The Irish Chess Union

Manage Officers and Mail Relays

What does this Involve?

There are two main tasks:

1. linking each officer to the member who currently holds that position so that the correct name and phone numbers are displayed on the contacts page,
2. keeping the forwarding addresses of the ICU's mail relays in sync with the personal emails of the current office holders.

The former is managed on this website while relays are managed partly on this website and partly on the website of our email service provider, Mailgun.

Each relay has a ICU address (ending in @icu.ie) and one or more forwarding addresses (personal emails).

There are 3 relevant database tables: officers, players, and relays.

If an officer is linked to:

• no player — then no name or phone numbers are listed for that position (it's unfilled),
• a player — then that player's name and phone numbers will be listed for that officer on the contacts page.

If an officer is linked to:

• no relays (rare, if ever) — then no email address will appear on the contacts page for that officer,
• one relay (the usual case) — then the ICU address of the relay will be listed for that officer,
• more than one relay (rare, but see the FIDE & ECU Delegate example below) — then the ICU addresses of the relays will all be listed for that officer.

Who can Manage Officers and Relays?

How to Change an Incumbent Officer

This is a type of task which will often need to be done when a new executive is voted in. To link an officer with a new member:

• click Officers from the top navigation bar
• find and click the officer you want to change,
• do one of two things:
  • if you know the new incumbent's ICU ID, enter it in the box provided, or
  • if you don't know their ID, search for it using Select Incumbent and click their ID when you've found it,
• click Save.

To update the email relay:

• click Mail Relays from the top navigation bar
• find the relay corresponding to the officer and click the ICU email (the From address),
• click Edit,
• enter the new incumbent's personal email address in the To box,
• click Save.

Alternatively, the changes can be made via the service provider and synced back to the ICU database:

• login to the ICU's Mailgun control panel,
• click Routes,
• find and click the filter expression corresponding to the officer's ICU email address,
• update the forwarding address for the new incumbent's personal email address,
• click Save,
• click Mail Relays from the top navigation bar, scroll to the bottom and click Refresh from Provider which ensures all ICU relays are up-to-date with any changes made via the service provider.

When an Role is Unfilled

It sometimes happens that a position is unfilled. In this case we want:

• the officer still to be displayed on the contacts page but with blanks where the incumbents's name and telephone numbers would normally go,
• emails sent to the officer's standard ICU email address to be relayed to someone else (usually the secretary).

To achieve this, follow the instructions above for changing an incumbent but with the following modifications:

• enter a blank ICU ID when editing the officer,
• use the secretary's personal email for the forwarding address when editing the relay.

Creating, Deleting and Updating Officers

Officers change so rarely that there is no website function to create new positions or delete positions no longer required (a small amount of programming effort would be required to achieve either of these). However, officers can be edited in the following ways:

• as already discussed, they can be linked to different players,
• their rank can be altered to change the order in which they are listed (the lower the rank the higher up they appear),
• their status can be set to inactive, in which case they won't be listed at all (soft delete).

Creating, Deleting and Updating Relays

Relays can only be created or destroyed via Mailgun. Relay forwarding addresses can be edited on Mailgun or, for convenience and because it's so common, on this website as well (see above).

One aspect of relays which is managed exclusively on this website is which officer (if any) each links to. It's fairly rare that one would need to change the links between officers and relays because, for the most part, one relay has been created for each officer and the links will already have been established. The FIDE & ECU Delegate example below describes a scenario where some relinking of officers and relays would be required.

Disabling Relays

In normal circumstances all relays should be enabled. However, in exceptional circumstances, such as the provider's service being down or a problem with our account, then some or all relays can be disabled.

There are two consequences of a relay being disabled:

• if the relay is linked to an officer, the incumbent's personal email will be listed on the contacts page instead of the generic ICU address,
• any emails sent to the ICU address will be stopped by the service provider and not be delivered.

As mentioned in the Privacy Policy, this is the only circumstance where persoanl emails would be publically available on the site.

In order to:

• disable a single relay: edit the relay, untick the Enabled checkbox and click Save,
• enable a single relay: edit the relay, tick the Enabled checkbox and click Save,
• disable all relays: click the Disable All button if it's present (it will be if there's at least one enabled route),
• enable all relays: click the Enable All button if it's present (it will be if there's at least one disabled route).

Not all Relays will be Linked to an Officer

There are more relays than officers and in most cases each officer has only one relay which means there must be some relays not linked to any officer. This is normal and there are good reasons why some ICU addresses should not appear on the contacts page. For example, some, which forward to the webmaster's personal address, are for emails registered with our internet providers (for hosting, domains or payment services) and which members don't need to be informed of. Others, forwarding to the secretary, are for officers that no longer exist (e.g. ICJ editor, IUCA delegate).

Adjusting the Phone Numbers Displayed for an Officer

By default, the contacts page lists all the telephone numbers of each officer, but some officers may not want this.

Configuring which numbers are displayed and which remain hidden is something each officer can manage for themselves, it doesn't require the webmaster. See Privacy Policy.

Extended Example: FIDE & ECU Delegate

This officer is a special case for two reasons:

1. there are two corresponding relays ([email protected] and [email protected]) instead of the usual one,
2. it's theoretically possible that the position could be split in two (FIDE Delegate and ECU Delegate) sometime in the future.

At the time this documentation was written:

• the FIDE & ECU Delegate officer was active, linked to a player and linked to both relays (which forwarded to personal emails of that player),
• the FIDE Delegate and ECU Delegate officers were both inactive (so not listed) and not linked to any players or relays.

If the position were to be split between two different players (A and B) here is how that could be managed:

1. make the FIDE Delegate and ECU Delegate roles active and link them to players A and B respectively,
2. edit the [email protected] relay, link it to the FIDE Delegate officer (instead of FIDE & ECU Delegate) and forward it to A's personal address,
3. edit the [email protected] relay and link it to the ECU Delegate officer (instead of FIDE & ECU Delegate) and forward it to B's personal address,
4. make the FIDE & ECU Delegate officer inactive and unlink it from the former incumbent.