[Gottis]

Maybe an old topic, but there are always new members and old that might be intrested. In real life the alert shall be explained by my partner how come on internet or BBO that alerter has to explain it by himself.

[hrothgar]

1. Tradition: For whatever reason, so-called "Self Alerts" were adopted by the original online bridge sites. At this point in time, its become self perpetuating.

2. As to why the original bridge sites started using self alerts... I suspect that this is an outgrowth of the nature of the electronic playing environment. If you're playing online the software provides a number of options that really can be easily duplicated in the face to face game. For example, if self alert a bid on BBO, the software will send this message to both opponents, but partner will never see this alert. In turn, this solves a lot of the "Unauthorized Information" complications that would crop up if self alerts were used in a F2F game...