An Unsettling E-mail from the USCF

Still waiting for the day when the USCF does something to impress me.

How about sponsoring the gold medal winning Olympiad team?

/ I got the mailing. I didn't think it was of ill intent. It didn't bother me at all. If you knew how mailing lists work, you wouldn't have a conniption fit. 

Actually, if one knows how mailing lists work, having a conniption fit is quite a proper reaction -- sending such emails to people who already made a choice is just about a pinnacle of incompetence and/or laziness to add a simple condition to the SQL query.

There is a way to report deceased players on their site. You report and link to the obituary. Not sure if they do any follow-up or not to verify it isn't a similar named person.

Really? Someone sends an email once every five years without bothering to learn SQL and that qualifies as the height of incompetence? 

IMNSHO, yes.

Well that's settled then!

And the email is a follow-up to a postal mailing that went last fall...

Here is the email I got in November:

Important Message to all Life Members of US Chess

Recently we mailed you a letter asking for your Life Member benefits choice. If you have not already replied, please do so today. Keeping updated records is one way for us as a 501(c)(3) to conserve funds for promoting chess rather than wasting money on unwanted mailings.

Please let us know if you choose:

Printed Benefits - Receive a paper copy ofChess Life magazine and access to digital edition/pdf download of the magazine.

or

Green Benefits - Have access to digital edition/pdf download of Chess Lifemagazine, and access TLAs via uschess.org. Green Benefits are completely paperless.

Here are three easy ways to respond (please choose one):

1. Go online to:http://www.uschess.org/datapage/LifeMemberPreferences.php and make your choice using your ID and either your PIN available athttps://secure2.uschess.org/pin-request.php or personal Life Member Code (LM CODE) from the letter you received.
2. Email your name, ID, either PIN or personal Life Members CODE (LM CODE) and benefits choice to:membership@uschess.org
3. Call 800-903-8723, ext.4 and speak with a representative or leave a message with your ID number, either your PIN or personal Life Member Code (LM CODE), and your choice of either Printed or Green benefits.

You must verify your Life Member benefits choice by February 28, 2017, or your membership will become inactive. You may re-activate your membership or change your benefits choice at any time by contacting us. Please respond now!

/ I did not feel like it was a scam or any kind of inconvenience to reconfirm my choice.

I was really talking about the email logistics (they already have a database with all emails, and a database of all people who opted for electronic delivery; combining the two is utterly trivial).

However, since you mention now the actual email text, compare these alternate approaches:

• "even if you already made a choice in the past, you must do it again, or else your membership will be deactivated, forcing you to waste time on reactivation, possibly when you are told that your membership check fails when you are about to start your next OTB tournament" (paraphrased and extrapolated :-)
• "if you don't make a choice, your membership will remain active, and you will be switched to Green Benefits"

Which one is less upsetting?

Note that the provided URL is plain http:// -- rather than https:// -- a big warning sign of phishing. Not that it matters much in this case, but once https protocol is available, a competent webmaster would've used it for any communications that involve exchange of personal information or preferences. IMNSHO.

Anyway, no big deal, my point is that it is quite understandable that the OP found that email unsettling, and he did not deserve a condescending remark about "If you knew how mailing lists work..."

Mindwalk;  Its a badly worded way of stream-lining the magazine. The're not gonna take you off the ratings list. "FineScale Magazine" has a business model like Chess.com. I get the hard copy version at Barnes & Noble but if you purchase the "on-line" version of the mag,  you get access to extra material not published in the hard copy. I don't like it but I'm afraid that's the wave of future publishing.  They don't want the cost of publishing, but they'll send you a PDF and YOU can print out the cost of publishing.

i'm not a member of uscf, but, as i see it, it's a piss-poor way to run an organization. 

many in this thread have basically said, "it's no big deal". 

well, it is if you want to be considered a reputable group.

MindWalk,

May I ask, is a lifetime USCF Membership a one-time-fee?... If so, that may explain a lot.

You can pay a one-time lump sum. Currently that is $1,500, $750 if the member is 65 or older, and there is a note saying they will contact members every approximately every 3 years, to verify benefits.

There used to be a way to make higher yearly payments and after 10 years of those, you would receive Life, but that was discontinued at the end of 2008, for new participants. 

Based on that, Perhaps they have been sending out a lot of "Three Year Contact E-mails" and getting no response.

If so, perhaps what the OP received was USCF's way of saying "We think you may be dead! So this is your last chance to declare your NOT-DEAD-YET status!".      :-)

(1) Why should I have to make my choice *again*?

(2) I'm not sure what to do about the potential for someone to set up "dead person tournaments." A clever director could set up e-mail accounts for them and reply to queries himself, making it seem that they were still alive.

(3) To someone who uses a computer and who has heard about e-mail scams but who isn't an expert about how to tell the difference between a legitimate e-mail and a scam e-mail, the demand to make a choice *again*, together with the threat to inactivate my membership if I didn't reply *when I was playing rated games*, made me unsure about whether it was legitimate or not. Was that an unreasonable uncertainty to have?

So you don't see any point at all in their trying to verify the continued existence of their 12,000 life members every 3 years? If they cut down on mailed magazines by 100 a month, it's probably worth the cost of the one time extra postal mailing.

Is it making you face your own mortality for the first time? I'll bet that most life members don't play many tournament games thirty years after they bought their membership, so relying on that alone wouldn't work.

One sure way to tell it wasn't a scam:

• They didn't ask for money, credit card numbers, or other data useful in a normal scam ( thereby excluding dead people's tournaments- as intriguing as they may be.)

One of the things they asked for was "ID"--without specifying the kind of ID.

It might have made sense to have taken the list of Life Members for whom no activity had been reported for a few years and e-mailed them.

As I noted, I'm not sure how you verify that members are alive when fake e-mail addresses can be set up for them and impostors can reply to e-mails to those fake e-mail addresses. If the goal was to check their rolls, they need a better method.

I don't see much point to continuing here, so...untracking (or "unfollowing," for those using v3).

Oh goody, I found another bug in this clunky site. My alert status says six new messages in this topic. I see two new messages on page two since reading yesterday, and a pair of links, one to page three and an arrow to the next page. Clicking on either link takes me back to page two. Consistently.

Hoping that posting this message will allow me access to page three. Maybe it's a test to prove I'm still reading the topic and want my reading privilege to continue by responding.