As most of you have probably seen by now, there are new options to link FUMBBL accounts with NAF accounts. For those of you who have a NAF account from before, it's not a very difficult process to do this: Click the link on your coach page, Click to connect/update the NAF account. This redirects you to the NAF site, where you (probably) log in and then grant access to FUMBBL to get your userid and name. Once done, FUMBBL will be able to store your NAF ID and NAF Name in a secure way (it's using OAuth2 as a communication protocol).

So what does this mean, and why do we need this?

With the advent of NAF Online Ratings on the NAF site, there has been a number of NAF rated tournaments run on FUMBBL. I personally think this is amazing, and love that this is an option both for FUMBBL and for The NAF. To allow this to function, and get matches played on FUMBBL be associated with the appropriate NAF account, coaches have in the past been asked to put their NAF Id and Name on their team bio for each tournament.

This is a manual process both for the coaches playing, and for the organizers, who had to manually input this data and deal with typos and erroneous spellings and mistakes. With this manual method, there was also no real way to be sure that someone on FUMBBL actually is the owner of the NAF account they claimed to be (I don't know if this actually was a problem in practice; haven't heard of any cases of this actually happening).

Either way, from the start it was clear to me that an OAuth-based (or some other standard tech) would be the best way to manage this identity synchronization between FUMBBL and The NAF, and after me pestering Stimme about it during the World Cup, and then again a couple of days ago, Stimme got some help from a friend and got the NAF-side parts to work and FUMBBL coaches can now go through the process to fetch their NAF info and store it on FUMBBL for future participation in NAF rated tournaments on here.

There is a small additional detail to mention: The old manually entered data is still there (and can still technically be managed by the appropriate staff). If you have an account with NAF data that has been manually entered, your coach page will have an "Unverified" tag next to the NAF id. Simply go through the linking process (which doesn't really link the accounts, it just uses the process to securely fetch NAF Id and Name from the NAF site), and the tag will disappear.

NAF Names and IDs will appear on coach pages of anyone who has NAF data registered, but you will not see if it's unverified or not at this stage.

Either way, this is a fairly technical thing to have changed, but it's a lot easier for the NAF staff. I encourage anyone who enters a NAF Online tournament and have a NAF account to go through this connection process to reduce the amount of work they have to do on the admin side (and as a side-effect, ratings will appear quicker on the NAF site after a tournament completes).

It's also possible to re-run this process if your NAF name is changed for some reason.