Beta release of My EBU

Today we're pleased to release a sneak preview of our new members area, now renamed My EBU. It's not finished and there are still some missing features, but we wanted to share some of the new things with everyone, particular those involving the NGS. This blog post will go through a few of the details.

Navigation

The first thing you'll notice is that My EBU looks quite different from the old Members Area. We're using more modern tools to develop and style things, and it should hopefully function well on phones and tablets too. Navigation is done through the menu along the top of the page or, if you're on a narrow screen, through the hamburger icon in the top right. Clicking on a menu item will show that page in the main window, or drop down some more options.

Sessions

The sessions list now shows your partner's name, to help you remember which event it is, and it fixes a few issues we had with the scores from Swiss Pairs and some teams events. You can also click on the NGS par score (the +/- value) to see how many boards were played and, in the case of a teams event, what your pair scored. Clicking on the session name will bring up the results, along with the NGS changes of every pair. One big change in the results page is that for a teams event you can now click on "Show Pairs" in order to see the ranking for the pairs (usually scored by Cross-IMPs), and how their grade changed. Finally, there's now a facility to filter the sessions list which makes it much easier to find that session you're looking for. Just type in the name of the club, or your partner, or even the session ID if you know it, and the list will show only the sessions that match the criteria.

NGS

The NGS information page has also gained a lot of new information. The graph has been spruced up (try dragging your mouse over it to zoom in) and the partnership list now shows your partner's grade, to save you having to look it up in the public area. The Latest Updates table should also help answer a lot of queries we get about how your grade is changing. It could previously get a bit confusing if sessions were deleted, or rescored, or if old sessions started getting expired from three years ago. This line-by-line breakdown of what's been happening should hopefully clear up a lot of these things.

Reorganisation

A few things have moved around a bit. The electronic version of the magazine now comes under the Magazines menu and if you're looking for your account balance with the EBU, you can find this under Credit History in the Accounts menu. Oh, and if you want to log out, you can find this under the Account menu at the far right.

Clubs

For club/county administrators, things have been similarly revamped, including the same much-improved sessions list. One notable new feature is Absent Members which you can find under the Reports menu. We often get clubs asking us for better ways to manage their membership list and cull lapsed members and this should provide a good way to track them down. Clubs can also now see their balance with the EBU, in the Credit History page via the Accounts menu.

Leagues

The League Management System that many clubs and counties use has been totally overhauled to work with the new My EBU, and we'll be making this available very soon, once we've transferred the data across.

All feedback welcome

As I said, this isn't a finished product yet and you will notice some key things missing, but these will be added in the next few months. With this "beta" release we wanted to get it out there for some member feedback, so if you find anything broken or behaving peculiarly then drop us a message or leave a comment and we'll take a look. If things do go wrong, just go back to the old Members Area which will stick around until everything has moved across.