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# Players management

The players are obviously the cornerstone of the whole system, mainly from the point of view of their participation to the tourneys, but also as potential users of the system itself: when a player is assigned a nickname and a password he will be able to log in into the system and insert new players, championships, tournaments and so on.

## Menu actions

In addition to the standard actions the menu at the top contains the following items:

Players management

Tourneys
  Opens the management of the tourneys which the selected players participated to
Duplicates
  Switches from the normal visualization of the players to the one showing potential duplicates
Distribution
  Show the distribution of the players around the world

## Insert and edit

Player’s first name and last name are mandatory, while nickname may be used either to provide an account or to disambiguate homonyms. When changes are committed SoL does check for the presence of players with a similar name to avoid duplicates.

Hint

Usually the nickname of the player is shown in the interface and on printouts. When the nickname is used only for the authentication purpose, we suggest to compose it using the last name plus the first letter of the first name, or the other way around, possibly dropping spaces or quote characters: SoL recognizes these cases and omits the nickname, with the goal of reducing clutter in the interface and printouts.

In other words, for the player “John De Beers”, in the following cases the nickname will be omitted:

- `john`
- `de beers`
- `debeers`
- `jdebeers`
- `jde beers`
- `debeersj`
- `de beersj`
- `johnd`
- `djohn`

Player’s sex, birthdate, nationality and club are optional and used to compute different kinds of ranking, while language and email can be used to send email messages.

Very often to be accepted as a participant to international events a player must have the citizenship of the country he plays for, and usually he must be affiliated to the federation of the same country.

The responsible is usually the user that inserted that particular person: the information related to the player are changeable only by him (and also by the administrator of the system).

The portrait may be any image (preferred formats are `.png`, `.jpg` or `.gif`) and will be used in his personal page. Even if the image will be scaled as needed, it is recommended to assign reasonable sized images (the program imposes a limit of 256Kb).

## Tourney registration

Adding other players

When you prepare a new tournament and want to subscribe the participant players, the add... action of the Competitors panel on the left of the tourney window will open the players window, where you can select one or more players (the usual `shift`-click and `ctrl`-click allow to extend the selection).

The grid automatically shows only the players not yet present in the current tourney. By default it also shows only the players considered active, i.e. those who partecipated to at least one tourney in the last year: there is a Show all players button in the lower right corner to toggle between this view and the show all view.

To add the selected players you can drag and drop them into the left panel of the tourney’s management window, or more simply you can use the Insert selected players button, if present.

## Merging players

Potentially duplicated players

Sometime a player gets registered twice (or more) with slightly different names, for whatever reason. The typical case is when the same player partecipates to different tourneys: being known with different names, his results cannot be correctly summarized in the championship’s ranking, where he appears more than once, with different aliases.

In this situation a merge is needed, that is, his various aliases must be unified into a single person, possibly that with the right and complete name, his canonical name; also, those names must be replaced in every tourney he partecipated to with the canonical one and finally deleted from the database.

This can be done by selecting the wrong aliases to be unified and `ALT`-dragging (that is, dragging the selected names keeping the `ALT` key pressed) them over the right name. You must of course filter the players so that all the names are visible in a single page at the same time, possibly prepending a temporary marker (for example `**`) to the players’ last name and filtering on that marker.

The server application will ensure that the operation is possible, for example you’ll get an error if the replacement would cause a conflict.

To make the task easier, the Duplicates action in the menu may be handy, because it applies a particular filter to the list of players showing only those that appear to be duplicated: the first and the last name of the players are compared and only those with very similar names, tipically differing only by a couple of letters, are shown.

Warning

Do not perform this cleanup while you are setting up a new tourney, as this may easily do the wrong thing with regard to not-yet-committed changes: close the tourney management window!

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