[hrothgar]

Hi Fred

I was curious whether it might be possible to request a significant enhancement to the FD application. Right now, the FD application is a great tool for announcing agreements to the opponents, however, it really isn't integrated into the mechanics of the alert structure. I'm going to throw up what I hope is a relatively simple implementation that should go a long way towards solving this issue.

I'm going to start with a very general concept about what an alert does: An alert is a visual or auditory cue that indicates that a bid has an unexpected meaning. Off course, this begs the whole issue regarding what constitues "unexpected". As I see things, there are two widely divergent theories regarding unexpected bids:

1. Some National Authorities use a framework based on natural = expected. No natural bids are alerted. All artificial bids are alerted.

2. Other National Authorities base their alert systems on deviations from some kind of assumed standard.

While I have my own subjective beliefs regarding which of the two systems is more useful, the alert system is ultimately designed to benefit end users. I suggest that end users should be permitted to configure how the FD applications automatically generates alerts.

Assume for the moment, that come from an NA that uses alert structure 2. At the start of a match I load an FD file that contains the "standard" meaning for bids in my area. For example, if I come from North America I'd (hopefully) be able to load an FD file documenting "Standard American". I would also load a second FD file documenting the system that partner and I are playing (Hypothetically, we might chose to play 2/1 GF rather than SA). Each time the opponents make a bid, the FD application would compare the text string describing their bid with the text string contained in the "Standard American" file. If the two strings match, FD does nothing. If the two strings different, FD would automatically generate an alert for that bid.

If, on the other hand, I come from a NA uses alert system 1, I'd configure FD differently. FD files already contain a field for the disposition of a bid. What if we added a second field indicating whether a bid is natural or artificial. This would allow FD to automatically alert all artificial bids.

In theory, a player could even configure FD to flag all bids that are either unexpect OR artificial, however, I suspect that this would lead to the system alerting 99% of all bids.