Open letter to the BBO Community

Dear BBO Family members,

The BBO has grown tremendously in the last two years. At any time you log on, day or night, you will most likely find more than 2000 and often well more than 3000 people involved in fun games of bridge, or fun discussions of range from Bridge to the meaning of life, to how the blackhawks did last night, and yes, sadly, to who is cheating where on the BBO.

Fred and Uday have created a wonder site, where you can setup your own private clubs, join many public clubs, watch world class players trying their best to play well, or participate in the may FREE educational opportunities for beginners like Shep's classes or the dozens of other weekly activities in the Beginner/Intermediate Lounge started by my personal hero, hallway .

The site is free to use, and was SET UP to be self-policing. However, we do have a team of very hard working, non-paid yellows who donate their time to make things run smoothly with very little thanks for the extra effort they put in. So I will say it here, thank you yellow guys.

While the BBO is free, life here is pretty much like the days of the old wild west. Land grabbers are rushing to stake out new territories, shifting alliances are being formed, and if you allow me to continue the wild west analogy, battles for "water rights" are constant and vicious. The only "law" most often is street justice on this site. Sure, if you call someone bad names, particularly using vulgar language, the penalty can be swift and automatic. If you constantly are leaving tables in the middle of hands, you can expect interaction with a yellow will be forth coming. If you accuse someone of being a cheater in public, and you will find very quickly that your actions are considered a worse crime than if the cheating took place at all. The volunteer “yellow sheriffs” can handle those type of cases as they are straight forward. But for some other situations, for which these unpaid volunteers are just not equipped to handle nor to speak with the full force of the BBO behind them.

Let me state just two such cases. The first is when you actually report a cheater. Here the volunteer yellows most often are not sophisticated enough as a bridge player to determine if cheating is the only explanation for what occurred. And even if they were sofphicatated enough, cheating carries a much WORSE stigma than being rude a real, so an honest to goodness staff member (uday) has to look into all the cheating allegations.

Does Uday do a good job checking cheating allegations? Apparently the consensus based upon the interest in cheating thread is no, he doesn't. But he is only one person, and he has lot of other work to do, so he can't spend a lot of time looking into any such allegation. And with 200+ tables going nearly 24 hours a day, how many cheating reports do you think he gets a week? And how much time do you think he can spare for detailed investigations of these allegations. I have thought several clear cut cases exist where cheaters have been uncovered, proof laid out, and the cheaters have “gotten away with it”, because either the lack of, or apparent lack of, disciplinary action being taken. However, if you think about the time involved and the resources involved in proving to within a reasonable certainty that some cheated, you will see that the BBO’s self-policing design does not have the resources to throw at such a problem in what might otherwise look like a reasonable manner. It would be much better if the individual tournament directors policed their own events to stop cheating. And if you run into cheaters during play in open room? Simply don't play at tables against people you think are cheating. Self-policing is the best policy here until something more formal is adopted.

The second item for which YELLOWS are not equipped to handle are ones where the facts are in dispute and may involve dozens of gray area violations where it is not even clear that any official BBO site rules have been broken, but the general feeling is that certain actions involved where inappropriate or highly inappropriate. With more than 100,000 members, it is obvious that many members will not get along well with other members. That is unavoidable. I know that petty bickering fights going on daily and our valued yellows spend a lot of time dealing with these, and this no doubt this takes up a lot of their volunteer time. But sometimes, perhaps much too often, the hostilities exist between individuals and the scope and extent of the battle is too large for a yellow to make a simple ruling, or even a fair ruling. Both sides taking shots at the other, and a yellow is simply not a judge and a jury, so these rise to the level of either FRED or UDAY.

When Fred or Uday have to step in, this takes the issue out of the self-policing mode, and battles between personalities or ego’s is clearly something neither of them have time or desire to get involved in. When they are forced into such positions, their options include, 1) potentially spending hundreds (literally) or at least dozens of manhours investigating who did what to whom and when, and then issuing appropriate sanctions, 2) order both sides to stop and cease the fighting or sanctions will be forth coming without assessing the blame anywhere specific, 3) find quickly some evidence that both sides are at least partial responsible and punish both or threaten both with punishment because of this finding, 4) put into place a set of guidelines both have to strictly follow and see that they are followed from that day forward, or 5) do nothing and hope sanity returns and the bickering stops.

We all lknow that Fred is a very busy man, he plays bridge professionally, which requires travel and practice time. He works on bridge products, he trains new authors how to use his CD-ROM bridge book making software, and importantly, he develops improvement on our favorite site. Uday is equally busy, I see him on line a lot of time, updating software, fixing bugs, working on server software. On top of that, he handles all the emails going to abuse@bridgebase.com, cheating allegations, you name it. HE must need a 29 hour day and that is BEFORE he gets any sleep.

Ok now imagine a complicated circumstances where the facts are not clear cut, and the problem has escalated over a long period of time, with charges and counter charges between the parties involved, with events going back months. Put yourself in Fred and Uday's position, realizing that out of their love for the game and hope for a self-supporting site (moneywise and userwise), they have created a pit that is draining both financial and human resources. Keeping the site running and free is probably a much larger task than they ever imagined when they began this journey. No doubt they are in negotiations for having bridge organizations sponsored tourneys, finding sponsors to foot bill for vugraph shows, finding ways to get money from educators on this site, etc, etc, in addition to all their other things they are involved in. Due to all these demands, they have little time to get involved in the constant ego battles between members on their site. Ideally, a stop fighting warning should handle the situation, but eventually, some conflicts get so out of hand that they have to deal with it more directly.

Now imagine such a case that reaches their level for a second or third or fourth time. Now they are absolutely forced to take some kind of action. As Fred or Uday, which of the five options above would you choose? Remember this is a free site, with in theory a self-policing policy?

I, for one, see no way they could possibly justify the time and resources that would be necessary to do a full investigation of any major allegations stretching out over months. It doesn’t make business sense, it doesn’t make fiscal sense, and it doesn’t make logical sense to even try. So their only recourse besides doing nothing, is to issue sanctions against both sides, make a quick ruling based on limited facts that one side is way more quilty and issue sanctions, or refuse to get dragged into the past battles and simply laydown a new set of enforceable custom rules for the situation that deals with all parties involved and that if violated would bring automatic and clearly defined sanctions.

Will either side of such a dispute think such an approach leads to Justice (short of a clear ruling of guilt on one side or the other)? I suspect the answer is no. Will it appear to community at large that Fred and Uday don’t care at all about what goes on at their site? For this last question, I hope not, for they have a tremedendous investement in this site, and surely they care more than the rest of us. But justice, true justice, is not practical if it has to be forged by two very part time judges (in the sense of how much time they have to deal with such issues) who would have to server as both judge and jury on a virtual population the size of a city like Knoxville TN, and with an amateur volunteer police force that helps them the size of police force in Mayberry, North Carolina.

Anyone expecting that the time will be available for a full hearing of all the allegations, and discover to see which “facts” are actual facts, and any mitigating circumstances surrounding such facts, and to interview all the witnesses and weigh each piece of evidence against all the others is just not being realistic. Face it, what we are going to get, and all we can expect or demand, is fair treatment to both sides. And here I define fair treatment as a judgment call of what seems fair to either uday or fred when they make it. It would be UNFAIR to them and the rest of the BBO community to expect them to waste all their time settling disputes and trying to be as “just” as possible. They have many more pressing needs they need to attend to, and if they allow themselves to be dragged into all these types of situations, no work on the software or their business plans, or anything else in their lives would ever get done.

So on behalf of myself, let me say that the claims that Uday and/or Fred don’t care about cheating on this site or don’t care that justice is achieved in each dispute is not valid. The fact is, they care, but realistically, there is only so much THEY can do. It is up to us to help clean up our house and pickup the trash on the street… and encourage people not to litter and not to spit in public. That is, we have to help out by policing ourselves. I think what is happening is that in many ways, we are letting them down and not the other way around.

So I wish to thanks the yellow, thank fred, and thank uday. Each of you get a lot of well deserved credit, but you also get a fair amount of venom when people perceive an unreachable goal of pure justice can not be achieved in every situation. So while, some people may have a legitimate complaints about some of your decisions, people who think you are here to serve at their every whim while they are on the BBO need to reconsider there entirely inappropriate positions. And to the rest of us, if you see a problem you think you can correct on your own or with the kind help of a yellow, do so. If someone does something that is not addressable by an yellow and it bothers you, rather than immediately write to uday or fred, evaluate if it is really all that bad. If you just could laugh off the other person as being a moron or something and walk away, please do so. Of course, this doesn’t mean if you have a serious complaint, not to bring it, but if and when you do, please remember the limit to what you can reasonable expect to have Fred/Uday do.

Thanks for reading, sincerely,
Ben, aka inquiry.

I agree with most of Ben's post.
To summarize:

1) BBO is a nice site, and FREE, despite having some people working fulltime, and a crew of voluntary people (the yellows) available without being paid.
The obvious consequence is that, while improvements may be possible, quite a few of these progresses would require more resources than a free site can guarantee.
My own position is that I much prefer a free site like BBO, as it is now, rather than having to pay for progresses that, IMHO, are minor for my own needs.

2) I agree with the self-regulation principle: if someone is rude to you, just avoid him/ignore him.
BBO is like a huge, virtual bridge club: how many of us have seen people behaving rudely at their local clubv without significant sanctions for them ?
This may be unfair maybe, but these peopl are generally just avoided by other players that cannot stand their rude behaviour.

Of course, I do agree that there are major offenses (harassment of any type, such as people continually changing nick to avoid the automatic rejection at a table after you have blacklisted them), and in this case it would be best to try to ban these people.
Yet, it is hard.

3) I'd like to make my point about the ecepal/steve thing here.
I know personally quite a few yellow members, and I have read all Fred's contributions since BBO started, therefore I know that the entire principle that animated (and still does) BBO is friendship and enjoyment.
Yet, in my opinion, it has been a mistake to leave all this sort of "mystery" about the reasons of why ecepal and steve left. The way the discussion was avoided seemd, even to me, one of the most positive minded, a sort of censorship: for the same reason, many people I know have started asking questions such as "what is BBO turning into? a sort of soviet where u cannot even discuss the facts?"

In my view, a much better approach would have been to disclose fully the reasons why steve and ecepal left, the facts. Some stetement like "This is the letter by steve and ecepal of why they left. We do not agree on the reasons why they left, but we are very sorry they are taking this decisions, and we ask them to continue to play and contribute on BBO like they did so far because we value them as people, players, and contributors."

Then, AND ONLY THEN, after clarifying the fact, I think it would have been proper to take care of avoiding flame threads, eventually editing and moderating the inevitable overly aggressive posts.

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Ok, all this was just to express my position, but I will repeat again that I do appreciate a lot the work by all the members. It is after all inevitable that sometimes we may disagree on a single point.

ciao

Mauro

BBO Discussion Forums: Open letter to the BBO Community - BBO Discussion Forums

Open letter to the BBO Community What can we expect of Uday/Fred?

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