i've been following this thread, but it hasn't made much sense until having the experience of actually running a tourney as i did yesterday for the first time with the "Sunday Special" .. now, i'm bubbling over with ideas
 
first, i'm curious what you mean by schedule .. i assume it's an every Sunday, 1500 UTC, type thing .. it would  be great to have TDbot handle that, too, making set-up each week almost automatic .. although it makes me wonder if fully automated tourney's which seems to be where you're heading here might not suffer from bot like personality problems .. we have enough bot personality dysfuntion issues already, don't you think? worse still, what happens when something inevitably comes up that needs human intervention?

for example, socksey really makes a huge difference in all the stuff she does with "Mini-Matches" .. as do all the regular hosts of the other tourneys .. LuckyDice, for example, saved yesterday's Sunday Bago when the regular director was not logeed in at registration time .. stuff like that will always happen, sometimes even with bots .. but folks like socksey and LD are rare .. regardless, i suspect the tournament director's personality, ownership of, and responsibility for an event really can make an important difference in a tourney's success .. so, i offer an apprehensive warning about overly automating the whole process including scheduling
 
regarding spam, by which i assume you mean shouts by TDbot and the tourney director, something i'd like to see integrated into scheduling and expanded on is promotion .. fibs tourney schedules are *very* confusing .. it took me months to figure it out and i still screw it up from time to time .. therefore, i'd like to see TDbot shout out alerts to upcoming events synchronized to the time of an upcoming tourney

for example, shout hourly notices synchronized to appear one and two hours ahead of a scheduled time and at the scheduled time itself for a couple of days before the scheduled tourney .. this might help catch the attention of players who log on at regular times each day rather than inhabit fibs 24/7 like some of us do .. additional and increasing levels of alerts should also kick in during the 12-24 hours before the event itself
 
while possibly annoying, this would really be a good way to spread the word about tourneys (especially new ones where my thinking is at the moment) amongst new and old fibsters alike .. with a little thought these ads, err notices, could be simple and capable of expressing basic info as well as the personality or character of the tourney itself .. additionally, a TDbot maintained URL with references for scheduled events would also be nice
 
on the subject of promotion, i used my javafibs friends list which i use for almost everyone with a good reputation near my player rating and a programmable button to send out invitations to over 200 players for this first "Sunday Special" .. my wrist still hurts from all the mousing around required to do that .. i received a lot of positive feedback on this - primarily from folks who couldn't make it, but were glad to be aware of the new tourney .. i'll likely do this again a time or two for the "Sunday Special" and a "Midnight Special" i'm also considering hosting, but it was rather a pain in the old arse, not to mention wrist .. seems as if TDbot might be able to help manage a task like this too .. of course, the delicate balance of information, promotion, notices, ads, and true spam has to be weighed very carefully here too .. frankly, it can't be as bad as JokeBot can get .. also, if it came as a shout from something other than TDbot, say TDads, anyone annoyed by it could always gag it
 
on handling forfeits, socksey's comments below, my experience with 2 forfeits yesterday, and common sense suggest forfeits are an area where a human tourney director *must* be involved .. to spend time trying to automate that process may not be worth the effort and could create as many problems as it attempts to solve .. one or two bad forfeits by TDbot could do a lot of harm to TDbot's reputation which must aim toward perfection and be as transparent as possible, imho
 
however, since it is a time issue, here's a couple of suggestions on forfeits  .. whenever TDbot sends a notice of a next match to the players, include a UTC time stamp ... further, CC: that match notice to a log for the tourney (another TDbot idea) as well as to the tourney moderator(s) in a Tell .. thus, a reference time is automatically available for matches not started promptly .. all we'd have to do then is check the server clock to determine a valid time to forfeit when a dispute arises .. this would be far preferable, i think, to having it done automatically .. there will always arise exceptions to a precise 5 minute limit which need to be accommodated, e.g. smoke breaks for resh
 
yesterday, one of my forfeits in the "Sunday Special" involved a very reliable player, Bonnita, losing connection and being unable to reconnect or communicate with us until after the tourney .. thus, the semifinal match was sitting in idle .. fortunately, socksey was watching the match, timed the delay, and let me know about it .. thus, it was a quick and easy call to forfeit the match .. however, without socksey being on top of it, i'd have had a hard time making the call without adding even more time, perhaps another 5 minutes, to the delay .. not sure how TDbot might be able to help in that situation other than by monitoring and reporting (on request) a player's idle time to the moderator .. but from what i've seen of idle time reporting, it doesn't appear to be consistent enough to trust - maybe i just don't know how to retrieve it
 
regarding player registration limits, i set the bar a little higher on reputation yesterday and will experiment next week with setting it higher still .. i used a RepBot threshold of 5000 rather than zero whcih socksey uses in "Mini-Matches".. next week i'm going to increase that to 10000

my thinking is that this will not only encourage responsible RepBot use, but it just makes a nice screen door to keep varmints out .. if ever a player rejected in registration would really like to play and communicate that with me, i have the ability to give them a one time vouch for the event only which would bring them to the 10K threshold unless i'd already vouched for them or they were negative
 
i have several other ideas (i think), but this is way enough for now
 
thanks for your email reply from which some of these thoughts arose and i look forward to helping anyway i can with tourneys and using TDbot in future "Specials"
 
sixty

Do you mean on Fibs?  This freaks me out!      Fibs is too small to support anything like that.     We are only around 100 players at any given time give or take.  I have seen as low as 80 something players to as much at 157 (the max I've ever seen).  If you run any conflicting tourneys at same time, you will have poor participation for one or the other.   

You mentioned elsewhere that you had in mind 4 tourneys per day which might not be so bad, but they couldn't interfere with the current regularly scheduled tourneys.     That means there could not be 4 tourneys on the days of the already established tourneys.   

socksey



"People say that money isn't the key to happiness but I figured if you have enough money you can have a key made." - Joan Rivers

Tom, as a burned out ex-programmer, i see a lot of your enthusiasm and skill in your ideas and experience .. sharing it here to get user feedback before rollout is a tool i never enjoyed when i'd crawl into that little design space i still enjoy .. kuddos to you for using it .. but, as you probably know well, too much design and too many new features can be as fatal to a programming project's success as too little .. i'm *not* challenging your programming skills or ability to implement them, but i think socksey's concerns and mine reflect a need to also, perhaps most importantly, think locally, keep it small, and keep it simple

as i said in the emails we've shared earlier, fibs is an eclectic place, to say the least .. fibsland is much more akin to a dirt road back street than an "Advanced Avenue" .. as a small town Texas boy, i appreciate and love that about this sometimes nutty place .. therefore, trying to introduce too much regularity, efficiency, and routine just makes no sense to me either

first, it would likely result in a landslide of good natured but hyperventilated criticisms and put-downs that would undermine the validity of already well run tourneys and further conflict with that "special" nature of this little corner in the "vast wasteland" of cyberspace .. worse, fibsters could start twitching and moaning about TDbot tourneys, regardless of their efficiency, as much as they do about don, droppers, politics, and countless other things ..  we have more than enogh of that, imo .. finally, tourneys, especially, too many of them, will never be able to compete with the eclectic social structure many folks here find as appealing as playing backgammon .. if ever present tourneys droning on with bot like efficiency interfered with that aspect of the fibs experience, they would be doomed to failure regardless of their efficiency
 
for me, fibs is more a mom and pop storefront or eatery than a wal*mart or mcdonalds .. i drive out of my way for places like that just to avoid the sterile efficiency and infernal predictability of big box retail and the ever predictable "would you like fries with that?" .. in Austin there's a group of old and new hippies, artists, and artisans with the motto "Keep Austin Weird" .. well, "Keep FIBS Weird" works for me, too .. that's why i'm inclined to fully support socksey's concerns on this one .. sometimes more is less, sometimes much less

on reflection, i don't think it's a design or ease of use issue we're even talking about here, but rather a concern over your vision of how it might be implemented .. so, maybe this is just much ado about nothing regarding TDbot design, but, thanks to fibsboard, we have the ability to express it and get it out there for the community to also consider now or for years to come
 
so, for TDbot, imho, keeping it simple and keeping it a little quirky may be best .. let's just get it out there and start using it .. as a new tourney director, i can't wait to see and benefit from some of the features you have in mind
 
great work, man, keep it up, but stay open to socksey's sense of the fibs landscape and big picture .. your ideas and ability to implement them is awesome .. i'm truly impressed by your decication and the many contributions others have also made and continue to make to this little hometown .. but let's not replace the back roads with paved superhighways or mom and pop's barbecue joint with a super-sized whatever just yet
 
best regards,

sixty

The "other" concern I'm having, is will all this shouting and telling slow Fibs down any?  I have noticed more lag on Fibs of late and I wouldn't want any of this to add to that problem.   

socksey



"So they're showing me, on television, the detergents getting out bloodstains.  I mean, come on, if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstains all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem right now." - Jerry Seinfeld

I hear your points and maybe I am looking too far in the future of possibilities.
Let me say this... The features I implement will avoid anything that will LIMIT what can be done.

We'll let the community figure out what fits best, which may even change over time...

tom

Just an update as to what I have been up to.

I have added automatic player clocks for drops and not starting matches.

This is taking a lot of testing with some test ids.

Then I need to consider how to handle slow play...

I was thinking about adding a command a player could send to tbot to have tbot Watch/UnWatch the match every few min to make sure the game it still moving and maybe if it found a player had not moved in two visits then clock them.

I am not sure I would want to do that to every match, as a player that could be annoying.
starts watching/stops watching/starts.../etc

Does anyone know a better way to tell a player has made a move?

tom

 

I did not see that one!

Thanks!

I am going to look over the shouts we use.

One thing I have thought about is to use TELLS to players of the tourney for most of the info

I have a bit more to do on clocks (look command - thanks burper) and then the cosmetic stuff...

The 'time' mentioned there was the time of day the match was finished.

And yes the bot will be able to track clocks and award wins when a player times out.

Remember theses things are all configurable...

if you do not define a timeout then the TD can manage the clocks manually.

tom

Well I have player clocks implemented, starts clock when player drops offline, leaves match or just sits there without moving (not idle, just not moving - I watch the board via Look - thanks burper)

Takes you off clock when you resume the match or start moving again.

If you time out it will automatically advance your opponent and send a tourney shout so everyone knows what happened.
(in email log too)

I have a little more testing to do but hope to run a tourney at 1600UTC  a few days this week (Mon-Thur)

I have not made the match shouts more people friendly yet, as those are just cosmetic changes and I need to get the logic tested...

thanks for all your future help testing! 

Hi, I can wait, my current hosting expires on 31 Dec, though. I have the new server already up and running, but I'd rather not go through the trouble of setting it up for TourneyBot if you're going to start hosting it ...

M.