[blackest_k]

The latest beta of the bridgebase software has the option of filtering online users by country and while i do see a benifit in being able to find citizens of a particular country which could perhaps lead to playing face to face and other agreeable benifits. I feel that this is better achieved by joining or forming a public or private club.

Ifeel the country filter will divide the membership and into divisions I do not like. I do not want to be playing with someone because I am of an acceptable race to him or her. I want to be chosen because people enjoy playing with me or are prepared to get to know me as a person not because of where i am born or what flag i decide to support.

now by not having a country filter doesnt stop an individual filtering out members of a particular country but it doesnt make it easy to do so and it is not done automatically as they log on to bridgebase.

We all have predjudices good and bad for example I like canadians and Poles, I speak a little Polish and Canadians all seem to be nice guys but it would be denying myself some superb games if i limited my playing to canadians and Poles

we are all world citizens and we have grown up with many sterotypes imprinted on our brains in a world community like bridgebase online we get the chance to break down our stereotypes and see people as individuals and play great bridge something we all share a love of. We all act as ambassadors for our countrys and we should remember this.

Fred said that this latest beta is a radical departure from what we are used to. Normally a Beta is designed to make sure as few bugs as possible go into the release version by having willing victims use the product, who accept sometimes it will not work properly and report back. This beta is different because it alters the way we will interact with each other.

Country filtering is not in the current version it is in the beta once the beta is accepted it becomes the current version and when this happens it will become extremely difficult to reject the country filtering feature.

So I am asking you to reject it now tell your friends and get them to reject it too
it doesnt mean we don't have great respect and admiration for fred and all the others that work to make this program as good as it is but adding country filtering steers this community down a path i do not wish to follow this is an important issue for all of us. please give your opinion becauser it matters.

regards

john

[inquiry]

very long question, very short answer.

Yes country filters are fine, great in fact. First, they are totally optional. Most people will never use them. And what if you only could speak one language, say greek. You could filter out all the other players and only look for people from greece. You say you could bookmark your greek friends, this is true,but you can book mark them and also keep open the search for new players who speak your language to make new friendships.. the rants against it is silly.

Thanks fred, thanks uday for this very nice feature... of course,I am always going to be most expansive in the options I choose to display, but to each their own. If there is anyone who doesn't want to associate with people from my country and they exclude seeing my name in the list, there is no harm to me.

Ben

[luis]

Filtering players by country in the lobby is a nice idea so you can know players from your country that you don't know and make friends, or find someone for a local game, etc.
I'd vote that the mentioned filter is very nice but you may not let sort tables by the host country. I'm not sure if you understand what I mean.
There's no reason to play only in tables hosted by someone from some specific country.

[spwdo]

hi,


lol, i like the asnwer to filter by sex, religion and income, coud add a few more there, would like to filter and show me all native americans with glasses who had sex change and drive ferrari`s , i think i host one of my next tourneys for them .


well, simple as that , if u dont like this filter , dont use it , some of my friends and me change flags often(to get to know them) so one day im filtered by some, next day i`ll be displayed.


no question of rasict with this tool, the user decides who to filter or not, fine tool for someone who knows one language and is seeking for help or wants a p he can understand for a tourney, i wont do much filtiring but for someone needed it for some reason it coud be very usefull , so my vote off course is yes , a filter can be usefull and doesnt change anything on the imago bbo has, great improvment


greetings marc

[Cascade]

Filter is good!!!

How you use it can be good or bad.

In my view in general flexibility is good.

I have already used it for good things ...

now I don't have to play against any of those nasty kiwis ...

Hang-on I am Kiwi (New Zealander)

Seriously I have found it useful to locate players when I was not 100% sure of there nickname.

Wayne

[anssibragge]

It's ok to have different views how to limit the players - after all it's not a permanent decision to see only albanian players

abe

[Rhutobello]

I played around with the country filter and liked it.

But I have a suggestion, let friend filter overide countryfilter, that way you will be able to build up a nicer selection from all country...but still narrow down the total selection to one country:)(LOL hope I have made this right:))

[fred]

Rhutobello, on Feb 22 2004, 10:26 AM, said:

I played around with the country filter and liked it.

But I have a suggestion, let friend filter overide countryfilter, that way you will be able to build up a nicer selection from all country...but still narrow down the total selection to one country:)(LOL hope I have made this right:))

This is a reasonable suggestion. I will think about it.

Figuring out the best way to combine filters while
keeping the interface relatively simple and intuitive
was a challenge.

There are so many types of things one might want
to express when constructing a complex filter. In order
to allow the user to do everything they might want there
would have to be buttons for "AND", "OR", open bracket,
close bracket (and perhaps "NOT"). My judgment was
that this would be intimidating for many people and that
it would be better to try to come up with simple rules
for defining how the filters interact with one another.

The rules I came up with are certainly not written in
stone so please let me know if you have any further
suggestions in this area.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[fred]

I suspect that the vast majority of our members
are not racists and, if these people use the country
filter, they will use it for "proper" reasons.

I was born in Canada, but I live in the USA and I
have the USA flag on my profile. If you took a poll
of BBO members asking them "what country's people
do you hate the most?" I suspect that America would
have a good chance of winning (please no Forums poll
on this!).

As such, there is a good chance that I am going to
be "filtered out" by some BBO members.

Why should I care?

First of all, these people are going to avoid Americans
regardless of whether or not the software makes it
easy for the them to do this.

Second, I would just as soon avoid these people too.
Why would I want to play at a table with people who
hate me because of where I live?

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Rhutobello]

Thx Fred for your posetive reply, and agein thx for a superb software and club:)

I was back on BBO and played around with Country filter. I think you can achive what I have in mind if you inklude "friends" as a country. That way we can mark "friends" and for exsample our own country, and get a nice selection of exellent players or we can exlude friends if we only want to se who is from that country over there and what friends I have there (that is the way it is now)

Good luck!
Edvin

[blackest_k]

Without filtering by country currently your forced to deal with your own prejudice's, (if any) ,you won't get up from a table just because someone is from a country you don't like and its only really practical to scan your potential partners card if you actually want to play.

you may choose to play with someone from a country because of the interaction you had with a fellow countryman of theirs.

One nice feature of bridgebase is that if someone leaves the table you do see if they have actually gone off line and not run away from the table to avoid spending time in your company, being ladies and gentlemen means we wouldnt do that.

I concede there could be a place for filtering in the lobby but lets keep it away from the mainbridge club.

I would ask thou what safeguards are in place to stop somebody taking up a membership to deliberately spam members of a particular country not easy with the current version but certainly possible with a country filtered version.

I would hate to see say version 8.x.x with filtering on the tables so you can reject players automatically according to a predefined set of criteria.

one feature I would love to see is an additional characteristic or 2 to that you can assign instead of just friend neutral or enemy giving it a destinctive color in the main bridge club perhaps light blue

it would let you keep your friends list manageable without consigning everybody else into the murk of unknown or worse still enemy for a minor reason.
we can choose our own meaning for it ,nice to play, speaks my language, gsoh ect.

I don't think for a moment that the concept of filtering by countrys has been introduced for anything other than positive reasons but I do see a negative side

Would someone monolingual filter on the basis that they will not be able to communicate with someone who's country has a language different to their own?

Why play with someone who hates you because of where you live?
because hopefully your personality will help remove their blinkers and besides it can be fun too.

The true language of bridge is in the bidding and while sometimes we misunderstand we generally get by

warm regards

john

[Rhutobello]

I see that some people try to see some negative in the country filter, I can't understand how.

I remb back when the first question for such a filter came, I could not see the use of it...how wrong I was.

Look at the speed BBO grow. the lobby display will soon (or is) on its limit to give usefull info. In order to bring it down to a personal good infopage it must be narrowed down. Here the country AND friend list will be great. The friend list will grow with members from all countrys around the world (yes bridge is universal ) and if you then only choose 1 or two country to display with this list, you can manage to look at it without to much fuzz.....I think

Edvin

[uday]

The issue is, as Rhutobello points out, that the Lobby list is not too useful with 3,000 names listed. Too much data is almost as bad as no data.

Similarly, when you are looking for a game, the Main Bridge Club is not useful with 300 tables listed. What we want is to make it easier for the user to find the game that is correct for that user.

One can't worry that certain countries will be excluded. And if a user is happier seeing only tables with his countrymen in them, we're happier as well.

[blackest_k]

The lobby would be more useful with a scrollable window. currently i think a maximum of 80 names including your own is available.
enough to show 2/3rds of americans online atm.
country filtering within the main bridge club appears to be broken with version 3.6.3 i tried looking for empty tables with Poles it was returning random results with no connection to my search criteria

[uday]

You can scroll the lobby list in either of two ways.

a) Use the right/left cursor keys
Use the weird arrowheads on the upper right of the screen (next to Show/Hide news)

[DrTodd13]

The country filter has been good for me. I think it is great we can meet
and play with people from all around the globe. More than a month ago
I started trying to see how many people form different countries I could
play with. I think I am up to 71 or 72 countries and by using the country
filter I can see that there are a few more left to go.

I think it would be cool if there could be a simple and expert BBO interface.
In the simple interface you can still do a lot of things but you have no
control over the order the filters are applied. In the expert interface,
there is a more complex interface that lets you order the way the filters
are applied or lets you construct an arbitrarily complex regular expression
for your filter.

Todd

[blackest_k]

uday, on Feb 23 2004, 10:50 AM, said:

You can scroll the lobby list in either of two ways.

a) Use the right/left cursor keys
Use the weird arrowheads on the upper right of the screen (next to Show/Hide news)

That needs moving for sure!
It would be worth giving up one line of names for scroll arrows immediately below the list of names.
I can't be the only person who hasnt spotted it
regards
john

[uday]

I like the software, and stuff, but this is one of the aspects of it that only (not even?) a mother could love. I am pretty sure we're going to lose the arrowheads ( and revert to a normal scrollbar ) before the 36x series of betas becomes official.

[EricK]

I think it is a mistake to confuse "Country" with "Race" (not that I am happy using the word "race" in any event - it is an largely spurious concept).

Where I live (London) and where I am currently on holiday (Sydney) there are people from all backgrounds, and I am sure the same situation applies in almost all the world's metropolises (metropoli?). As such, I just can't see a country filter as a racist thing.

In any case, if someone filters me out because I have classified myself as British, then I probably wouldn't have enjoyed playing with them anyway.

Eric

[mishovnbg]

Spoiler

----------------------------------------Hi all!

Spoiler

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The weapons aren't responsible for what the people doing with them. The filters can be used for good or bad - depend of the people. The people can do that without the filters too. Stopping the evolution (of bridge systems too, sorry Fred) was and will be never the right answer, because nature show us what follow after the stop - only regress...

Spoiler

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Thank you Fred and Uday for really nice additoin (hope usage of filters will not cost me BBO or any other kind of money, because bulgarian's payment standard is 20 times lower ).

Spoiler

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For other nationality I don't know, but bulgarians didn't and don't hate any! As a prove you can look relations between bulgarian and turkish - we were 500 years their slaves - many blood, many sacrifices.... By the way we are small nation, but we are brave fighters and stop then of make all europ their slaves too. But all is history and we like to look forward, may be too far sometimes .

Spoiler

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Misho