Hi!
I can´t create a tournament with ‘Exclusivity’ set in ‘open’; only ‘Members only’ and ‘Invite only’ options are available.
And all of my active tournaments that I created with the option set in ‘open’ changed to ‘Members only’ (!?)
Does someone know why??
My group is Fast and narrow rank range correspondence tournaments
Thanks in advance.
Yes, due to recent abuse of the “open tournament” option, we have removed it.
The abuse was “sending invites to open tournaments to users who were note remotely interested in receiving them”.
The correct way to find out if a user is interested in a tournament in your group is to invite them to your group.
If they decline, they are not interested - please do not pursue them again.
If they accept your group invite, you will be able to invite them to your tournament.
This explains why I don’t see tournaments from groups I’m not part of under the “Tournaments” tab.
Oh yeah, that’s a big loss. I always just signed up for a lot of open tournaments back when I was playing mainly correspondence. Was a great way to get to know different groups on OGS
Yeah, I’m playing some correspondence tournaments because I could see them open Tourneys under that tab. 
How will I find them now? I can’t join all them groups.
Considering the harm, it looks like a troll’s victory. Do we have a so big burden besides the planet go incident?
In a way it could be seen as “a troll’s victory”, but from a different perspective, it’s simply a measure of maturation and change.
As a site grows and ages, it will become subject to more stresses, and have to respond by defending against them. It’s not the “individual troll’s victory” it’s just a measure of the fact that the site is at the age and stage where some person like that is going to come along and test these things.
When that stage is reached, it’s time for the defenses against that sort of thing.
Much like it’s inevitable that someone hijacks a plane with a gun. Until that happens, air travel is easy. After that, we all have to be screened. This wasn’t “the first hijacker’s victory”, it’s just “the time when that sort of person starts realising that this is possible”.
Aside from the sheer “troll protection” we also have a fair amount of “negative feedback” about the “amount of unwelcome notifications that OGS users are subject to”.
It seems reasonable that “receiving tournment invites” is an “opt-in” thing, taking away one source of ongoing “unsolicited notification”.
Note this change shouldn’t be a reason why tournaments “aren’t showing up somewhere” - as far as I know, the only change was to take away the option to create open group tournaments. If existing ones suddenly disappeared from a list that’s probably a bug.
Hi @GreenAsJade , earlier this tab/page used to have a list of open tournaments that I could “Join”. There were 100s. Now I just see 1.
Note: I am not part of Houston GC as well.
A tournament that is “Members Only” is showing up.
Sounds like a bug to me… not intended.
The change was entirely front end, so hopefully we can get it sorted relatively easily!
It does raise a possibility though: maybe an open tournament can be allowed - it’s just that we don’t want non-member invites for it.
Opting in from a list like the above seems ideal… 
Would it be useful to show members only tournaments in groups that are open to join, in the tournaments list?
The correct way to find out if a user is interested in a tournament in your group is to invite them to your group.
Sorry but how can I invite a user who I don’t know? Must I do it personally only for people who I know? And how anybody can invited me for theirs if they don”t know me?
And if I want to enter in a tournament must I scroll every group and join to view theirs?
Fully understand how we got here, but if I understand this correctly (honestly not sure) this will kill a good part of the tournament culture. I mean, some silly stuff will disappear, but some good stuff too.
The TTY tournament would not have been possible …
I have a proposal.
OK - we’re listening, and not necessarily aware of all the cultures going on.
Let’s keep discussing possible options while having this pause, and look forward to the right solution going back soon - maybe even “just how it was before”.
Note that:
You can invite anyone to your group.
We’d envisaged that this is how you’d find out that people are interested in being invited to your tourneys at all.
For example, I might find the idea of “Fast and narrow tournaments” to be a great idea. I see your invite and join in.
Or I might be aware that I’m not interested in that sort of thing and decline. Benefit: then I don’t hear from you about every tournament you create.
This actually feels OK to me personally for narrow group scopes.
I can see it’s less ideal for groups that might create all sorts of interesting different tournaments.
I wonder whether we might solve the problem of “unsoliciated spam” by adding an “opt in to open tournament invites” checkbox on the tounaments page?
Then everyone can rapidly opt out each time we get an invite spammer, and opt back in when the coast is clear?
That’s another option, and even easier (therefore quicker) to put in place.
Thoughts?
Anything to get open tournaments back IMO, so if that’s easiest, great.
Personally, I don’t care one way or another about the invites. You can always just message people a link to the tournament instead of sending an invite, right? Why do we have that feature at all?
I don’t really understand why the discussion is around the invites. From my perspective the problem is that I can’t look through a list of tournaments that are going to start shortly and (ask to) join. I now have to go through pages of groups and hope to find one that holds a tournament.
If that’s unintended behaviour then it does look like a sizeable bug.
The discussion is around invites because they were the thing that triggered the change.
The impact on “finding tournaments and joining them” was an unintended consequence.
The discussion includes “what to do with invites” as well as “how to re-enable browsing a tournament to join”.
I do worry that we’ve started with the solution that affects users more than spammers. After all, spammers are still allowed to invite unlimited people to their group.
I made this suggestion earlier:
I think it would be good to limit an spammers’ ability to scale their attack. OGS already implements similar in that chat is blocked for the first 24 hours (or until email verification)
There are other similar ideas like “block group” that I think may help users mitigate spam without affecting their ability to join (most) tournaments. I think the “opt-out of open tournaments” mentioned above is another that leaves the power in the non-spamming users’ hands.
Well, lets be clear that the solution we put in place “that affects users more than spammers” was the quickest thing we could to stem the loud indignant user complaints about the invite spam … and that spam stopped.
“Yay”? 
I wonder why you are worried?
It seems to me that we:
Stopped the spam as quickly as we could
(a front-end-only change: light weight easy to whip in place and tweak)
Responded to the feedback that it’s not OK for a long term solution, and are engaged to find the best solution for long term.
What’s missing, to ease your furrowed brow? 
Yes, a PR is in for that as well, specifically about trust to create a group in the first instance.
This is a back-end change and so is on the usual longer test/assess review etc cycle.
( Probably what we need is for the troll to come back and spam group invites again to hurry that one through 
)
I’m not sure about “opt out”. I think I’d view it as “opt-in”. An option for a person to go to the Tournaments page and decide “Oh, I’d like to get invites” and turn that on.
I guess it’s also opt-out, in the scenario we get another spammer and everyone wants to turn it off for a bit 
… for people who already opted in. Anyhow, I guess the intial setting is a point of fine tuning.
I’m leaning in the direction of this…
As one of those who pointed out there are negative consequences I now just want to add that I like the direction this discussion is going in now and think you are handling this very reasonably.
