Latest revision as of 19:37, 6 January 2022

Web Committee procedures are used by the members of Web Committee to perform routine tasks.

This is a living document; the contents are updated as procedures are refined and developed.

Committee roster updates

When any NASPA committees invite new members or members retire or change roles, Web Committee updates the committee roster as follows:

1. Verification: all changes in committees, committee leadership and committee memberships may be authorized by Executive Committee. Changes in committee membership or members’ roles may also be authorized by the any of the chairpersons of the committee. Committee members may also resign by their own announcement.
2. NASPAWiki access:
   • We used to have to manually add NASPA committee users to the NASPAWiki user list.
   • As of 2017-08-02, we made custom code changes that permitted any current NASPA committee member may use their regular NASPA ID and password to sign onto NASPAWiki; they no longer need to keep track of separate authentication information.
   • As of 2020-08-03, we determined that a MediaWiki security update had partially broken this mechanism. New committee members now need to have local MediaWiki accounts created for them manually, but can thereafter log in using their NASPA credentials. This can be done from the command line with: www-data% php5 files/wiki/maintenance/createAndPromote.php AAnnnnnn RANDOM-UNUSED-PASSWORD. Note that the username is case-sensitive.
3. Mailing list update: our mailing list administrators (Chris Cree, John Chew or Dallas Johnson) shall update the mailing lists as appropriate. When adding a member, follow up with them to make sure they accept the emailed invitation.
4. Database update: Use the add-to-committee or remove-from-committee Committee Services to update the database.
5. Contact page update: create the contact page if necessary, copying an existing committee member’s page to get the database access right, update the contact information as needed (do not publish private contact information without permission).
6. Membership number: if the member is not already a committee member, ask if the member prefers a CM-series membership number
7. Notifications: update the breaking news page as appropriate; post to Twitter and Facebook; notify iContact staff for weekly mailing by sending email to info@scrabbleplayers.org.

Contact page updates

Our web site shall have a personal contact page for each current and former committee member, person with specific duties (spokespersons, NSC division leaders, office staff etc.), person of the year, and national champion.

1. Create the contact page when the person is added to the applicable roster (such as committee members). List the person’s roles on the contact page. Link the pages both ways (person to role and role to person).
2. Contact the player to determine what contact information (phone and/or email) should be listed on the page. Do not list any private contact information without the person’s permission. (You may list public information, such as the person's name and official roles and the place of residence as listed on the public member search page.)
3. Categories: add category tags in this order as appropriate:
   1. Champions
   2. Person of the Year
   3. Committee members
   4. Former committee members
   5. Tournament Directors

Creating a Committee

Creating a new Committee should only be done at the request of a member of the Executive Committee, who should provide the name of the new committee, its initial chair, and any other initial members.

1. Use the add-committee, set-committee-email and set-committee-mandate command-line tools to create the committee in the database.
2. Follow the Committee Roster Updates procedure to add initial members to the committee.
3. Create a NASPAWiki page for the committee by copying an existing committee page.
4. Follow the Creating a Committee Yahoo! Group procedure.
5. Ask the committee chair to read the Committee rules page

Creating Committee Yahoo! Groups

Each NASPA committee needs a Yahoo! Group in which to conduct and archive its official correspondence, and to offer an email address to which public inquiries may be directed. We currently use the yahoogroups.com system for doing so. Requests for new group creation should be directed to the Web Committee, who should follow these steps to ensure that the group is correctly configured.

1. Assign the group the category Entertainment & Arts
2. Give it a name that starts with “naspa-”
3. Specify English at the group’s primary language.
4. List the group in the Yahoo! Groups directory.
5. Specify the committee NASPAWiki page as the group website.
6. Specify that all web tool permissions are member-only, and enable chat.
7. Specify that membership is restricted (requires approval, to prevent spammers and other unauthorized joiners), do not allow members to hide their email addresses, and leave the welcome message at the default for the committee chair to edit.
8. Specify that anyone may post messages (to receive public inquiries), replies go to all members, moderation is for new members (so that spam does not get posted automatically), attachments are stored in email and not on site (so that people can view attachments offline) spam filtering is on (not that it works), and the archive is accessible only to members.
9. Manually add (“from an existing list”) the following people to the list, grant them all administrator privileges and specify that the receive all admin email notifications: the committee chair (or cochairs), Chris Cree, John Chew, another Web Committee member willing to take responsibility for the group if available, and any committee members whose preferred group email address is known.
10. Use the web interface to invite all committee members to join the group, and follow through to make sure that they do so without difficulty.
11. Make sure each committee member’s individual message posting settings are set to unmoderated, overriding the group default above.

Director FTP account creation

Follow these steps to create a director FTP account for use in live coverage of a NASPA sanctioned tournament.

1.  % sudo ~poslfit/bin/make-director-user <naspa-id>
2.  % sudo passwd <naspa-id>
3. communicate login information to new user

Problems receiving Yahoo! Groups messages

Follow these steps to help diagnose why a user may not be receiving Yahoo! Groups messages.

1. Go to the group website, click on Management > Manage Members > Bouncing, see if the user is listed. If they are listed as Soft Bouncing, follow the instructions to try to reactivate them. If they are listed as Hard Bouncing, ask the user to resubscribe.
2. Go to the group website, click on Members, Members, search for the user, make sure they are set to receive Individual Emails or Daily Digest (not No Email).
3. Ask the user if they are receiving other Yahoo! Groups email at their same address. If yes, and if you have administrative access to those other groups, check that the user is in fact ubscribed at the same address. If yes, their mail client software is likely hiding the specific group’s messages from them for some reason.
4. Ask if they are receiving any other email from other sources.
5. Ask if their mail client software is configured to automatically group email into threads or conversations, and if they are aware that it might be hard to see new messages at the end of long ongoing discussions. Some mail software may also automatically put a user’s own posts into their Sent Mail folder and not their in-box.
6. Ask if they checked all of their spam traps (some users may have separate spam folders at their ISP, company or institution, as well as on their personal machines).

NASPAWiki editors

If a NASPA committee member complains about the cryptic login message

 Auto-creation of a local account failed: Automatic account creation is not allowed

the most common cause is entering their username in using lower-case letters; suggest that they enter it capitalized.

As of 2022, MediaWiki code changes have broken something again, and it may be necessary to use maintenance/createAndPromote.php to create the user first (all caps) using an impossible password.

See also naspa-auth.log for debug information about the authentication system.

The rest of these instructions were obsoleted in 2017, when we extended MediaWiki's authentication method to accept NASPA internal authentication from committee members.

Follow these steps to create a new NASPAWiki login for a person that will be editing web content.

1. Create the user: current convention assigns each user their preferred email username (e.g., if their email address is jjchew@math.utoronto.ca, their Wiki username is jjchew). Assign a secure random password.
2. Create a contact page for the user.
3. Create a Wiki user page for the person and redirect it to the contact page. This allows every entry in Wiki page edit history to be linked to the actual person who performed the edit.

Yearend Tasks

Perform the following tasks close to the end of the year:

Perform the following tasks close to the beginning of the year:

• Update Tournament results, Ratings and SOWPODS rating system for the new year.
• Increment the year in the webpage inc/std-bot.html.
• Increment the year in the webpage wiki/LocalSettings.php.
• Increment the year where appropriate in scripts in ~scrab/bin
• Increment the year where appropriate in scripts in http://www.../cgi-bin

NASPAWiki password recovery

The following instructions were obsoleted in 2017, when we extended MediaWiki's authentication method to accept NASPA internal authentication from committee members.

Follow these steps when an authorized NASPAWiki editor forgets their username and/or password

1. Find their username in Special:ListUsers. It should be the username portion of their email address at the time that they became a NASPAWiki editor. It is 'not' their NASPA ID.
2. Generate a random password and assign it using Special:EditUser.
3. Email them the new password and instruct them to change it right away.

Zyzzyva Offline Licence Activation

Follow these steps to respond to a member request for the activation of a Zyzzyva licence on a computer that cannot be connected to the Internet.

1. Check that the member has provided the uuid and a nickname for their Zyzzyva device.
2. Verify their membership expiry date.
3. Optionally, use the get-zyzzyva-info to get and check the uuid and nickname provided against any previously provided values.
4. Go to http://scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/check-zzl.pl?naspa=NASPAID&nickname=NICKNAME&uuid=UUID replacing the values of NASPAID, NICKNAME and UUID with the correct ones for the member; this will download an activation certificate.
5. Email the member the .ZZA activation certificate file, ask them to open the Licenses dialog, click on Add Licenses..., select the .ZZA file type (the default is .ZZL), and open the emailed file.

Zyzzyva Offline Licence Creation

Follow these steps to respond to a member request for the issuance of a Zyzzyva licence on a computer that cannot be connected to the Internet.

1. Verify their NASPA ID and membership expiry date.
2. Use the get-zyzzyva-info command-line tool to see if they have a previously issued licence, and increment the serial number if necessary. If they have no previous licence, use 1.
3. Use the make-zzl command-line tool with arguments --issuance-subject NASPA:NASPAID --issuance-serial SERIAL --issuance-date IDATE --validity-not-after EXPIRY > NASPAID.zzl replacing the values of NASPAID, SERIAL, IDATE and EXPIRY with the correct ones for the member
4. Email the member the .ZZL licence certificate file