[meliora2]

I am so weary of "PRIVATE". They tell you no country - okay. They tell you no name - okay. BUT, they tell you no system and do not fill out cards.

I feel it should be required to announce your system or lack of one on your Profile.

Yesterday I was partner to anonymous from nowhere. It opened 2H. I asked if the bid was weak, as previous hands showed unusual bidding. No answer. I passed my 14 points. It had 24 points and a 7 card heart suit. What system was it using - Goren? I hadn't a clue. Our score was dreadful.

I believe BBO should require some announcement of what system (or not) a player uses to be allowed to play. If the "requirement" is too stringent or considered an invasion of privacy, there is always The Zone.

[hrothgar]

meliora2, on 2013-November-14, 19:26, said:

I am so weary of "PRIVATE". They tell you no country - okay. They tell you no name - okay. BUT, they tell you no system and do not fill out cards.

I feel it should be required to announce your system or lack of one on your Profile.

Yesterday I was partner to anonymous from nowhere. It opened 2H. I asked if the bid was weak, as previous hands showed unusual bidding. No answer. I passed my 14 points. It had 24 points and a 7 card heart suit. What system was it using - Goren? I hadn't a clue. Our score was dreadful.

I believe BBO should require some announcement of what system (or not) a player uses to be allowed to play. If the "requirement" is too stringent or considered an invasion of privacy, there is always The Zone.

Out of curiosity, do you find it at all hypocritical to launch into a bitchfest over blank profiles while leaving your forum profile blank?

Regardless

1. If you're silly enough to play with random pickups, you better develop a strong stomach
2. You'll soon learn that the claims that people make in their profiles bear little to no relationship to reality

[barmar]

Welcome to the forums, meliora. Please notice that there are separate forums for BBO discussions and general bridge discussions, and I've moved this thread to the BBO-specific area.

This is a subject that comes up frequently, if you search back through old posts here you should be able to find previous discussions.

[barmar]

hrothgar, on 2013-November-14, 20:08, said:

Out of curiosity, do you find it at all hypocritical to launch into a bitchfest over blank profiles while leaving your forum profile blank?

What doesthis have to do with anything? Do you need to read their forum profile to be able to converse with them?

[hrothgar]

barmar, on 2013-November-15, 09:39, said:

What does this have to do with anything? Do you need to read their forum profile to be able to converse with them?

Obviously not. You might have been able to infer that from the fact that I was able to respond to the original post...

With this said and done if someone is too ignorant / lazy to fill out a profile on the forums, it seems a bit weird for them to be bitching that people are too ignorant / lazy to fill out a profile on BBO.

In a similar vein, do you really need to read someone's profile to be able to play bridge with them.
Stronger yet, does anyone actually place any credence what so ever in some random yahoo's BBO profile?

[barmar]

No one cares about forum profiles, they're not used for anything important. It's ridiculous to compare them with BBO profiles.

When people sit down with random yahoos in online bridge, there's usually little to no system discussion. The profile is often expected to substitute for this.

However, if you play with someone and they don't have a profile, and don't discuss system, the logical assumption should be that they're playing YOUR profile. As long as one of you has a profile, that should be enough.

[canam99]

i too dislike blank profiles, that dont show bidding system or "private" for skill level , when i am host i dont allow it, another bitch i have is when new ops sit at a table, u nearly always have to ask for a reset of the score with many hosts refusing to do it or only after they see if they can u wait u out , when i am host u dont have to ask if new ops join my table, its the right fair thing to do sadly so few do

[jillybean]

I'd take a blank profile over this any day.

[1eyedjack]

Odd. I would have rated a name (even a pseudonym) to be a higher priority to display than skill level. At least it might be regarded as courteous to provide a label by which you can be addressed, while skill level does nothing more than sate curiosity, even if it had any reliability. If I sit down at a random face to face table I do not expect to be asked how many masterpoints I have, and if someone did ask me I would tell them in the nicest possible way to go shaft themselves.

As for systems, I have yet to encounter anyone with a blank profile who lacks a rudimentary grasp of standard methods. And if I ever do encounter one such, I doubt that anything that he might have entered in his profile would have made a heap of difference.

My principal objection to the current setup is that the software does not allow me to suppress or make private my BBO masterpoint ranking.