English Chess Forum

Let me introduce myself, I'm the rating officer for Cumbria and as such, all rated games played in Cumbria come to me for processing.
At the end of each month, I upload the results, in Excel format, to the ECF rating site. In September, I received Barrow's results of their club championship and noticed a new player whose name I recognised as it was the same as a player from Keswick. Naturally, I contacted the Barrow organiser and he assured me that they were not the same player. I have also spoken, in person, to the Keswick player and he said that he'd never been to Barrow. So, when I uploaded the Barrow results, I left the rating code field for said player blank and as expected, I got the usual alert and was presented with a list of possible matches and an option to request a new code. So I requested a new code and thought nothing more about it until the rating list was published for October, when I noticed that the Barrow player had the same rating code as the Keswick player. I immediately sent an email to the rating admin (Matthew Carr) but it along with subsequent emails on the subject, have so far been ignored or have ended up in his spam folder.
There are many duplicates in the database that should be merged but not this one.
I'm not sure who it is that is authorised to issue new rating codes, unfortunately not me, but I am a little annoyed that my request for a new code was ignored.
I don't know of any way to rectify this. Can anyone help?
I have not named the players involved but the rating code for the Keswick player is: 362691L. The Barrow player does not have a code of his own.

Andy McAtear wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 16, 2025 1:03 pm

Let me introduce myself, I'm the rating officer for Cumbria and as such, all rated games played in Cumbria come to me for processing.

Andy,

Good to hear from you. If you wish these matters to be dealt with in a timely fashion then I strongly recommend you contact

Steve Emmerton ([email protected])

who turns around my various rating database and LMS requests superbly.

Such matters include:

Name corrections
Gender corrections
FIDE ID allocation
Club code corrections
Rating code merges
Incorrect allocation of rating results

etc.

I believe Matt Carr is heavily snowed under with other work so I no longer trouble him with requests.

Andy McAtear wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 16, 2025 1:03 pm

I don't know of any way to rectify this. Can anyone help?

You aren't using the ECF LMS so what I suggest may not work. I'd suggest resubmitting the internal Barrow results. It may help to amend the name of the new player slightly if possible. Otherwise as John Upham suggests.

I submit the rating results via the ECF LMS for the Berks League and have a similar problem where a player for a Berks club has had his historic rating record abducted by a player from Ipswich. I have a new code for the Berks player, but the tidy up of rejoining the historic record was still outstanding last time I checked.

If you want to allow it, clubs can be set up on the ECF LMS to directly submit their own internal results.

Thanks John,
I'll contact Steve. Hopefully, he can do rating code unmerges too.
...........Andy.

"You aren't using the ECF LMS so what I suggest may not work. I'd suggest resubmitting the internal Barrow results. It may help to amend the name of the new player slightly if possible. Otherwise as John Upham suggests."

Thanks Roger.
I like spreadsheets. I have a separate one for every competition, even so, it only takes a few minutes to upload them all for rating at the end of the month and the ECF site let's me know if there are any issues with the result files that might not be picked up on LMS.
I'll try Steve...he may be able to help.
...........Andy.

I concur - Steve Emmerton is very efficient at dealing with such issues, and has already sorted it!
https://rating.englishchess.org.uk/play ... de=383658H

Thanks for your help guys. You definitely got the ball rolling.
I think it's sorted now.
............Andy.

Steve Emmerton wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 19, 2025 1:20 pm

If you are using LMS, and you have a problem with Duplicate Players on the system, there is a documented procedure on the LMS home page on how to deal with these, or you can just click on the following link to view it: https://tinyurl.com/lmsduplicates.

Steve Emmerton
ECF LMS Administrator

Thanks Steve and I'd like to send my appreciation for your help in dealing with my multifarious queries