[cjv123]

I'm new around here, and I'm certain this has been discussed before.

I've encountered a series of trollish players, and I realized there is no (obvious) system to provide a reputational feedback on players, and certainly one easily interpretable when granting players seats at your table and when deciding which table to sit yourself at.

I'm thinking something as simple as a "thumbs up/down" tally for a player, next to his/her username, each other player only permitted one vote, at most. With comments inside. Or, perhaps, a standard checklist of trollish behaviors, where you can "check" one if you encounter it.

Sample trolls I've run into during the past 72 hours: complete troll who sits at table, then concedes all tricks. Troll who makes wrong bids so he can play every hand. Troll who abandons game when his own bad bid is revealed, etc. Troll who removes you from table when you point out his mistake.

Anyway please accept my apology for posting this outside existing threads. The programming here is very good and a system of social reputation can easily be added. Else personally I worry I'll find the risk/reward to playing here to not be sufficient. I think this is a great site and I hope it can be cleaned up from the trolls.

[mgoetze]

Yes, similar things have been discussed and I'm afraid BBO management isn't interested in anything of the kind. I would recommend you keep track of people who are nice and try to form a game with them again next time you are looking to play.

[barmar]

Most people use the "Enemy" setting for this. It doesn't provide feedback to other users, but it allows you to keep track of which players you've found objectionable. If you use "Help Me Find a Game", you won't be taken to a table where they're playing, and vice versa.

[billw55]

The "enemy" setting and notes in the player's profile will work for players you have encountered before. But I think the OP is looking for a system that provides the feedback of others, for players you have not met before.

As with any feedback, the result is only as good as what goes in. Chances are that in all the examples given, the players you want to give negative reputation to, will also do so for you. In fact, trolls and fools are probably more likely to give out bad rep indiscriminately. And so the end result is not reliable. I think BBO is making the right choice to omit this feature.

[oryctolagi]

 billw55, on 2016-January-13, 10:25, said:

I think BBO is making the right choice to omit this feature.

Agreed. Allowing players to publicly upvote or downvote other players, is simply offering the trolls carte blanche to form a clique and gang up on someone they don't fancy. I know this - I've been there! (Not in bridge, but in other activities).

Having said that, what wouldn't I give to know what slanders, those whom I've upset have written about me, on my profile! There must have been a few. Like the creature who slung me off a table just because I wouldn't let them UNDO......

[gwnn]

I haven't heard this suggestion that many times before, in fact I first heard of it a few months ago. I think it would be a great addition. I said it there and I'll say it here too, a lot of big sites such as Amazon and eBay have customer reputation already and it works out just fine. Yes, negative votes were a disaster on this forum last time, but I think it's solved in practice because a) you could only vote on someone once, b) you can safely have the voting anonymously, and c) people wouldn't care that much to try some sort of retaliation.

The enemy system converges way too slowly, as I'm sure just about anybody can figure out. One compromise would be to at least have a "marked as friend/enemy ratio" publicly visible. If 90 people marked you as an enemy and only 10 as a friend, well, that doesn't bode well.

[billw55]

 gwnn, on 2016-January-13, 13:21, said:

The enemy system converges way too slowly, as I'm sure just about anybody can figure out. One compromise would be to at least have a "marked as friend/enemy ratio" publicly visible. If 90 people marked you as an enemy and only 10 as a friend, well, that doesn't bode well.

Perhaps. But I think oryctolagi has a valid point as well. Also, jerks that get a poor ratio can just make a new account and go on being jerks.

Maybe it could work. I think it would be necessary to add minimum number of logins for a user's friends and enemies to be counted, to prevent starting multiple new accounts just to add a target user as enemy. Say, 100 or 200 logs, that should surpass the patience of most jerks. Or maybe a minimum number of hands played. (This could work for forum downvotes too - minimum post count).

But overall I am satisfied with the existing system.

[gwnn]

Any counterarguments here can be applied to eBay or Amazon or Yelp, as far as I know, except that on those sites people/the company can lose serious money when people abuse the system. Can anyone name anything that applies to bridge but wouldn't apply to those sites? I don't mean it rhetorically, I'm just looking for a clear case.

[oryctolagi]

While we're on the topic of multiple accounts held by the same person, I wonder what measures BBO is able to take, to police this sort of activity? I need not go into detail as to why this would be a BAD THING - especially on an online Bridge site!

Anyone who's ever been involved in running a forum or similar site, will know that IP addresses are not a reliable check on someone's identity. And proxy servers abound...

One way might be to ban anyone from registering via a free webmail. But that would be rather restrictive. I'm registered on BBO via a webmail myself.

At least, I can categorically state that this is my ONLY account on BBO...

[billw55]

 gwnn, on 2016-January-13, 14:06, said:

Any counterarguments here can be applied to eBay or Amazon or Yelp, as far as I know, except that on those sites people/the company can lose serious money when people abuse the system. Can anyone name anything that applies to bridge but wouldn't apply to those sites? I don't mean it rhetorically, I'm just looking for a clear case.

Yelp is known to be plagued by fake reviews, both positive and negative. I don't know about eBay. On Amazon, I sometimes find positive reviews that sound fake, like marketing copy. Whether this significantly skews the overall rating is hard to say.

Bridge is more personal than shopping. That might make a difference, also hard to say.

[gwnn]

I meant the Amazon reviews of small sellers. There are people who sell used crap and advertise it as better than that. There are also buyers who just whine that a "very good" product had a tiny scratch on it. In theory, there could be concerted efforts to sink small sellers and there could be bad actors who purposely keep selling crap, but in practice, I would venture to guess that nobody would seriously consider shutting down these mutual reviews. I don't know what you mean by more personal than shopping. How about airbnb? Is bridge also more personal than giving your keys to some random stranger, reviewed by other random strangers? In practice, it somehow always works out. People have decent intentions most of the time. The only reason I can see why BBO couldn't implement this is that in airbnb, Amazon, etc, you need to provide the website with some information before you sell/review stuff. Also, you can't review a seller you didn't buy from, just as you can't review a host you didn't stay at. For the first one, yes, that's too bad, but BBO is already banning people who cheat, knowing full well that IP's can be changed. The second one is easily avoided as you would only be able to review people who you've played with or maybe against (opps at your table or in a TM). If you want to start a campaign to smear me, you'll need to keep sitting at my tables with new and new usernames, or to keep bribing my partners. It's a lot of hassle.

[mgoetze]

 oryctolagi, on 2016-January-13, 14:10, said:

While we're on the topic of multiple accounts held by the same person, I wonder what measures BBO is able to take, to police this sort of activity?

Well, they could, in theory, put a symbol on the profile of anyone who has ever purchased BB$. Wouldn't quite guarantee uniqueness but...

[helene_t]

 billw55, on 2016-January-13, 10:25, said:

In fact, trolls and fools are probably more likely to give out bad rep indiscriminately.

A possible solution would be not to count overall rep but to calculate a relative rep, say if two of your friends have enemied me and only one of your friends has friended me then I am probably not a good partner (or opponent) for you.

[cjv123]

So for me, another 24 hours playing solo "Find me a table" (since I'm new none let me sit at "Interesting" ones) has led to roughly 50% games with cold beginners imposing on non-beginner tiers, 25% drive-by trolls as I mentioned above, and 25% the Joy of Bridge. The Signal-to-Noise is too low for me. But I do want to commend the site and its software and some excellent players I've had the privilege to play a few hands with. Adieu.

[mgoetze]

 cjv123, on 2016-January-14, 06:30, said:

So for me, another 24 hours playing solo "Find me a table" (since I'm new none let me sit at "Interesting" ones) has led to roughly 50% games with cold beginners imposing on non-beginner tiers, 25% drive-by trolls as I mentioned above, and 25% the Joy of Bridge. The Signal-to-Noise is too low for me. But I do want to commend the site and its software and some excellent players I've had the privilege to play a few hands with. Adieu.

I also suspect that the tables you can get to via "find me a table" are, on average, worse than the ones where seating is restricted. Note that the "interesting tables" are a very small subset of the latter, clicking "list all tables" is the way to go. Unfortunately, trying to find tables by that method using the web client can be frustrating unless you have an excellent low-latency connection to BBO's servers...

[Vampyr]

A backgammon server I used to use generated a reputation based on the number of matches left unfinished. Something like this would not address all bad behaviour by bridge players, but it might be better than nothing.

[mgoetze]

 Vampyr, on 2016-January-14, 06:43, said:

A backgammon server I used to use generated a reputation based on the number of matches left unfinished. Something like this would not address all bad behaviour by bridge players, but it might be better than nothing.

You can get something like this on BBO by starting your own table and setting the minimum completion rate to 95%.

(Incidentally I don't understand why BBO only allows the minimum completion rate to be set in steps of 5%. I consider a 100% requirement excessive and 95% to be rather low, if I could set it freely I would probably choose 98%.)

[billw55]

 cjv123, on 2016-January-14, 06:30, said:

So for me, another 24 hours playing solo "Find me a table" (since I'm new none let me sit at "Interesting" ones) has led to roughly 50% games with cold beginners imposing on non-beginner tiers, 25% drive-by trolls as I mentioned above, and 25% the Joy of Bridge. The Signal-to-Noise is too low for me. But I do want to commend the site and its software and some excellent players I've had the privilege to play a few hands with. Adieu.

I wonder how often this is happening and we do not hear about it on the forum.

[kuphrer]

I think what really would work is not flagging the player, but flagging a deal a player has recently played. The database is already there-BBO stores everyone's recently played deals for several months- so it wouldn't be much of a work to implement. List all the flagged deals and let people decide for themselves.

[oryctolagi]

 mgoetze, on 2016-January-13, 16:22, said:

Well, they could, in theory, put a symbol on the profile of anyone who has ever purchased BB$. Wouldn't quite guarantee uniqueness but...

Sorry, I don't quite see how this helps catch the sock-puppets. What may be of concern, is that you could get someone partnering themself - or kibitzing at a table they're also playing at.

 cjv123, on 2016-January-14, 06:30, said:

So for me, another 24 hours playing solo "Find me a table" (since I'm new none let me sit at "Interesting" ones) has led to roughly 50% games with cold beginners imposing on non-beginner tiers, 25% drive-by trolls as I mentioned above, and 25% the Joy of Bridge. The Signal-to-Noise is too low for me. But I do want to commend the site and its software and some excellent players I've had the privilege to play a few hands with. Adieu.

This doesn't quite chime with what you said in your original post. There, you were complaining about unsportsmanlike conduct such as walking away in mid-hand, irrational concessions, and so on. So, are you now saying you have a problem playing with beginners?

Every bridge player was a beginner once.