[mink]

I am one of several directors for BBO-Germany tourneys. We share the account DBV_01 when directing or creating tourneys. We are running 5 tourneys per week. Access to the tourney is restricted by Filters. We are using "Friends", "no Enemies", "Country" and "Language".

Yesterday I received several complains by Austrians (using the German language, too) who are normally playing the tourney, but were rejected by the filters this time. Setting them to "Friend" solved the problem for each of them. However, many others maybe just accepted the rejection and are now angry for being rejected though they did nothing wrong.

On the other hand, a lot of players had successfully registered who would normally have been rejected by the filters.

It was quite obvious that the language filter was malfunctioning, but yesterday I did not figure out why. Now I think I have found the solution:

In the past, I have noticed that whenever a new version of the BBO web client is automatically invoked, my language setting is English. The next time when I start BBO, it is German again. This was never a problem for me, so I did not report it. But obviously it has happened to the director who created the tourney, as he normally uses the windows version, so he got a new web-client-version when he started BBO in order to direct the Sunday tourney and create the tourneys for the next week. (I had suggested to give the web client a try.) When I asked him he remembered that in fact his language setting had been English. So all the tourneys he created inherited an English language filter, which explains the problem I encountered.

Therefore I suggest the following software changes:

• Make sure that the language setting does not change when a new version of the BBO web client software is launched for the first time
  
• In the dialog for the filters of a tourney, please mention explicitly which language and which country will be used
  
• Maybe enable the creator of the tourney to explicitly change the country and language settings for the tourney
  
• Use the flag set in the profile of the player for the country filter rather than his IP address.

Reason for the last suggestion is, that in the past I have heard that a tourney host who creates a tourney in a foreign country inherits the country that is derived from his IP address. Again, he does not realize this, and the result is a mess.

Karl

[diana_eva]

 mink, on 2013-November-22, 05:40, said:

• ...
• Use the flag set in the profile of the player for the country filter rather than his IP address.

Reason for the last suggestion is, that in the past I have heard that a tourney host who creates a tourney in a foreign country inherits the country that is derived from his IP address. Again, he does not realize this, and the result is a mess.

Karl

I tend to agree with all your suggestions except this last one. Country filter used to be working by flag, rather than by IP. In practice, players who wanted to join a restricted tournament would just change their flag to the one required by that tourney and be able to register without problem, which made the filter quite useless.

[1eyedjack]

 diana_eva, on 2013-November-22, 05:53, said:

I tend to agree with all your suggestions except this last one. Country filter used to be working by flag, rather than by IP. In practice, players who wanted to join a restricted tournament would just change their flag to the one required by that tourney and be able to register without problem, which made the filter quite useless.

How about using the flag of the tourney host, but the IP address of (other) registered players? Maybe I miss the point.

[diana_eva]

 1eyedjack, on 2013-November-22, 07:50, said:

How about using the flag of the tourney host, but the IP address of (other) registered players? Maybe I miss the point.

I missed it, not you I thought he meant flag of players who want to play. Didn't realize he means the host's flag.

[mink]

I was not aware that currently the player's flag is never used. Rather I thought that when somebody registers for a tourney with country filter, the flag set by the player is checked. Using the IP here seems smarter at the first sight. But for our tourneys, this means that a German player with a German flag who is spending his vacation on a Caribbean island cannot play in a BBO-Germany tourney unless he knows how to set the language to German, or he asks us to be included in the friends list. And one of our directors is living in a German area where he has no cable or ADSL access to the internet, and is therefore forced to use a satellite connection. His IP address is Italian. On the other hand, any BBOer who is currently in Germany can play, though maybe he cannot speak German at all.

Maybe the best solution would be that a player only passes the country filter if both flag and IP match the tourney's country setting.

Karl

[barmar]

 mink, on 2013-November-22, 10:25, said:

Maybe the best solution would be that a player only passes the country filter if both flag and IP match the tourney's country setting.

How will that help with the vacationing German?

I'm not sure there's an ideal solution to this, unless we give the option to the tourney creator.