The membership download file

[John Upham]

The current version of the membership download file contains ECF membership codes.

I assume that this list has all/almost all ECF membership codes issued since the dawn of time?

It include persons that have renewed by the August 31st watershed and those that haven't.

Since there is one column containing more than one item of information (the "category" column) one has to parse out of this column an expiry date and the category of membership. Rather poor design IMHO.

OK, so this is trivial to do (but a waste of time) but my question is this:

Will the list grow to be a master list of all membership codes or will it list only those who are members at its time of publication?

I assume that the DoM will not read this but maybe a request could be received to separate Category and Expiry dates into their own columns?

I'm assuming that Dave Evans will charge to make this change to the CSV export ftp'd to the ECF Office?

[Roger de Coverly]

Will the list grow to be a master list of all membership codes or will it list only those who are members at its time of publication?

When has the download list been anything other than a list of current members with an overlap for those whose membership has recently expired? Presumably membership will appear to plummet when the not yet renewed are removed. If the counties and leagues supposedly collecting on the ECF's behalf take advantage of the time scales for collection and reporting, it will be another couple of months before the list of members is mostly reliable again.

[Ian Thompson]

There are now two membership lists on the ECF website - one for 2012/13 and one for 2013/14. It would be useful to know whether the 2012/13 list is the final list of members, so that League Treasurers can do a reliable calculation of their game fee liability. If it is final, and accurate, the Surrey Border League has 4 non-members who have run up a total game fee bill £114 when it would only have cost £48 in membership fees, and one of them has incurred another £18 in another league.

[John Upham]

There are now two membership lists on the ECF website - one for 2012/13 and one for 2013/14. It would be useful to know whether the 2012/13 list is the final list of members, so that League Treasurers can do a reliable calculation of their game fee liability. If it is final, and accurate, the Surrey Border League has 4 non-members who have run up a total game fee bill £114 when it would only have cost £48 in membership fees, and one of them has incurred another £18 in another league.

I believe that the 2012/13 list is stated to be the membership position as at the deadline of midnight of August 31st 2013.

If the offenders are not on that list as having joined then I believe that the ECF will invoice the league that submitted games for grading for those offenders.

If someone from the ECF can write authoritatively on this matter then the leagues can bill the clubs...

Let the fun commence!

[Angus French]

I believe that the 2012/13 list is stated to be the membership position as at the deadline of midnight of August 31st 2013.

If the offenders are not on that list as having joined then I believe that the ECF will invoice the league that submitted games for grading for those offenders.

What about old-scheme memberships which expired at some point during the 2012/13 membership year and weren't renewed - are those listed?

[John Upham]

What about old-scheme memberships which expired at some point during the 2012/13 membership year and weren't renewed - are those listed?

I don't know: possibly the DoMM can advise here?

[John Upham]

Forgive a rather nerdy and dull question:

The last membership download contains items in the Category column such as

Paid 3-yr Jnr Gold (expires 31 Aug ’15)

whereas the bulk of the dates contained in this string are in YYYY format such as 2015.

Anyone have a clue as to why some years are in YY format and some in YYYY format?

Of course is it trivial to parse these various strings to extract the correct a meaningful expiry year but one wonders why someone has gone to such lengths to introduce this variance.

[Angus French]

Forgive a rather nerdy and dull question:

The last membership download contains items in the Category column such as

Paid 3-yr Jnr Gold (expires 31 Aug ’15)

whereas the bulk of the dates contained in this string are in YYYY format such as 2015.

Anyone have a clue as to why some years are in YY format and some in YYYY format?

When I last looked at the Membership List - on 27 August, before it was split - it contained 120 different values for Category.

Here, for example, are all the different Category values which contained the word 'Bronze' twice:

BronzeBronze.png (21.31 KiB) Viewed 1340 times

Note that 'Paid Bronze (expires 31 Aug 2013); Paid Bronze (expires 31 Aug 2014)' and 'Paid Bronze (expires 31 Aug 2014); Paid Bronze (expires 31 Aug 2013)' are both listed though they presumably have the same meaning.
Also note that 2016 is represented in some cases as '’16' rather than '2016'.

My guess at what's happening:
1. The year parts of values are inconsistently defined because there's a space constraint and a year part with all the digits would, in some cases, produce a part Category value that's too long for some purpose;
2. The membership system has no concept of 'membership' only of 'member' - hence the use of Category to contain membership information for different membership periods;
3. Values created as a consequence of the previous point are manually input and this results in inconsistencies.