English Chess Forum

Anyone know who to report dodgy data in the ECF membership list download to?

Some current examples:

Mr A.Y. Yiamakis Albert G24613 277362E Guildford Paid Gold (expires 31 Aug 2014) 0000-00-00
Mr A Albert Yiamakis G06128 277362E Guildford 3. Gold Membership 2013-08-01

and

expires 31 Aug ’16

instead of expires 31 Aug 2016

Rather than having this corrected by ECF Office each day can it not be corrected at "Chelwood Gate, Haywards Heath RH17 7LY" which is from where the data originates?

An email to [email protected] will do the trick.

Sean Hewitt wrote:An email to [email protected] will do the trick.

Thanks Sean but will Dave Evans act on requests of this nature from the Office?

I am led to believe this is somewhat tortuous.

Who is the Director and Manager responsible?

John Upham wrote: Who is the Director and Manager responsible?

In some ways that's actually a riddle.

The Office reports to the CEO, so that's one answer, but what happened last year when there wasn't a CEO? Membership lists and what's on them you might expect to be the province of the Director of Membership. It involves money, so that's the Director of Finance or his team. There's a tenuous link to the Company Secretary with all those historic white forms defining the £ 1 guarantors. Equally there's a tenuous link to grading so that's the Home Director and grading team.

In a membership list running into 1,000s it's inevitable that a few mistakes will occur. It looks an ordinary office job to make amendments once reported and hardly one that merits a massive "who's responsible for what" thread.

I have had a look at the Scarborough Congress website following the notification of their results. The results pages are littered with typos, peculiar place names and incomplete information. I especially liked Oskar "Call-me-a-cab" Hackney and Alex "I'll get my coat" Crombie. If someone has an e-address for the webmaster, I'll happily provide a list of suggested amendments.

John Upham wrote:

Sean Hewitt wrote:An email to [email protected] will do the trick.

Thanks Sean but will Dave Evans act on requests of this nature from the Office?

He doesn't need to. The office can resolve this themselves.

John Upham wrote:Who is the Director and Manager responsible?

You're asking which Director is responsible for membership? Really??

Sean Hewitt wrote: The office can resolve this themselves.

The "expires 31 Aug '16" instead of 31 Aug 2016 or 31 Aug 16 comes straight from the drop down list where a potential new member selects a membership option. So whoever or whatever wrote this piece of code has perpetuated that non-standard date format doubtless to the continued annoyance of those who need to parse the data for expiry dates.

"The "expires 31 Aug '16" instead of 31 Aug 2016 or 31 Aug 16 comes straight from the drop down list where a potential new member selects a membership option. So whoever or whatever wrote this piece of code has perpetuated that non-standard date format doubtless to the continued annoyance of those who need to parse the data for expiry dates."

Could that be why I didn't get a reminder when my membership expired?

Sean Hewitt wrote: The office can resolve this themselves.

Not really.

The point being made is that the dodgy data is being generated at source. That is, the daily export from PSO contains multiple instances of '15 and '16. This will continue until PSO correct it.

The office can only correct it once it lands each day. I've discussed this with Andrew who each day has to reformat the PSO export and publish it on the ECF site.

He does not wish to correct the '16 problem (and why should he?) and so it propagates to the end user.

The DoMM (or is it now just DoM?) has replied to my email acknowledging the problem.

Just to add yet more tedium to this thread I've noticed occurrences of

31 Aug '16

and

31 Aug `16

(and their 15 fellows)

just to add more obfuscation to the data.

Someone has gone to a lot of effort to make it this random! Well done!

John Upham wrote: just to add more obfuscation to the data.

There's also

Junior Silver Membership (FREE - expires Aug 2014)

From the context, that means 31st August, but anyone trying to extract expiry dates from the data has to make that assumption.

Roger de Coverly wrote:

John Upham wrote: just to add more obfuscation to the data.

There's also

Junior Silver Membership (FREE - expires Aug 2014)

From the context, that means 31st August, but anyone trying to extract expiry dates from the data has to make that assumption.

Yes, I have reported this to Dave Thomas and Dave Evans (PSO).

I can deal with this anomaly programmatically but the apostrophe (as opposed to back tick) causes the import from .csv into MySQL to barf.

I am attempting (via CRON) to each day @ 7am:

1. download the .xls file
2. correct all the 'anomalies' in the file (new ones appear at random).
3. Export to .csv
4. Import to MySQL to a number of DBs in parallel.
All good fun!

This all sounds ridiculously stupid. A date format of year-month-day would be fine for any sane human i suspect. it is after all the most logical.
Don't get me started on the American month-day-year. Who came up with that? I find it most annoying, especially as I work for an Anglo-American firm where both date formats are used and confused

Neil Graham wrote:I have had a look at the Scarborough Congress website following the notification of their results. The results pages are littered with typos, peculiar place names and incomplete information. I especially liked Oskar "Call-me-a-cab" Hackney and Alex "I'll get my coat" Crombie. If someone has an e-address for the webmaster, I'll happily provide a list of suggested amendments.

And Jonathan "Mahoney" not Mahony

I'm pleased to report that the membership list spreadsheet has been sanitized to a large extent.

Not sure who to thank am guessing it would be Dave Thomas and Dave Evans.

Would it be useful if you could query it in real time say something like this?

J.