Good evening, everyone.
More and more feedback is coming in and we do listen to your suggestions. Please keep sending them and any other problems you are having to [email protected] and one of our Helpdesk people will be glad to assist you.
Some things that have been changed/added to the system in the past week or so:
- Added the office type Marshal – Youth Rapier
- Added a view of officer reports that includes the answers to the questions for each report type. This will allow baronial, regional, and kingdom officers to peruse the various answers for their officers. It is an interactive report and you can add or remove columns, change sorting, and download the report to a file.
- Fixed an issue where people with “shared” offices (i.e., “At large” type offices such as marshals) could see other reports for that same office. This has been updated to not allow that but yet still allow superior officers to see historical reports for their deputies.
- Fixed the issue with getting an error when deleting an officer report and there were question responses still on the report.
- Added the ability for Kingdom Level officers to “un-submit” an officers report if they submitted it accidentally.
A few other errors I have seen that are common and some solutions to them:
- Unique key violations when filling out a report. There are four things that make each report unique: the year; the reporting quarter; the office being reported on; and the person filing the report. The system will only allow you to file a report for an office that you hold, unless you are the seneschal of a group in which it will allow you to file a report for any office in your group. What I have been finding is that the year and the quarter get duplicated. A person started a report, got part way through it and then had to abandon making further changes. In the past, you would have had to start to file a new report. Now, if you have gotten to adding the questions to the report, the report is saved in the database and you can edit it further until you are ready to submit the report to your superior. Always check the Officer Report List to see if there is a report there already when you get this error. Another case where you might get a unique key error is in the question and response section. The report automatically fills in the questions for you so you should never need to add any questions to the report. If you have two of the same question on the same report, you will get an error. The answer field is quite large and can take quite a bit of information. Be brief but complete and you’ll do just fine.
- Duplicated names in the populace listing – when the data was brought in to the system, users were created from two sets of data. The first was the old award recommendation system. The second was the order of precedence. We made a “best guess” to merge those two sets but it was by no means perfect (matching on free form text strings is hit or miss at best). So, we have been finding duplication from time to time. We have a procedure to merge those records together. Send an email to [email protected] with the SCA Name of the two profiles that need to be merged (if you have the username that is even better). One of the Helpdesk staff will be glad to take care of that for you. Why is this important? If offices get assigned to the wrong user account, and the person is actually using the other account, then reporting doesn’t work for the offices. Most of the offices have been assigned and if you don’t see your office, search for other spellings of your name in the Populace Directory. You may find yourself multiple times (cue the eerie Sci-Fi soundtrack). It’s easy to fix but we can’t fix it if you don’t let us know.
Some upcoming updates:
- A more detailed how to file a report (especially on a narrow screen) video.
- Improvements to editing calendar entries for the Calendar Secretary
- Improvements to the main midrealm.org pages to make certain things work better on mobile devices (i.e., the 30-Day calendar on the front page; the deputy list for officers)
As always, we are open to suggestions. The beauty of this system is that changes are much easier to make and that shortens time needed to get out new functions to you the end-user.
As always, I remain in service to the Kingdom and the Crown,
Master Rijckaert (Richard) vanUtrecht, OP
Middle Kingdom Web Minister