[kenrexford]

If you want to have something like this, without rubbing people the wrong way or accidentally offending someone, then why not simply treat it like the ACBL Bulletin does?

I mean, the ACBL Bulletin runs questions past a group of experts. However, I doubt that any experts are miffed if they are not included in the panel. Rather, the panel is simply a group of some experts who are in theory particularly fun or particularly willing or particularly representative of a cross of theories, or whatever.

So, rather than having an "experts only" forum, which by implication passes judgment on excluded people, judgment that at times will be subjective and arguably errant, either by inclusion or exclusion, the PC solution might be rather to have a group of volunteer experts selected by someone to serve as "contributors." These folks would be expected to serve and deemed "representative" of the fine attributes of many of the BBF expert community. No hurt feelings.

If you wanted to advance the cause even further, albeit with some difficulty, then you could have "particularly interesting" additional posts included after sending them to a moderator OR a sublink within the forum for "general comments."

But, the idea would be to focus on limited inclusion rather than on difficult exclusion. If the inclusion group (maybe a dozen people?) included people that turned out to not comment very often, then they could be replaced by others periodically, not because of any criteria, technically, other than the fact that they do not contribute enough. If at some point someone was not on the panel but might serve well, they could be offered a position to replace someone who "retires."

If an issue is particularly relevant to some sub-set of talents, like a squeeze position or a Precision sequence, or something like that, then a guest panelist(s) could be included in for the case-specific discussion.

[Fluffy]

In the poker forums, I have a problem that when I see completelly different answers for the same problem I have no idea who is the expert and who is the advanced/BIL.

In Bridge forums most worthreading answers are elaborated, and even through an expert might just said 3♥ wtp, an advanced who bids 2♠ and then elaborates his answer will be more helpful that the expert's view IMO. Even if 2♠ is not best.


Some experts often post their decisions without giving the problem enough thought.


Also note that there are several posters who start their posts in A/E forum by stating they are not expert. This is something that should be encouraged.


I think jdonn is on the rigth track, there are many forum regulars who are more active than the moderators, and would clean up the thing better, everybody knows who they are.

But bear in mind that if you give power to any forum member, any decision he make is gonna be criticied by at least 1 person. By the time you do that, you could as well start another forum about moderator complaints. I know we losed one of the overall top10 posters 3 or 4 years ago because he didn't like a moderators decision on one of his posts.

[cherdanno]

I think this idea has a lot more merit than most people here are giving it credit for.
I once talked with a German International about BBF, his comment was s.th. like "It may be nice, but it is a little hard to figure out who has good things to say and is worth listening to". He certainly classifies as an expert, likes to discuss bridge (also online) and has thought a lot about many bidding issues, i.e. he is certainly someone BBF should try to attract and would benefit from.

The regular posters all have a filter whose opinion to listen to and whose opinions to ignore, but if an expert looks at the A/E forum for the first time, she will probably see a lot of posts below the advanced standard, and might not find it worthwhile to start spending more time on it. A real A/E forum would be more likely to draw her to BBF. Once she gets to know the other posters in the A/E forum, she might well start posting in the other forums, too. (So I don't think cardsharp's worry about the other forums being marginalized is justified.)

The real problem is that someone would have to make judgment calls, about who can post or which threads or sub-threads to move somewhere else. This would need to be done by volunteers who would in some sense "own" that sub-forum and who wouldn't mind the bad blood from posters who are completely self-unaware and keep posting beginner questions in the unmoderated A/E forum. It should be clear that BBO has no responsibility for these decisions.

[Echognome]

Under the current setup, Ben hosts most of the forums. I think he does a great job doing it. However, it seems that having more people share the load might be a good thing. I know a few other people have moderator rights (e.g. Fred and Uday). Perhaps some of the subforums could be moderated by different people who could make their own criteria. It would obviously have to be under certain guidelines (such as not deleting posts simply because you don't like someone), but I think we have many intelligent, reasonable people here who could do the job.

Right now we're discussing the idea of an experts only forum, but the idea could be expanded to some of the other forums. For example, perhaps the moderators in the BIL forum could make sure that posts that are rude or harsh to beginners are edited or deleted?

Then maybe someone like Ben could focus on oversight of the moderators themselves and not have to get into the everyday moderation of all the posts. This may or may not be a welcome change for him. BBO would simply be in charge of setting overall guidelines and enforcing those and the moderators could do the rest. I see this akin to having BBF "Yellows".

[Trumpace]

cherdanno, on Feb 17 2009, 02:55 PM, said:

I think this idea has a lot more merit than most people here are giving it credit for.
I once talked with a German International about BBF, his comment was s.th. like "It may be nice, but it is a little hard to figure out who has good things to say and is worth listening to". He certainly classifies as an expert, likes to discuss bridge (also online) and has thought a lot about many bidding issues, i.e. he is certainly someone BBF should try to attract and would benefit from.

The regular posters all have a filter whose opinion to listen to and whose opinions to ignore, but if an expert looks at the A/E forum for the first time, she will probably see a lot of posts below the advanced standard, and might not find it worthwhile to start spending more time on it. A real A/E forum would be more likely to draw her to BBF. Once she gets to know the other posters in the A/E forum, she might well start posting in the other forums, too. (So I don't think cardsharp's worry about the other forums being marginalized is justified.)

I agree. If we manage to attract a lot more good players, it would be a really great learning opportunity for the others. The experts could then discuss freely without having to bother with spam, while the others can read each post with assurance of quality and hopefully learn something.

If we go this route, perhaps we should create two new forums, "Expert Discussion" where only some posters are allowed to post and "Ask the Experts" where anyone can post and ask questions (either new or about the discussions in the other forum).

I believe the A/E was created with such a goal in mind, but alas...

[jdonn]

Ok, it seems the responses have been overwhelmingly positive, at least to do something. So what's next? Do we start a poll among the ideas? Or Fred do you find out what your business partners think?

[vuroth]

I realize I'm late to the party, but I echo some of the comments on page 1 about being a B/I and having to manually build a "bozo filter".

It's worthwhile, and the B/I is an incredible resource to a learning player, but certainly a newcomer might be a bit lost amidst the conflicting opinions.

[gwnn]

Sometimes (especially in a bidding problem) I find that I see the merits and the flaws of each alternative, but I can't weigh them one against the other. In these cases a '2♠ wtp?' reply is more than enough because I'm reading the reply of someone who has been in that particular situation more often than I and has a capacity of synthetising his previous experience with various calls more effectively than I have, so basically I can rely on his/her judgment. I don't think I can agree with Adam that every post should carry at least one additional argument for the 'canonical action' if there really is one.

[1eyedjack]

I doubt that the forum software can manage it, but if possible an alternative would be to enable each forum member selectively to flag each other member in the same way as they can on BBO. A 3-way flag would be adequate. On BBO you flag them as friend, neutral or enemy. You could use the same designation on BBF, or you could rename it as "expert", "unallocated" or "B/I" or similar. With regard to any individual forum member, all other forum members would be unallocated/neutral until the member takes some positive action to shift it.

That done, at the point of commencing a thread, the forum management could delegate to the thread-starter the authority to restrict contributors to that thread, to (say) "expert only" or "No B/I". It could even be set to "B/I only" or "no expert" when posting to the B/I forum.

You could also use these settings to blanket-ignore postings of a particular class, if (say) you were not the thread-starter and still wanted to filter out the known bozos.

In this way, forum management could escape any criticism for inappropriate labelling of individuals. But, as I say, this is probably a pipe-dream as I cannot imagine the software enabling it.

As to the original suggestion, there seems little point speculating on whether the suggestion would succeed or fail to improve the forums, given that you could settle such speculation simply by putting it to the test. No decision need be irreversible. As to whether the overhead on forum management is likely to be too high, well, they can make their own mind up about that. They are big boys now.

[Apollo81]

Slightly off topic:

Could the software support an "agree" button along with "quote" and "reply"? I was thinking that there could then be a link that would say (e.g.) "7 concurrences" and when clicked it would reveal the IDs of the posters who clicked "agree". This would cut down on the number of replies to OPs but at the same time allow the people that like posting "agree" to be satisfied.

[Apollo81]

Apollo81, on Feb 24 2009, 12:23 PM, said:

Slightly off topic:

Could the software support an "agree" button along with "quote" and "reply"? I was thinking that there could then be a link that would say (e.g.) "7 concurrences" and when clicked it would reveal the IDs of the posters who clicked "agree". This would cut down on the number of replies to OPs but at the same time allow the people that like posting "agree" to be satisfied.

hm should I have started a new thread about this?

[Cascade]

Apollo81, on Feb 25 2009, 05:27 AM, said:

Apollo81, on Feb 24 2009, 12:23 PM, said:

Slightly off topic:

Could the software support an "agree" button along with "quote" and "reply"?  I was thinking that there could then be a link that would say (e.g.) "7 concurrences" and when clicked it would reveal the IDs of the posters who clicked "agree".  This would cut down on the number of replies to OPs but at the same time allow the people that like posting "agree" to be satisfied.

hm should I have started a new thread about this?

No a new version of the software is being developed.

The "Agree" button will be right along side the "WTP?" and "LOL" buttons.

[Hanoi5]

I think the best solution is the one where moderators choose what posts belong to the 'real experts' sub-forum and all the others can go to the 'normal A/E'. How these moderators are chosen beats me, but creating a board where only certain people ask and answer won't solve any problem for those people might as well talk on the phone or IM among themselves.

[helene_t]

It's hard enough already to find moderators (see the fate of the bidding poll) and making it their task to move threads from one forum to another won't make it more attractive to volunteer. Seriously, what does it achieve? An opening post is often a question which can be answered at different levels. Some will say what they would do with an expert partner, a few would say what they would do with a b/ii partner, some may try to give expert advice although they are not remotely qualified for that. Moving the whole thread is not the solution.

[Hanoi5]

I finally read through the whole topic.

Whenever I post in the A/E forum I do it expecting to see the A/E opinion on a matter. I have received answers rejecting a previous decision not being discussed, probably showing that an A/E player would not have needed to reach the decision being discussed. I agree some of my hands might not be of an A/E nature, but again I imagined that board was supposed to give A/E answers, not only for posting A/E problems.

I think an interesting idea not offered here yet could be creating a 'personalized' forum, where its moderator chooses which topics deserve to be in and which don't. Let's say the first of these boards is JLOL's, he'll be able to post the kind problems he wants, read the topics/posts from people he wants to read from and have the meaningful experience he expects from the expert's forum; everyone is invited to read and if they're not 'allowed' they could send private messages to JLOL in order to make a question or give an answer, which of course JLOL would allow or not depending on his opinion. Maybe this could go on for a month or two (or whatever time frame is agreed upon) and then another poster would get the opportunity to create his/her board. These personalized board would get as many allowed posters as the current moderator allows, so maybe JLOL could invite some friends who have never been in the board or who have gone away (where is han-8888-posts-then-gone?).

I'd love to see what develops from this thread and suggestions. (I also liked the idea of a poster of creating theme-sub-forums and then putting a tag to threads in them).

[brianshark]

My number one preference would be something like Gnome's suggested list of forums where it is more clear what thread should go in what forum. I think that would solve a lot of the existing problem of trying to figure out which forum to ask a question in.

My number two preference would be to just publically announce and request that people put less stuff in the adv/expert forum unless they are sure it is advanced/expert stuff, and to ask the mods to be a lot more willing to move stuff out of there into general discussion if they feel it doesn't fit.

Also, I think the problem might be solved by making the 'adv/expert' forum an expert forum. There's a big difference between an advanced player and an expert player (as defined by what a typical person is likely to assess themselves as). Raise the bar of the existing forum instead of adding a new one.

I think either or all of those 3 solutions would do adequetly and inventing a secret committee and expert lists and posting restrictions and post authorization and the like is probably unnecessary.

[Echognome]

If someone has the time, it might be useful to start a new thread and post the main suggested ideas into a poll. Given that the forums are for everyone's use, seems an ideal situation for a poll where we would want equal weight to everyone's vote. One of the options could be "Leave everything on BBO the way it is."

I recognize that the task isn't so straightforward as other than the status quo suggestion, it may take some effort to categorize all the ideas into poll options and then there is also the problem of combined ideas. Unfortunately, the polling options on the forum do not easily work well for voting for multiple options. However, someone may be clever enough to put together an acceptable list of options.

At least as far as getting any change done (if warranted), it seems that a poll might be a positive step for aggregating everyone's preferences. If no one steps up, then I will try to find the time later. If someone does step up, my appreciation goes out to you in advance.

[keylime]

I think it's easier to have a b/i forum, an advanced forum, and an expert forum.

[Rossoneri]

Too tired to argue this out completely and coherently, but FWIW, my views on this:

1) It would be a good idea to have better guidelines on how to post in each of the forums.

2) Better cleaning up/moving of threads. But I agree that this will be a thankless job which few would want to take up.

3) A restricted A/E forum could work with moderation and a panel of experts given unrestricted posting rights.

4) Agree with echognome that we shouldn't restrict it to one post per day since interesting hands come in bunches due to tournaments/weekly games/etc.

[david_c]

Personally I would prefer to have forums distinguished by function rather than skill level, not least because it's often difficult to decide what level a particular hand is at. The B/I forum has a particular problem in that it contains both
- topics written for B/I players; and
- topics written by B/I players but wanting answers from better players.
I don't think these really work together very well. I'd prefer something like the scheme on the right here:



(I hope that worked...)

That would take a lot of strain off the A/E forum.