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Policy / Politique
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Dark Knight / Le Chevalier Noir
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---- Nous avons besoin d'un traduction français!
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aren't you risking accusations of racism because it is a White King only? (gasp)
#BlackKingsMatter
Perhaps the unofficial cutout version (unofficial stencil version) would be politically correct for all? As seen here on the CFC's fresh new unofficial cloud storage landing page...
If I was pres, (that's a mighty big IF) the CFC membership would have cloud storage for their games ... and a game interface to view them ... with commenting and branch analysis too.
Unofficially official value for your membership dollars, ha!
FYI, I am currently battling with Google. At 1am this morning, Google blocked the new chess.ca website (chrome and firefox users will see a big red page warning them not to proceed). The reason was that the new website had a link (just one link) to the old website, now called "old.chess.ca" and the old website has malware (intermittently it will redirect to phishing websites).
At 6am, when I read Google's email, I immediately removed all links to old.chess.ca from the new website. I submitted a request to Google to review and unblock chess.ca. At 9:15am, I received their generic notice that the review had failed. They indicate that the problem is still a link to old.chess.ca. BUT..., I have completely removed all links and text "old.chess.ca" from the new website. At 10:30 today, I submitted another request for a review demanding that they be more specific. We'll see what they say or do. I am not happy with Google right now.
This is a very scary situation. It means Google could block us, not for something bad on our website (which is now virtually unhackable), but for something bad on another website that we just happen to link to. That's beyond our control! Imagine this happening to a website like wikipedia.org, which as millions of links to external websites. If one of those millions of websites gets hacked, will Google block wikipedia.org? This is like being charged with a crime you didn't commit and having to immediately serve your punishment without even an initial hearing to respond to the charges! Google should not have this power on the internet.
Last edited by Don Parakin; Saturday, 1st August, 2020, 11:37 AM.
At 2:30am today, Google unblocked chess.ca. The new website did not have any malware. It was only guilty by association. If Google finds malware on ANY website ending in "chess.ca", it will block ALL websites ending in "chess.ca". Google was able to find the old website at "old.chess.ca" (the new name I had given it) and find malware on it so it blocked everything: "old.chess.ca" (old site), "chess.ca", "www.chess.ca" (new site). They kept everything blocked even after I had removed all links to "old.chess.ca". Most of the blocked time yesterday was waiting 16 hours for Google to do its 2nd review.
This means the old website is unavailable to you for now. Until I have migrated everything to the new website, if you need something on the old website, ask via Contact the CFC.
The player's rating webpage seems that is not generated a webpage with own link, doesn't it? Can you tell how it would be possible to create a link having only a player's ID?
Also letting to open the tournament page from the player's page to a new tab.
Also enabling the mouse "back" function.
The handbook and documents from the Continuation are listed on the above thread. You might be able to get it from the link below which is a copy and paste from the CFC forum post.
Question: What is the current legal status of what is now "The CFC Handbook"?
I understood that when CFC went not-for-profit, the handbook lost all legal standing, and needed to be converted into a "by-law" to have any legal force and effect.
In my view, at the time, it was simply a resting place of some good, old CFC ideas, which could be valuable in drafting and passing a new "CFC Policies Handbook" as a by-law.
The CFC handbook is still our policy to the extent possible and consistent with the NFP act because at the time of the transition we promised to continue with the handbook. The handbook is no longer our bylaw. A new executive would not necessarily be bound by the promise of an old executive. It was simply not possible at the time to bring the entire handbook up to NFP compliance in the few months that were left. There is now a number of people who have taken responsibility for a number of sections of the handbook and new volunteers so I think that we will be bringing sections of the handbook up for a vote at every meeting this year. They will become CFC policies.
Bylaws deal with governance and also must be consistent with the NFP act. I don't think we need to change the bylaws or constitution unless we intend to restructure the CFC in some way (ie allowing corporate memberships or having direct voting by all members).
When we change our bylaws, or constitution there is a fee payable to the government. There is no fee payable nor notice required for changing policies. We do have to make sure that any policies are consistent with the provisions of the NFP act.
So the current CFC Handbook/Policies still has some legal standing in so far as it has been affirmed by the Executive as such (so long as a policy in it is consistent with the NFP Act, and the CFC Constitution and By-law).
And a lot of it is being revised at the moment by volunteers dealing with different sections, and these will be being brought to a vote over the next few Voting Members Meetings.
Congratulations on keeping the bureaucratic side crawling forward!
I wouldn't say it has legal standing. The board has a wide latitude to set policy for the corporation. As long as I am president, it has the legal standing that I promised to follow the provisions as much as possible until we start creating a new handbook. Once we adopt a more transparent handbook, the old handbook will remain as an historical document. The problem with the handbook is revealed in the case of the Ethics Committee which was passed in 2005 and never implemented. This came up in the campaign when I was attacked for not embracing the idea of an Ethics committee. The rule as written appears to me to be problematic as it seems that it gives people the opportunity to "Cancel" other people. I was originally reluctant to even add a discipline provision to the bylaw though the governors thought differently. I don't want to rehash the campaign issues but I found ridiculous the assertion that I was somehow blocking an Ethics committee when no one had brought it up in the nine years that I have been involved in the CFC as a governor, masters rep or president. A president is only one vote on the executive and sometimes two votes in the case of a tie and one vote as a voting member and sometimes two votes in the case of a tied vote.
How feasible is it to take regular snapshots of ratings to open up the possibility of re-rating tournaments after the fact e.g. backtesting ratings formulae, un-rating cheaters' games?
Several more comments:
The player's rating webpage seems that is not generated a webpage with own link, doesn't it? Can you tell how it would be possible to create a link having only a player's ID?
Also letting to open the tournament page from the player's page to a new tab.
Also enabling the mouse "back" function.
Apologies for the delayed response; I was unexpectedly busy in August. A new version is coming in a week or two. First version was quick & dirty based on tdlist.txt. Current version was less dirty using data from the Ratings program but focused more on back-end & data issues than user interface. Next version will focus more on user interface. We're getting there :)
Hi Don,
How feasible is it to take regular snapshots of ratings to open up the possibility of re-rating tournaments after the fact e.g. backtesting ratings formulae, un-rating cheaters' games?
Apologies for the delayed response; I was unexpectedly busy in August. Right now the same 20+ year old Ratings program is in use. It does its mysterious magic and saves the results in an ancient MS-Access database. I extract from that MS-Access to get a copy of the data for the website. Btw, why the website doesn't have tournaments before 2006 is because the MS-Access doesn't have tournaments before 2006. I'll have to recover that from the old (hideous) Drupal database (on my to-do list).
Modernizing the Ratings program will likely start once the website is in a happy place. There's much to think about for that. Providing data for analyzing the ratings & trends should be in-scope. I'm not so sure about re-rating tournaments as we wouldn't want player's ratings to mysteriously change as we un-rate cheaters, for example, causing secondary, tertiary, etc effects.
Apologies for the delayed response; I was unexpectedly busy in August. Right now the same 20+ year old Ratings program is in use. It does its mysterious magic and saves the results in an ancient MS-Access database. I extract from that MS-Access to get a copy of the data for the website. Btw, why the website doesn't have tournaments before 2006 is because the MS-Access doesn't have tournaments before 2006. I'll have to recover that from the old (hideous) Drupal database (on my to-do list).
Modernizing the Ratings program will likely start once the website is in a happy place. There's much to think about for that. Providing data for analyzing the ratings & trends should be in-scope. I'm not so sure about re-rating tournaments as we wouldn't want player's ratings to mysteriously change as we un-rate cheaters, for example, causing secondary, tertiary, etc effects.
Thanks for the update Don. And a big thank you for the work you are doing... it is a big effort indeed.
I always wondered about how the CFC rating process worked; I have even quizzed Bob (Gillanders) about it.
In particular what concerned me was rating events out of order. (I don't even worry here about club round-robins or swiss tournaments that last for weeks). Some results come in to the office and with or without editing, they are rated it seems once a week. Of course, there is always a chance a big even might miss the logical rating point and have to be rated later (say the following week or even later). This means that strictly speaking all of the inter-related ratings are not strictly processed in the correct sequence.
Of course, one might argue that is the way it is and perhaps that is reasonable but I wondered whether the rating system could essentially re-rate everything when a late arriving result arrives and is inserted in the correct spot? As a programmer, I have had some long thought experiments with myself about ways to do this (database transaction timestamping and replay come readily to mind) but this is more of a whimsical concept I suspect.
But, nevertheless, I applaud the job you are doing and this will result in a much more resilient CFC website - already HAS!
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