Your Bridgemates don’t recognise your club members?
Ian Mitchell addresses this problem which occasionally arises. These changes relate to Bridgemates but the fundamentals are the same for other scoring devices If you have any queries please contact Ian – ian@ebu.co.uk
FAQ1: “Whenever Fred puts his EBU number into the Bridgemate (bridgepad, etc.), his name fails to come up – I repeatedly have to manually enter his name into the scoring program.”
The Bridgemate system can be set to look up names from two sources: (1) the club’s own player database (linked to the scoring software) and (2) the EBU member database. Firstly check on the Bridgemate system settings that it is set to look at both of these, and not just one or the other. And then there might be a number of other things you might check to rectify this issue:
- Check that Fred has been registered in your own player database, and that his EBU number is accurately recorded there. It’s easy to register somebody with a name but not a number, or even with a wrong number! Quite often clubs assign numbers that actually belong to other members with a similar name, but also it’s not unknown that clubs have erroneously recorded Fred’s wife’s number for him on the club database!
- The system does not check the EBU database ‘live’ over the internet, but a copy (with limited details) on your own computer. This copy needs to be refreshed on a regular basis. If Fred has only recently joined the EBU, then he might not appear on the version of the database on your computer.
- This database only includes current full members of the EBU. It does not include ‘lapsed’ or ‘potential’ members, nor players that have chosen to be ‘anonymous’. If Fred has recently joined the club, have you registered him with the EBU as a member?
- Are you sure that the number that Fred is using is the correct number? I’m sure that you have checked! Typos are easily made. But there could be other issues: Sometimes clubs have erroneously registered Fred as a ‘New EBU member’ when he already has an EBU record, and he ends up with two EBU numbers! When this comes to the attention of the EBU, we would merge the two records, and delete one of the ‘duplicate’ numbers. On such occasions, we would normally notify by e-mail any club of which Fred is a member, but if he’s not registered as a club member, this message might not get through. So when a number isn’t working properly, double check against the latest EBU database that this is the correct number!
FAQ2: “Every time that I upload a result to the EBU Members Area, Fred comes up as a mismatch, even though he’s there on our list of members.”
We’ve raised this before, but it’s worth repeating, since the question can be answered by (1) and (4) above. The only other possible reason for the mismatch is if Fred’s surname is mis-spelt (by comparison with the surname recorded on the EBU database). This can include accents on certain letters, whether the surname is hyphenated, etc. Please consider such variations when entering the name.
