[Old York]

A good friend e-mailed a genuine complaint to abuse@bbo, this was their answer:-


"Hi,

We believe in letting the free market forces determine which tourneys are worth joining, which aren't. This is especially true for the free tourneys.

The player always has the right to choose which tourney he wants to play or help out in.
Similarly, TDs can adjust their rules (some never adjust anything, time or whatever), they can be sterner or nicer, etc. They can choose to direct for just their friends, or for everyone.

We interfere only if the TD is doing something wrong like giving their friends top boards. So if this isn't the case here, please try to join other tourneys in the future if you don't like this TD's style.

Thank you"

The support for free bbo tourneys is awesome.
Perhaps this is official BBO policy, or more likely it is because Fred is out of the office until 7th June?

While the cat's away.......

Tony (Duke of York)

[barmar]

It sounds like the policy BBO has had for as long as I remember. What's the problem?

BBO is not running these tourneys, they don't set the rules. Think of the tourney hosts as bridge clubs, and BBO is just the landlord providing the room and providing equipment (card tables, cards, dealing machine). If a club director made a bad ruling, would you complain to the building management?

[pclayton]

I don't think the 'cat' likes to meddle in these affairs much either.

Perhaps if we knew what kind of 'abuse' was reported (rather than just a 'general complaint'), it might shed some light if the response was OK or not.

[Old York]

Confidentiality forbids.
But I would not post such a reply to a frivolous complaint....it was genuine (imho)

[jdonn]

So you don't want to post the complaint, but you want to vent at everyone that the response was inadequate? Sorry it's hard to feel your pain at this point...

[fred]

Old York, on Jun 4 2008, 03:40 PM, said:

Perhaps this is official BBO policy, or more likely it is because Fred is out of the office until 7th June?

Bad theory.

Do you really think that Fred would be monitoring the 100s of weekly e-mails to support@, abuse@, td@, etc@, if he was not busy playing in a bridge tournament?

The truth of the matter is that Fred and Fred's partners believe in hiring excellent people and, once we hire someone, we do not believe in micro-managing their every move.

From the "evidence" you present it would appear that this style of management seems to be working. I agree with everything our staff member said in the e-mail you quote and I believe that the e-mail was written in a polite and articulate manner.

I don't know which member of our staff wrote this particular e-mail, but if anything your post has only served to reinforce the confidence and pride I have in every member of our customer support department.

Under normal circumstances I would ask people who have a complaint about a member of our staff to send me an e-mail. However, your posts suggests that you are one of those people who likes to wine and try to publicly embarass others when you don't get your way.

So I have no interest in corresponding with you. Have your friend e-mail me himself if he thinks he has a legitimate complaint.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[david_c]

Everything that was said in that email response seems fine to me.

But we should be careful here. That email looks very much like a "standard letter" (and even if it is not, that is the tone of it). The problem with these things is that even if it is very carefully worded and the policy is fine (which it is), there is a danger of it coming across as unresponsive. If the complaint was about "disrespect" as per the thread title, then this is not really addressed by the reply.

This post has been edited by david_c: 2008-June-04, 11:33

[jtfanclub]

Old York, on Jun 4 2008, 11:06 AM, said:

Confidentiality forbids.
But I would not post such a reply to a frivolous complaint....it was genuine (imho)

There are serveral valid complaints IMHO.

One is adjusting based on people they like/don't like.
One is having false tourney information. Creating a 6 board tourney, and then changing it to 12 boards at the last second is an excellent example.
One is the use of extreme rudeness, particularly vulgarities.

There may be more, I can't think of them at the moment.

Generally, these are not considered valid complaints:
Any ruling, on anything, that is not directly to adjusting based on who they like.
Delaying tourneys to wait for another to finish, or delaying during the game to allow table to finish.
Unusual rules ("no psyches" "no redoubles")

Landlord is one comparison given, but I prefer to think of Abuse more like mall security, and the free tourneys as stores in the mall. If it's something that you'd send to security (stealing, screaming curses, etc), then contact abuse. And only then.

Now, based on those categories, would you say that your friend had a valid complaint?

[NickRW]

Tony, this is a public board, but you've not seen fit to disclose one side of the argument. Therefore, nobody can draw an unbiased conclusion. I respect your friend's right to privacy, but in that case what is the point of making half the matter public.

Also the remark about the cat being away is, at least to an unbiased and uninvolved observer, speculation at best.

[TimG]

Old York, on Jun 4 2008, 10:40 AM, said:

We interfere only if the TD is doing something wrong like giving their friends top boards. So if this isn't the case here, please try to join other tourneys in the future if you don't like this TD's style.

This part of the response makes it sound like this was something of an auto-response made without careful reading of the complaint -- "if this isn't the case". If the BBO representative had examined the complaint, there would be no need for the "if".

That having been said, it seems to me that there are likely 100s of complaints and only a very small percentage of them are something that truly requires BBO action. They get this auto-response with the invitation to pursue the matter further if the complaint, upon reflection, is one that really needs the attention of BBO under the "free market" approach favored by BBO.

I think your friend ought to respond: I understand your position, but feel my complaint requires your attention. Again, this is my complaint: <paste complaint here>.

I don't think BBO has disrespected your friend. Your posting, however, might easily be considered disrespecting BBO.

Tim

[babalu1997]

Old York, on Jun 4 2008, 10:40 AM, said:

The support for free bbo tourneys is awesome.
Perhaps this is official BBO policy, or more likely it is because Fred is out of the office until 7th June?

While the cat's away.......

Tony (Duke of York)

That is a rather uncouth comment.

However, duke, please note that the bbo rules do state a list of serious offenses, and truly, when there is enough evidence, there are penalties and player's and td'd privileges are suspended-- I have seen it done. However, you will likely not be personally notified that action was taken against individual x.

But on another note, and in several matters relating to bbo, I personally vouch that Fred, Sheri, Rain and Uday have excellent bedside manner and, whenever I had complaints I felt that my opinion was heard and that they truly care, and they solved the problem.

It is the main reason why I continue to play on this site.

[Trumpace]

Old York, on Jun 4 2008, 10:40 AM, said:

<snip>

While the cat's away.......

And you talk about dis-respect?

I am not affiliated with BBO staff etc, and yet I find this quite offensive (or maybe it is just me).

I really don't see the point of a rant like this if you are not prepared to disclose all relevant details.

[Codo]

This (Tonys rant) had been improper even if all details had been there.

It was a respectful and polite post from BBO. The staff did not share the view of the complainer. This can happen. They refused to punish the TD.

The complainer should accept this, but obviously he did not and told it to Tony.

Tony made a rant out of it instead of telling his friend to calm down.

I am sorry guy, this sucks. I had expect more gentleman- like behaviour from a Duke.

[barmar]

Tony, can't you post the complaint with the names redacted, so no privacy is violated? Or at least summarize the nature of the complaint. How do you expect anyone to react to this if we don't know what the issue was?

[Walddk]

fred, on Jun 4 2008, 07:00 PM, said:

The truth of the matter is that Fred and Fred's partners believe in hiring excellent people and, once we hire someone, we do not believe in micro-managing their every move.

I can verify that. Not once during the 6 years I have been coordinating our vugraph presentations did Fred or Uday interfere with or overrule a decision I made. I had a few delicate calls to make but that is part of the job.

On occasions, mainly regarding abusive language by commentators and the consequences, I have conferred with one or both of them before I made a decision, but I did not have to. Fred and Uday are both very supportive of their staff.

They have wisely chosen to rely on the staff they hired for a particular job. Just like managers do in real life.

Roland

[helene_t]

Walddk, on Jun 5 2008, 07:56 AM, said:

They have wisely chosen to rely on the staff they hired for a particular job. Just like managers do in real life.

Lolol, I actually thought Fred and Uday were made of flesh and blood

Anyway, the response from abuse@ looks fine but of course it is impossible to say whether it was an appropiate reply in this particular case.

[DukeofYork]

I have been unable to reply using my primary id. I will not jump to conclusions.

My main concern is to the actual wording in the bbo reply

"which tourneys are worth joining, which aren't. This is especially true for the free tourneys."

Why are FREE tournaments being singled out for derision? I took this to be dis-respectful of the vast army of Directors and Hosts of free tournaments, who have made bbo the great site that it is today. Perhaps I over-reacted.....but.....

I strongly believe that the bbo reply WAS a standard reply, I did suggest that my friend should contact Fred directly, and I hope the matter was resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned. The actual content of the original complaint is a red-herring, and only concerns 2 people who must remain anon.

Many postings on this site, and messages from other td's have pointed to a general feeling that td's are not held responsible for their bad decisions, perhaps we do need re-assurance that the complaints procedure is actually working.

Respectfully
Tony (Duke of York)

[david_c]

DukeofYork, on Jun 7 2008, 11:04 AM, said:

Many postings on this site, and messages from other td's have pointed to a general feeling that td's are not held responsible for their bad decisions, perhaps we do need re-assurance that the complaints procedure is actually working.

I wouldn't expect BBO to take action against a TD just for making a few "bad decisions". After all, making the right decision is not always easy, particularly online.

Of course, there are some things which a TD can do wrong which should not be allowed to continue, but these would have to be considerably worse than a bad decision (obvious example: cancelling a tourney half-way through for no good reason).

I do think it is in BBO's interests to "police" its TDs to some extent. But even checking for the obvious abuses would (I guess) be a full-time job. It's surely not realistic to expect them to review every decision made. Hence the reply that it is up to the players to work out which tourneys they are happy to play in.

[fred]

The person did contact me directly. He/she was unhappy with the way a TD in a free tournament handled a particular situation. IMO it was a completely reasonable complaint - I also would have been unhappy if this had happened to me.

The person went on to claim that it reflects badly on BBO when one of our representative TDs handles a bridge situation so poorly.

Normally I do not put a lot of effort into responding to such e-mails. In fact, more often than not nowadays I simply forward e-mails like this to a particular member of our staff who has a gift for explaining awkward situations in a way that tends to satisfy the person who complained.

This policy is not because I don't care - it is because I have a lot of other responsibilities and writing long responses to every BBO member who contacts me about a bridge ruling, their new favorite convention, or most other subjects, is not the best use of my time.

However, in this particular case I made an exception because (as you probably noticed!) I do not like it when people make an effort to publicly attack or embarass my partners or the fine people who work for us, particularly when they do this via BBO or a BBO web site, and particularly when the complaint in question is not justified.

So I decided that I would try to do some damage control - a copy of my e-mail (with references to the name of the person who complained deleted) follows:


I sympathize with you from a bridge point of view, but with all due respect it sounds like you do not fully understand the nature of our site as it pertains to free tournaments.

BBO policy is to allow just about anyone who volunteers as a TD to run free tournaments on our site. This is because we know that we have many 1000s of members who enjoy playing in free tournaments so we do what we can to try to ensure that there are as many of these tournaments as possible.

And of course we are grateful to those who volunteer their time to run free tournaments on BBO. As I am sure you can imagine, this is often a thankless task - these people unfortunately suffer a lot of abuse at the hands of rude players who do not realize that they should be thankful that they have a chance to play in free tournaments on a free site in the first place.

Please note that I am NOT suggesting in any way that you were rude, that your actions were in any way inappropriate, or that your attitude toward BBO and/or free tournaments is not sufficiently grateful.

From a practical standpoint it is impossible for us to train or monitor the 1000s of free-tourney TDs with respect to being good TDs for a number of reasons:

- there are too many of them and too few of us
- BBO is a business and there is only so much time and money we can invest in giving away things for free
- many of these TDs have only limited English skills
- these TDs come from all over the world and standards for things like "what bids should be alerted" vary widely from country to country
- typically it takes years of experience before a new TD really knows what he/she is doing
- most of these volunteers would quit if they were forced to submit to "tests", if we constantly criticized them every time we heard of a ruling they made that we disagreed with, etc...

About the best we can do is to tell these TDs that we expect them to follow general BBO rules (be polite, don't cheat, etc) and leave it up to our players to decide which free TDs' tournaments they want to play in. That was the basic message that you received from our staff. I can assure you that if any TD (or any BBO member for that matter) is consistently rude, cheats, etc. that we will remove their right to be a TD. But we do not (and cannot) get involved in teaching these people how to be good TDs.

The bottom line is that these TDs do not "represent BBO" as you suggest. I can understand how you and other players might be under this impression, but it is emphatically not the case.

If incidents like the one you report "reflect badly" on BBO then that is just too bad. We are doing the best we can to provide a quality site with plenty of options where people can play bridge without spending any money. If some of our players don't like some of these options they should simply avoid such options in the future. As you correctly note, there are a lot of free TDs on BBO who do an excellent job.

I hope that this e-mail has helped to clarify the reasons behind the response that you received (a response that I personally consider to be entirely appropriate by the way) and that you will continue to enjoy BBO despite the occasional unpleasant incident that you are bound to experience on any free site.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[jillybean]

DukeofYork, on Jun 7 2008, 03:04 AM, said:

Many postings on this site, and messages from other td's have pointed to a general feeling that td's are not held responsible for their bad decisions, perhaps we do need re-assurance that the complaints procedure is actually working.

I think the point is free TD’s are free to make any decision they like. They can adjust boards unfairly, only adjust odd numbered tables or take 2 tricks away from anyone who opens 1nt in first seat. Pay TD’s on the other hand won’t be in business if they make too many bad decisions.

Free TD’s along with everyone else on BBO are expected to follow the rules of the site, not any bridge laws. The site rules prohibit profanities, racist or sexually explicit remarks, insults but say nothing about bad decisions.

(oops, posted before I saw FG's response)