To MODERATORS: Please STOP moving genuine tournaments!

[Dann Corbit]

That makes sense if you have no interest in tournaments. If you wanted to find out about upcoming events, it seems logical to me to look there.

But hey, what do I know.

[bob]

Leiden, IGT and ACCA

are these human vs human tournaments or program vs program?

Computer vs computer, but ONLY authors can apply. You can't just choose a program and enter it...

[Modern Times]

Computer vs computer, but ONLY authors can apply. You can't just choose a program and enter it...

HG uses the programmers section for his monthly tournament announcements, so a precedent has been set for this. If the intended audience for this is engine authors only, then perhaps the announcement itself could have been posted there.

[Vinvin]

The Tournaments and Matches section is really for home tournaments...

Why do you believe that ?

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi there,

Leiden or other match / tournament constellations ...
Is the same as livening room comp-comp tourneys by users.

Chess programs are playing chess in both cases, not more not less.

Best
Frank

[hgm]

No, it is not the same. It is in fact totally different.

Events that require others to subscribe and participate need exposure, and when they do not get it they will have to be cancelled because there are no participants. 'Basement tourneys' can be started by anyone who has a computer and knows how to download engines. They can keep it totally secret until the tourney is finished, and publish the results only then (or not at all).

99%+ of the stuff posted in the 'tournament and matches' section is about such basement tourneys; there only are a few 'participation' events per year. It is rather idiotic to require potential participants to scan through the tons of basement postings every day just to see if an event solliciting their participation happens to be announced (which would almost never be the case).

The subdivision of the forum was introduced to make it easy for everyone to find the information relevant to them. Not to make it ridiculously hard.

It would be a cause for great concern if we have moderators that cannot understand that.

[Graham Banks]

Events that require others to subscribe and participate need exposure, and when they do not get it they will have to be cancelled because there are no participants.

Couldn't a mass email be sent out to all of the engine authors?
That would give them the necessary information directly. This would surely allay some of the concerns being expressed.

[hgm]

Not all authors make their e-mail address public.

But indeed, it is also possible to abuse power over the forum content to excessively hinder event organizers, and force them to do tons of unnecessary work, by sabotaging the easy and obvious method of achieving their goal. It is not just the potential participants that you can inflict pain on.

It seems pretty absurd to me that you would require an event organizer to collect e-mails of every Chess programmer (including new ones that never participated in any event before), just because someone here prefers to hide that information...

[Jesse Gersenson]

Hi there,

Leiden or other match / tournament constellations ...
Is the same as livening room comp-comp tourneys by users.

Chess programs are playing chess in both cases, not more not less.

Best
Frank

Frank, One does not make travel arrangements for a basement tournament.

Two competing models are being discussed:

a) The user finds the information
b) The information finds the user

Pushing information at users, i.e listing tournament announcements in the general section, because 'otherwise no one will not see the information', is spam.

Sending out an email, as Graham suggests, to engine programmers is a reasonable solution.

A 'sticky' could be added to the top of the Tournaments and Matches section listing events requiring travel arrangements.

Or, a subforum could be added to Tournaments and Matches specifically for such events.

[hgm]

Don't be ridiculous! Announcing a handful of events per year is spam? Then surely announcing new versions of engines, which happens at least 10 times often must be spam. And posting silly positions for engine analysis. It could be said of any posting here that it is 'pushing information at users'. You could also make sub-forums for analysis of Chess positions, and for announcement of engine releases. Perhaps no postings should be allowed at all in the general section?

In fact nothing is 'pushed'. People that are not interested do not have to open postings. It is intricsic to a 'General Topics' section that some 80% of the information doesn't interest you anyway, and the 0.1% extra that event announcements would cause is totally insignificant.

In the past it has been suggested there could be a stick 'Calender' thread in General Topics section in which events could be announced. Nothing came of it, however.