USCF still lists dead life members as alive
Sam Sloan
Where it says "Expires Life" just put "Expires Deceased".
What cound be wrong with that?
Sam Sloan
On 17 May 2003 04:56:52 GMT, no...@gw.tssi.com (Mike Nolan) wrote:
>miri...@aol.com (Miriling) writes:
>
>>The USCF continues to list deceased life members as alive in its player
>>database. The families of at least two life members who died some years ago in
>>Massachusetts may be still receiving the benefit of receiving Chess Life, which
>>will be mailed to them (ad infinitem?) until the HQ takes the action of
>>stopping delivery of the magazine to the deceased members. One would assume
>>that CL delivery would stop after the members passed away.
>
>George, I assume you must be looking at the ratings information on the
>USCF website.
>
>My records show that Harry Lyman's membership (10010420) was deleted
>in December of 1999 and David Lees membership (10003202) was deleted
>in May of 1999.
>
>There is no record in the current membership files for either of those
>ID's or under those names, so I am fairly sure we have not been sending
>copies of Chess Life out to them since 1999.
>
>I have not checked the most recent 'Gold' cumulative ratings supplement
>data file, but neither Lyman nor Lees was in the last one, issued in
>late 2001, so I think it is unlikely they're in the current one.
>
>The USCF's current membership system has no way of coding for deceased
>members, so they physically delete the record from the COBOL file when
>they are notified of someone's death and flag the record as deleted in
>the dBase file.
>
>As I noted earlier, this was done for both of those members during 1999.
>
>I know that for a fact, because I recently processed all 51 of the data
>files I have been sent since August of 1998 in order to test a transaction
>log procedure. That process involved comparing each monthly file to
>the previous month's file, including noting when a record was no longer
>physically present in the file or had been marked as deleted. I now
>have a file which tracks over 714,000 membership additions, renewals,
>changes or deletes since August of 1998.
>
>What to do with deceased members in the ratings system is a somewhat
>different issue. For historical reasons we probably want to keep track
>of ID's for former members, including deceased members. This is so we can
>regenerate crosstables for those events long after the fact.
>
>When it goes live, the Member Services Area should be able to bring up
>crosstables for events going back as far as 1991, including ones in which
>David Lees or Harry Lyman participated.
>
>At present neither of them are in the files for the beta version of the
>MSA, though they are in the ratings lookup system that Al Losoff has
>been maintaining for several years, which is probably where you found them.
>I suspect that the way we send updates to Al gives us no way of sending
>him information about deleted records.
>--
>Mike Nolan