Tournaments needs more filters and sorting

[xiaodaiboy]

For tournaments I think it needs more filtering like the ability to filter for 19x19 only and sort by number of users. At it is now, it’s basically unusable.

[snargleplax]

I wanted to suggest this too, so I’m bumping the existing thread.

Apart from the direct convenience aspect, there are multiple unpleasant artifacts in the current system that seem somewhat to result from lack of this capability, which of course is pretty common to tabular displays in web apps. A few I can think of right now:

• Some tournament directors fiddle with start dates over and over to accumulate a large number of players. I infer that they don’t want to set it too far forward in the future, since this would put it too far down the list to be discovered; thus, the current system incentivizes this. This irritates players, who want a clear expectation of when the tournament will actually start; I often see confused messages and venting in tourney lobby chat. If the list had better usability, there would be less apparent need for such fiddling.
• Smaller tournaments struggle to accumulate sufficient players, because it’s more laborious to find ones of interest when browsing. This in turn diminishes an opportunity for tournament-based groups to attract new members and form community.
• It’s easier to contribute to a noise-to-signal problem by putting tournaments in the list that many would find a nuisance – unreasonable time settings, huge numbers of rounds, or whatever. Different folks will have different ideas about what falls into this category, and I don’t want to demean anyone’s attempt to organize a tournament they’re interested in. But surely, sorting and filtering would make it harder to create what is pragmatically spam for others to mentally filter out.

And here are some of the (fairly obvious, but perhaps worth listing a few) direct use cases for user convenience:

• Exclude tournaments for which you do not meet the rank requirements
• Sort or filter by board size. Personally I’m not so into 9x9, and I sure do a lot of mentally filtering those out when browsing the list.
• Filter by number of rounds, or tournament type. It would also be nice to have these exposed as visible columns.
• Exclude timing settings you dislike.
• Sort by number of players – either to find well-populated tournaments (that are likely to start soon because they’re reaching their min player limit), or less populated ones that would appreciate more participants.