[cher 2276]

What's the rule, or where can I read it? I have truly enjoyed the express tourneys, but guess I have been banned for some reason. This is very disappointing.

[Bbradley62]

The Automated Fun tourney says "exclude runners". It would be much more helpful if it said "90+% tourney completion rate required", or whatever the actual rate is.

[nigel_k]

Actually it would be even better to say something that tells peoople who have played for years and have a 100% completion rate that they still can't get in.

[bbutcher85]

 fred, on 2010-November-20, 10:35, said:

The fundamental reason why this is a problem is because we have no way to identify the actual people behind a given user ID and no reliable way to get rid of or "punish" those who behave badly.

If someone using a given ID behaves badly, we can block that ID from logging in or restrict the priviledges of that ID, but there is nothing we can effectively do to prevent that person from creating another ID (please don't bother telling me why I am wrong about this - whatever method you propose will have a relatively easy loophole around it and I don't want to get involved in posting the details of these loopholes). If an abuser resurfaces with a new ID and if new IDs are not restricted from certain privileges, it is all but certain that the pattern of abuse will continue.

One advantage of the current approach is that abusers are forced to improve their behavior if they want to continue to be able to play in tournaments.

As you point out, the disadvantage of this approach is that new BBO members who are destined to become good citizens on our site have a harder time establishing themselves as such.

It is unfortunate that we (as the people who run BBO) have been forced to make what we think is a "least of evils" decision in this area, but I suppose in a sense this is part of the price that all BBO members pay for having access to a free online bridge site - this issue would likely be a non-issue if we charged a membership fee for basic access to BBO, but that is not a "solution" that we are prepared to consider.

Even if you do not agree with our decision, I hope you now understand why we made it. This whole area is very new and it is not unlikely that we will refine our current policies as we learn more about the impact of what we have done and as we receive feedback from our members.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[bbutcher85]

Some of us "new " players are long time ACBL members who adhere to the "zero tolerance" policy, and would never leave a tournament or a hand until the play is completed. I understand the problem as in "take me to the first available table" play I encounter many runners. Sometimes I have had 10-12 different opponents and/or partners on a single hand. That is very frustrating and not fun. I also realize that I and others sometimes lose internet connectivity or are dropped for some reason beyond our control. I have also run across players calling partner, or opponent "idiot" or similar, and if I am table host, I will boot them instantly. If you classify someone as "new" anytime they fail to play in 10 tournaments in the last 30 days, that is not fair. A better method is to classify someone as "accepted" when they have shown good behavior and have played in at least 10 tournaments without running. Please note that you have records of our ACBL player number connected to our username for members of ACBL.

Bob Butcher
ACBL Bronze Life Master
over 40 years playing bridge

[Bbradley62]

Last I knew, it was 10 tournaments in 60 days. Has this changed?

There are plenty of open-enrollment tournaments to play in order to attain your TCR. It is also not at all reasonable to expect BBO to look up your attendance record at in-person ACBL tournaments; off-line behavior is not necessarily indicative of expected on-line behavior.

[barmar]

 Bbradley62, on 2013-December-11, 22:03, said:

Last I knew, it was 10 tournaments in 60 days. Has this changed?

No, he's confusing Board Completion Rate with Tournament Completion Rate. BCR requires 10 games in 30 days, TCR is 10 tourneys in 60 days.

Having an ACBL# is no indication that you have a reliable Internet connection. We don't really care whether disconnections are intentional. They inconvenience other players regardless of the reason. So if you have a flaky connection, which causes you to drop out of tourneys too much, you'll get a bad TCR and be blocked from tourneys that use this statistic. But there are plenty of tourneys that have no TCR restriction (none of the ACBL tourneys do).

[Cthulhu D]

 barmar, on 2013-December-12, 11:02, said:

No, he's confusing Board Completion Rate with Tournament Completion Rate. BCR requires 10 games in 30 days, TCR is 10 tourneys in 60 days.

Having an ACBL# is no indication that you have a reliable Internet connection. We don't really care whether disconnections are intentional. They inconvenience other players regardless of the reason. So if you have a flaky connection, which causes you to drop out of tourneys too much, you'll get a bad TCR and be blocked from tourneys that use this statistic. But there are plenty of tourneys that have no TCR restriction (none of the ACBL tourneys do).

Why isn't it lifetime? It's really annoying when you use the service infrequently.

[barmar]

 Cthulhu D, on 2013-December-13, 06:51, said:

Why isn't it lifetime? It's really annoying when you use the service infrequently.

Just because you had a good ISP 5 years ago doesn't mean your current ISP is OK.

It also would slow down the program that calculates the ratings every day, having to scan back through years of records instead of a limit period.

[Bbradley62]

 barmar, on 2013-December-13, 09:34, said:

It also would slow down the program that calculates the ratings every day, having to scan back through years of records instead of a limit period.

The program wouldn't scan years of records each day; it would do that once to create two baseline datapoints (tournaments entered and tournaments completed) then add one day's worth to each field each day.

[Antrax]

I agree with the former, but surely you know how to calculate a rolling average, barmar.

[barmar]

 Antrax, on 2013-December-13, 09:39, said:

I agree with the former, but surely you know how to calculate a rolling average, barmar.

Yeah, but it's a PITA in SQL, especially since the query has to work for both players that already have an average and those that don't yet.

But this is academic. As I said, we have a good reason for only considering recent activity. We want a rating that reflects your current connection quality, not what it was like months or years ago.

Please try to understand that these ratings are not intended as an assessment of you, the player. They try to assess how likely you are to get disconnected from BBO, whether intentionally or not. Recent activity is likely to be the best indicator of this. Having a poor Internet connection doesn't make you a bad person, but it does cause you to inconvenience other players.