Should we optimize the process of connecting a wca id to a wca website account?

[Jeremy Fleischman]

(written on my phone, please bear with me)

I'm getting ready to pull together some sort of FAQ, and before writing up the current system, I thought it would be worth first investigating if we want to change the system.

Back when I first introduced the concept of connecting a wca id to a wca website account, many people asked about building a system whereby people request wca ids, and "their delegate" is notified to handle the request. I always thought that was a great idea, but was stymied by the fact that we don't know how to figure out who someone's local delegate is. I recently realized that just picking the delegate from someone's last competition is a pretty good heuristic. Obviously it doesn't work so well if your last competition was worlds. To get fancier, we could look at delegates of all competitions you've been to, and pick the most common one. There's also the possibility that the person who delegated your last competition is no longer a delegate. I was thinking it would be reasonable to forward those hopefully rare cases onto the Board.

So, should we build a system that allows people to request a wca id? As a delegate, I find the current system a bit janky and annoying.

[Pedro Santos Guimarães]

I believe you mean requesting a wca account? Because wca ids are given once you compete for the first time.

I like the idea of sending an email to the last and/or most common delegate once someone creates an account.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WCA Results" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wca-results...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Sébastien Auroux]

No Pedro, what he means is linking a WCA ID to a WCA account.

Of course I am in favour of this since I was probably one of the first to request what you describe. What I proposed to you back then was to simply notify the delegate of the competitor's country or the senior delegate if a country has no delegate yet. In addition to that, delegate should be able to forward such request to other delegates.

Or how about what I propose AND the delegate of the person's last competition?

[Jeremy Fleischman]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015, 15:14 Sébastien Auroux <sebastien...@gmail.com> wrote:

No Pedro, what he means is linking a WCA ID to a WCA account.

Yes.

Of course I am in favour of this since I was probably one of the first to request what you describe. What I proposed to you back then was to simply notify the delegate of the competitor's country or the senior delegate if a country has no delegate yet.

Yes, I remember this request, and I still think it's not a great solution, nor even possible right now:

- We have people like Dan Sachs who are citizens of one country, but don't live anywhere near there.
- Given a country, there is no way to find its delegate(s), or senior delegate. That's because our delegate location information is just some text.

In addition to that, delegate should be able to forward such request to other delegates.

With what I have in mind, that would actually be as simple as forwarding the email. I am still thinking it would be best to keep things simple and give all delegates the power to assign anyone's wca id.

Or how about what I propose AND the delegate of the person's last competition?

2015-11-30 0:10 GMT+01:00 Pedro Santos Guimarães <pedr...@gmail.com>:

I believe you mean requesting a wca account? Because wca ids are given once you compete for the first time.

I like the idea of sending an email to the last and/or most common delegate once someone creates an account.

Em 29/11/2015 21:00, "Jeremy Fleischman" <jeremyfl...@gmail.com> escreveu:

(written on my phone, please bear with me)

I'm getting ready to pull together some sort of FAQ, and before writing up the current system, I thought it would be worth first investigating if we want to change the system.

Back when I first introduced the concept of connecting a wca id to a wca website account, many people asked about building a system whereby people request wca ids, and "their delegate" is notified to handle the request. I always thought that was a great idea, but was stymied by the fact that we don't know how to figure out who someone's local delegate is. I recently realized that just picking the delegate from someone's last competition is a pretty good heuristic. Obviously it doesn't work so well if your last competition was worlds. To get fancier, we could look at delegates of all competitions you've been to, and pick the most common one. There's also the possibility that the person who delegated your last competition is no longer a delegate. I was thinking it would be reasonable to forward those hopefully rare cases onto the Board.

So, should we build a system that allows people to request a wca id? As a delegate, I find the current system a bit janky and annoying.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WCA Results" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wca-results+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Luis J. Iáñez]

What is wrong in asking the competitor?  For example:

In order to validate your account, we need a delegate to confirm your identity.  From the delegates below, select the one you think knows you better:

[x] <name of the delegate who more often delegated your competitions> (for example "Luis J. Iáñez")
[ ] <name of the delegate of your last competition who is not a) [if any]> (for example "Javier Tirado")
[ ] Other:
    (x) <list...
    ( ) ...of all...
    ( ) ...
    ( ) ...delegates [dropdown list]>

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wca-results...@googlegroups.com.

[Sébastien Auroux]

ouch, why didn't I think of that. Good idea in my opinion. :)

[ILKYOO CHOI]

I like Luis’s idea as well.

But here is a crazy thought: can we assign a temporary WCA_ID to each WCA account, and then transform the temporary WCA_ID to a real WCA_ID when a competitor actually competes?

— ILKYOO

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "board-wca" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to board-wca+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to boar...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/board-wca/CAF2SvPXQscjX_6vbre%3DXfb1QSybCRD39xt9RbDw622yrnwNkEQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Luis J. Iáñez]

Ilkyoo, what use would that temporary ID have?

- Luis

[ILKYOO CHOI]

It would eliminate the need to manually link WCA ID’s to WCA accounts. 

I imagine that this linking process would cause many issues.

To me it seems like another procedure that is prone to human errors.

— ILKYOO

[Sébastien Auroux]

I think I get your idea. You want to automatically link WCA accounts of newcomers to their profiles when they are generated. To do that, we do not even need a temporary WCA ID, the user account ID would be sufficient. The problem is more how to match the registration data to the results data in the posting process.

[ILKYOO CHOI]

I am confused.

I thought the issue was linking WCA accounts to WCA IDs, no?

— ILKYOO

[Sébastien Auroux]

Exactly. And you want to automate this within the posting process in case that a WCA was used for the competition registration, correct? 

This is by far no trivial thing to do, but in any case we do not need a temporary WCA ID to do that.

[ILKYOO CHOI]

I realize that this will not solve the problem for competitors that attend competitions that do not use the WCA registration system.

So ignore me. xD

— ILKYOO

[Jeremy Fleischman]

@Luis, asking the user which delegate to notify is a great idea! I've implemented this here: https://github.com/cubing/worldcubeassociation.org/pull/267.

I put a lot of screenshots in the PR, even if you don't know how or don't want to look at the code, please scroll through my writeup and comment on the flow. Unless I get any comments soon, I'm planning to merge this up tomorrow night. This is necessary cleanup so I can get working on a FAQ, and hopefully cleanup our contact information.

[Luis J. Iáñez]

Looks awesome, Jeremy.   Just one comment:   to me it sounds weird the "Request WCA id" wording.  I know that it's stupid me suggesting that there are issues in your English, :P but requesting something that you already have, is not weird?  What about "Claim your WCA id"?

[Pedro Santos Guimarães]

That is something I don't like too (even said it in my first email).
What they are doing here is connecting the existing wca Id to the created wca account. Só maybe "connect your id" or something like that.

[Sébastien Auroux]

I would go with "Connect your WCA id", I clearly support Luis' and Pedro's feelings.

[Jeremy Fleischman]

I prefer claim to connect, as "connect" sounds like it's actually doing the connecting, but what we're doing here is actually requesting that a delegate connect your WCA id.

It's a little annoying to change, so I'll wait to hear any futher thoughts before making the change. If no one is opposed, I'll make the change this afternoon.

[Sébastien Auroux]

How about "Connection request for your WCA id"? 

Or how about "SYN"? :P

[Jeremy Fleischman]

LOL. While I love the TCP reference, I still prefer claim =)

[Jeremy Fleischman]

Ok, this is pushed live with the word "claim"! I'm moving onto building a FAQ now.

[Ron van Bruchem (WCA)]

I just received my first one. Works fine!

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/board-wca/CAHpv4cOq9ikaqcdWerfpzk7kJLSa14nJ-751R4WX9XctD9UAsA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jeremy Fleischman]

Glad to hear it!!

[Sébastien Auroux]

Hey Jeremy,

I posted about this on the German forum and as expected I got a lot of approval request afterwards. What I found is, that there is very little support to make an educated decision about approving or not.

What I asked myself is: could anyone enter any valid WCA ID? Do you perform any checks on the entered WCA ID at all? In general, noone should be able to claim a WCA ID which is either not existing or already claimed by someone else. Is this already implemented?

As for the decision process, I would like to have a link to the WCA profile of the claimed WCA ID on the approval page. Unfortunately, I think that this is currently all that we can do to support a delegate with this decision. Does anyone else have another good idea?

Have fun,

Sébastien

[Jeremy Fleischman]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 6:22 AM, Sébastien Auroux <sebastien...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey Jeremy,

I posted about this on the German forum and as expected I got a lot of approval request afterwards. What I found is, that there is very little support to make an educated decision about approving or not.

Thanks for bringing this up, Sébastien. I too, worry about how hard it is for us to verify that people are who they say they are.

 

What I asked myself is: could anyone enter any valid WCA ID? Do you perform any checks on the entered WCA ID at all? In general, noone should be able to claim a WCA ID which is either not existing or already claimed by someone else. Is this already implemented?

We have a server side validation that the WCA id must exist (validation and error message for user) Furthermore, it's rather difficult to type in an invalid WCA id, as we have the autocomplete thing which doesn't let you choose non existant WCA ids.

We also do not allow users to claim a WCA id which has already been assigned to someone else (validation and error message for users).

We *do* however allow you to claim a WCA id which has been claimed by someone else. This was an intentional decision on my part, as a way to prevent people from intentionally or accidentally "squatting" on WCA ids that don't actually belong to them. Consider the following scenario:

1. Malicious user Bob creates an account, and claims WCA id 2004MAOT02.
2. Tyson Mao now creates an account, and tries to claim his WCA id: 2004MAOT02. He would be blocked with a message saying "someone else has already claimed WCA id 2004MAOT02".

I don't think this is a desirable flow.

 

As for the decision process, I would like to have a link to the WCA profile of the claimed WCA ID on the approval page. Unfortunately, I think that this is currently all that we can do to support a delegate with this decision. Does anyone else have another good idea?

We already do give you a link to the WCA profile in the notification email: https://github.com/cubing/worldcubeassociation.org/blob/master/WcaOnRails/app/views/wca_id_claim_mailer/notify_delegate_of_wca_id_claim.html.erb#L3. I've added a link directly to the edit page though, as you may be accessing these requests through the WCA website notifications:

​

I don't have any great ideas for helping delegates make this decision. One idea might be to look at the emails people have used to register for competitions in the past, but I don't think it's worth building something around that.

[Ron van Bruchem (WCA)]

One additional data source is the Preregs file. I normally use the preregistration on the WCA website for my competitions. It would be good to see the preregistrations for the WCA id and for the mail address.

[Sébastien Auroux]

Ok, now comes the next interesting situation: I just received a claim request by some indonesian that I do not know at all. As I will surely not approve that request, I have the feeling that the notification might remain on my account forever. What am I supposed to do in that case? :)

How about giving delegates the opportunity to reject a request? A delegate could be able to select between two different options:

- "I don't know you, please select a different delegate for your claim request."

- "I am not able to verify your identitty, please contact me seperately to prove this is really you."

As a result, the claim request should be cancelled and the person that sent the claim request will get the according notification.

Jeremy, what do you think?

[Jeremy Fleischman]

You're right, that is definitely a source of information. What exactly do you have in mind? A new link right next to the "Profile" link Sebastien asked for?

[Jeremy Fleischman]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 2:19 AM, Sébastien Auroux <sebastien...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, now comes the next interesting situation: I just received a claim request by some indonesian that I do not know at all. As I will surely not approve that request, I have the feeling that the notification might remain on my account forever. What am I supposed to do in that case? :)

How about giving delegates the opportunity to reject a request? A delegate could be able to select between two different options:

- "I don't know you, please select a different delegate for your claim request."

- "I am not able to verify your identitty, please contact me seperately to prove this is really you."

As a result, the claim request should be cancelled and the person that sent the claim request will get the according notification.

Jeremy, what do you think?

I think these are great ideas, but probably wouldn't fit into our (already very crammed) edit a user page. The WCA id approval page should probably be pulled out into a new page.

For the record, everything you describe is currently possible, it just required a bit more work than clicking. To reject a request, you just clear the "unconfirmed WCA id" field. If you want to send the claimer a message, you should have received an email with the request, you can just reply to that email with whatever message you want. That's what I've been doing with requests from people I don't remember, and I think it's a good opportunity to put in a message like "send me photo id, or we can do this in person at the upcoming XYZ competition".

I've created https://github.com/cubing/worldcubeassociation.org/issues/273 to track improving this. Unless I hear that delegates are being swamped in requests, I'm not planning to work on this anytime soon.