| State | No. of Members December 2023 |
Voting Numbers |
| Australian Capital Territory | 23 | 1 |
| New South Wales | 110 | 2 |
| Queensland | 71 | 2 |
| South Australia | 30 | 1 |
| Tasmania | 22 | 1 |
| Victoria | 137 | 2 |
| Western Australia | 49 | 1 |
CASPA COORDINATOR’S REPORT 2024 - Carol Johnsen
Australian National Championship
Congratulations to Naween Fernando 2023 Champion
Masters/State Team Challenge 2023
Congratulations to Edward Okulicz, Masters Champion and to the Queensland team of Liz Blanch, Sheryl Davidson and Jane Brown.
WESPAC 2023
Congratulations to David Eldar, his second time as World Champion (last time 2017) held in Las Vegas.
WESPA YOUTH 2023
Great efforts in Trang, Thailand from Ronnie Bennett (15th), Ashwin Page (37th), Vinh Nguyen (55th) and Kelvin Korn (90th). Thank you to Tony Hunt and Tsa Ng for their continued efforts in this regard.
ALCHEMIST CUP
A shame that Michael Tang has now cancelled this very popular event.
WORD LIST
CASPA Presidents have voted that CSW21 be the accepted word list.
CHRIS MAY MEMORIAL BOARD
CASPA Presidents have agreed that a memorial trophy/prize be presented at the Nationals each year.
The Web site for Scrabble Australia has many pages, some of them obsolete or outdated, as a legacy of several webmasters over the years, starting with Steve Sunter.
Some parts don't work as well as they used to. The FileZilla program for updating no longer works. The cgi programming largely implemented by Edward Okulicz now struggles to keep up because of the sheer volume of data from over 3000 tournaments dating from 1998. Edward and I are now unwilling to try to troubleshoot this aspect of cgi programming. Edward suggests that WESPA might help with a better method. The page https://scrabble.org.au/tournaments/cgi-bin/recentinfo.cgi seems to work well enough giving a quick summary of recent and upcoming tournaments.PHP programming is not supported by our new host halcyon. This had been used by me to process forms, particularly for tournament entry. Tony Hunt asked me to create a form for people to express interest in Youth Scrabble. Others have done something like this, for instance in Victoria and Western Australia, using their own private Google or Microsoft accounts, which seems to work quite well.
Many people now access our site using a mobile phone. Accordingly some pages have been rewritten to be adaptable to be more mobile friendly. For instance the front page reflows as one column or several columns depending on platform.
On a mobile phone, clicking on an email adddress or a phone number eg in the tournament calendar will send an email or ring a number. But this seldom works on a computer screen.
Unlike WESPA, our site is constantly worked on to keep it up to date. The tournament calendar is manually edited freuently as tournament organisers or state presidents keep me informed. The displays for recent tournaments are updated automatically by the ratings officer, either by offsite programming which is ten uploaded or with onsite programming which can sometimes fail. The front page tries to keep fresh by occasionally showing news items from major happenings around the country. Information on state committees, clubs erc is updated when I am told. Minutes of the annual CASPA AGM are displayed on our site once ratified, eg https://scrabble.org.au/about/docs/24AGM.html
One feature that is occasionally used is to give almost live updates of progress during a tournament. I have written software to do this by a local Perl program toushow.pl which reads the TOU file and spits out web pages which can then be uploaded, eg at the end of each round. I have operated this software at many events over the years. Paul Richards also knows how to do so.
An agenda item for the 2024 CASPA asked for a system for people to advise corrections and changes to the website. At the foot of the main page, it tells you that you can contact webmaster@scrabble.org.au to advise such changes and people do so quite regularly. I have recently reworked the main page to show links higher on the page as a result of a suggestion.
I am willing to act as webmaster for the next year, but if anyone would like to work on all or part of the site, I would be happy to transition.
The work of ratings officer meshes with the webmaster in several respects. Both posts being filled by Barry Harridge makes communication easy.
The webmaster updates the tournament calendar from time to time as they are informed. This helps the rating officer anticipate when results are in, and occasionally nudges for getting the TOU file.
The ratings officer has to inspect the TOU file. The filename may be changed to something easy to find later, eg BALL24.TOU, the event name may be edited for ease of recognition when displayed eg Ballarat Open. Badly spelt names may need to be fixed, and markers like tildes or @24 etc need to be deleted. The prior ratings come from rating.dat. This has many names. Some players who have not played for 8 or more years are archived in oldrats.txt and occasionally need to be retrieved. Players who have died are noted in oldrats.txt with the date of death.
The program plinratS.pl is then run. This creates files like BALL24.STA and BALL24.txt. The BALL24.txt is a human readable summary which may need to be posted to the mailing group, but in many cases this is not necessary, since the tournament organiser may have run pratcooker locally to prepare a .txt file for display. The updated rating.dat is also created.
The ratings officer then puts files into their local storage as eg /tournaments/24/VIC/BALL24.TOU and /tournaments/24/VIC/BALL24.TOU. They also update a very big text file will well over 3000 lines called archive.txt which lists every file in order eg
2024/QLD/QMARMAD.TOU
2024/VIC/FNS2203.TOU
2024/SA/SEAFORDM.TOU
From local storage these files are uploaded to the corresponding parts on the Scrabble Australia website. A program FlingFTP is useful for this. Once these steps are done, results are viewable by all, notably at https://scrabble.org.au/tournaments/cgi-bin/recentinfo.cgi
The ratings officer then runs several local perl programs which search through results of the previous several months to calculate qualification statistics for eg AMSC, WSC, TT, WYSC etc. FlingFTP then updates these to our website.
Perhaps once a month the ratings officer will run a program records.pl which calculates things like high game score etc and displys them at http://scrabble.org.au/tournaments/records/index.htm . However some data for this like high opening score, long word etc can only be found from information submitted. I suggest that tournament organisers be aware of this and encourage people to submit superior records.
The work has to be done carefully and takes an hour or so each week.
Occasionally the ratings officer is told of a mistake in a score. The ratings officer fixes this although it has to be done carefully.
There is a mechanism for planned redundancy in that when a TOU file is sent to nro@scrabble.org.au the file is actually sent to three people, Barry Harridge, Martin Waterworth and Edward Okulicz so that unexpected absences can be coped with. In the last few years, no fallback has actually been required.
I have outlined these aspects of the job, so that if anyone else would like to take on the job, they are welcome, and I could provide support and advice. They could act as shadow for a while if they wish.
I am willing to serve for the upcoming year, but would be happy to surrender the job.
Barry Harridge (National Ratings Officer)Income Statement
CASPA 2023 Calendar Year
1 January 2023 - 3 January 2024
Balance Brought Forward $7,854.70
REVENUE
Levies 8,926
Net Revenue $8,926.00
EXPENSES
Insurance 1,596
WESPAC Subsidies 1,100
Nationals Logo 20.98
AMSTC Grant 3,000
Nationals Grant 3,000
WESPA Membership* 232.61
*Payment was made on 30 December 2022 however was not
counted in 2022 expenses due to an oversight
Total expenses $8,949.59
Net income (loss) -$23.59
Closing Balance $7,831.11
Income Statement
CASPA Youth 2023 Calendar Year
1 Janaury 2023 - 31 December 2023
Balance Brought Forward $1,937.57
REVENUE
Donations 1,540
Total Income $1,540.00
EXPENSES
Tournament Reimbursements 110
Youth T-Shirts 323.15
Wespa Youth Cup Travel
Reimbursement 600
Accommodation Battle of Brains 99.75
Total Expenses $1,132.90
Net Balance $407.10
Closing Balance $2,344.67
MOTION: THAT THE COORDINATOR ORGANISES THE INVITATIONS FOR QUALIFIERS FOR
THE MASTERS/STATE CHALLENGE EACH YEAR.
Moved: Jane Taylor Seconded: Paul Richards CARRIED.
National Women's Championship
MOTION: THAT CASPA COMMITS TO SANCTIONING
& PROMOTION OF AN ANNUAL NATIONAL WOMEN'S CHAMPIONSHIP.
Moved: Jane Taylor Seconded: Paul Richards CARRIED.
The meeting agreed that funding for the Masters/State Challenge and Nationals to be placed on the 2025 AGM Agenda.
The meeting agreed that all motions must be on the agenda no later than 2 weeks before the AGM.
Other items of interest to be pursued included: