 8 January, 7 February, and 3 March events, including a couple out of state. Finally, at the very end, there is one event listed as “online”, with a warning that it was entered by an affiliate and has not been checked by USCF staff.
I intended to refer to all those events in my original post.
Yes, some unification would be highly desirable. Perhaps, for those events which are rated tournaments, the 12-digit event ID could already be assigned when the TLA is submitted. (If the tournament ends up being cancelled, I assume it would be no big deal to have missing event IDs in the sequence.)
There are problems trying to pre-allocate 12 digit event IDs in order to associate them with TLAs for those events.
One is that a TLA can result in more than one rated event. Conversely, an event could have multiple TLAs associated with it.
Also, it is not unusual for TDs to upload an event more than once during the validation process. In addition, we encourage TDs to upload incomplete reports for large multi-day events during or after the first round, to help them check for ID and membership issues.
Maybe each TLA should have some kind of number, even if it isn’t the same as the event ID.
Here’s what I’m thinking. The form for submitting a TLA could be similar to the form for submitting a rating report. Some of the fields could be the same.
When it comes time to submit the rating report, the program could first ask the user to enter the TLA number, if there is one. And if there is, the rating report screen could then immediately auto-populate from the same fields in the TLA – things like tournament name, dates, time controls, section(s), schedule(s). The user could then fill in values for the remaining fields, and/or modify those that auto-populated.
Who knows – that might actually encourage organizers to use online TLAs, i.e. to submit TLAs through the form.
Of course things sometimes change. As an example, the Portsmouth Open this weekend was supposed to have two sections, with a time control of 40/90, SD/30 + 30 seconds increment. It ended up with four sections. An extra rated games section, and a GAME/30 extra rated games section. Other times I’ve had to contract the number of sections. I’d bet that a lot of events don’t get entered exactly as they are planned in the TLA. Still, I like the idea.
Each TLA in our internal records has a number, assigned sequentially.
However, rather than asking TDs to remember and enter yet another number for an event, the new rating report data entry program will bring up a list of Chess Life TLAs for that affiliate with the same ending date as the event being worked on. (And it is possible to pull up TLAs for events other than those with the same ending date.) If we can develop a unified TLA database, it should be possible to bring up any online-only TLAs as well.
But keep in mind that under current rules, online-only TLAs do not satisfy the requirements for an event being either a Grand Prix or Junior Grand Prix event.
Also, pulling things like time controls from the TLA might be difficult, both because of the many events-to-many-TLAs issues mentioned earlier and because it may not be obvious from the upload file which sections in it match up with which sections in the TLA.
However, the new format DBF files contains a time control field that the pairing programs should be able to populate from the pairing program’s records.
If you use your parser program to standardize the time-control format at the time the TLA is submitted, it might be easier to find it at rating report time. Or, for any events which the organizer shot through without submitting it to parsing, that same parser program can be used at rating report time. (Maybe.)
The TLA department does not use programming that would allow it to run time controls through the parser to standardize them, as time controls are embedded in with a lot of other information. (A single TLA could also have multiple time controls in it, eg, for multi-section events.)
Organizers have been particularly reluctant (if not outright hostile) towards attempts to force TLAs into any standard formating. (That’s probably why there was nothing about standardizing formatting of time controls in TLAs in ADM 11-36 and why the ED/Board have been silent on this issue since August.)