Proposal Mandate Public Profiles for Playing in Tournaments

[ninjadog]

Pretty simple, if you have a private profile you should be barred from entering tournaments or receive automatic losses, it just makes it needlessly difficult for your opponent to contact you which can be annoying if they have limited availability and want to schedule quickly, and it would make things easier for hosts. Anyone using it is just being obnoxious and trying to make things harder for others.

It's not the biggest deal but there are basically no downsides to implementing this, the private profile function has pretty much outlived its use given no one uses VMs for anything except scheduling now anyway.

There can be some exceptions for public figures like freezai or blunder whose walls get flooded by fans but these cases are extremely rare and can be handled case-by-case.

 

[Finchinator]

Yes. Private profiles are silly and everyone should be able to VM their opponent.

This helps people playing in tours have ease of access to their opponents and hosts have public ways of seeing contact rather than asking for PM logs if things are done there.

I agree with the OP entirely.

 

[Aqua Jet]

To add on to this can we mandate that the privacy setting must be set so that everyone can write on your wall? Feels somewhat pointless otherwise

 

[kaori]

Not a whole lot to add, but I think this should absolutely be implemented, especially in consideration of tournament hosts. Hosting tournaments on this site is an unpaid time suck that often goes under appreciated. Any common sense, low effort step we can take to ease that burden should be a no brainer.

To throw around a small idea, I think scheduling done over Discord (or any other platform I suppose) should be posted to the wall of one of the players once a time has been agreed upon. Any scheduling should be easily accessible to hosts without having to hound people over Discord.

 

[Rei]

I do think this should be a thing. I hate having to schedule offsite because my opponents have their profile private or have it to where I cannot write on their wall due to their settings. I use Discord for more than Pokemon and would rather not be forced to use it to schedule Pokemon games in pms because of my opponent's privacy settings when using smogon vms that are public makes it easier for the host to see the time that was agreed upon if there is a debate about a missed time. I do agree with kaori that if a tournament game gets scheduled offsite, the agreed time must be posted on one of the player's walls.

 

[w_r]

It's not the biggest deal but there are basically no downsides to implementing this, the private profile function has pretty much outlived its use given no one uses VMs for anything except scheduling now anyway.

It's simple if you are making this post I'd assume you have your profile public which means the other party can contact you on your wall for scheduling. If you have limited availability you shouldn't be joining tours expecting the other party to play ASAP. There is another convenient option of starting a conversation which also helps if you are expecting a reply within 15 mins of a round going up.

If you want a reason why it should be individual preference to keep your profile public / private it's because some of us are here just for the sake of quietly playing the tour game and logging off. Just see the smogon masters drama between leru and ima, one party going after another for following the rules. Well I think it's valid to limit contact with the toxic smogon tour culture and it should be left to individual preference. I'd be interested to hear out your personal experience of finding it impossible to schedule with someone who locks their profile and maybe we can work out a solution ;) hope I helped.

 

[Nashrock]

I’m not sure if this will add tons of work to do, but is it possible that we have tour players’ walls open to users in the same tour, or their opponent this round automatically?

 

[Excal]

It's simple if you are making this post I'd assume you have your profile public which means the other party can contact you on your wall for scheduling. If you have limited availability you shouldn't be joining tours expecting the other party to play ASAP. There is another convenient option of starting a conversation which also helps if you are expecting a reply within 15 mins of a round going up.

If you want a reason why it should be individual preference to keep your profile public / private it's because some of us are here just for the sake of quietly playing the tour game and logging off. Just see the smogon masters drama between leru and ima, one party going after another for following the rules. Well I think it's valid to limit contact with the toxic smogon tour culture and it should be left to individual preference. I'd be interested to hear out your personal experience of finding it impossible to schedule with someone who locks their profile and maybe we can work out a solution ;) hope I helped.

if someone posts toxicity on your wall/uses contents on your wall to be toxic, just delete it and/or report them to staff.

the feature is antiquated. who cares about smogon profiles. they should serve mainly to ease scheduling and activity decisions for hosts and participants. i understand not preferring everyone to have access to your public scheduling, but hosts understand that a scheduled time with someone doesn't have any dictation on your availability for other tour games. i support enforcing public profiles for tournaments strictly or facing disqualification.

 

[Da Pizza Man]

It's simple if you are making this post I'd assume you have your profile public which means the other party can contact you on your wall for scheduling. If you have limited availability you shouldn't be joining tours expecting the other party to play ASAP. There is another convenient option of starting a conversation which also helps if you are expecting a reply within 15 mins of a round going up.

If you want a reason why it should be individual preference to keep your profile public / private it's because some of us are here just for the sake of quietly playing the tour game and logging off. Just see the smogon masters drama between leru and ima, one party going after another for following the rules. Well I think it's valid to limit contact with the toxic smogon tour culture and it should be left to individual preference. I'd be interested to hear out your personal experience of finding it impossible to schedule with someone who locks their profile and maybe we can work out a solution ;) hope I helped.

If somebody is being toxic on your wall, XenForo already has a built-in Ignore feature that lets you hide all messages from any user you please. And hell, even if this feature didn't exist, you could always just delete these post, and if necessary, report them and have the moderators deal with the issue. There's really no reason why you would have to resort to blocking anybody from writing stuff on your wall just because you got into a heated argument with somebody.

 

[Lily]

One very tiny challenge to this is that moderators can bypass private profiles. A lot of hosts tend to moderate some section of the site, so it won't necessarily always be obvious to them if someone's profile is private or not (and there's no indicator for it), and so if they see no contact between two players they might make the incorrect call assuming one had a private profile.

An easy enough solution would be to just have the non-private player in the pairing tag the host in the thread and have them ask the other player to unprivate their profile. That might create more work for hosts though. Maybe there's another obvious solution I'm missing so I'd be happy to hear it if so. Seems like an open and shut proposal either way.

edit: easy solution was found, ty chaos!

 

[Eternal Spirit]

Why don't the ADMs just disable the option of hiding a profile? This tool doesnt add anything relevant, as I can't think of a single reason to justify anyone trying to hide their message walls on a pokémon gaming forums, unless you like to post your own photos with swimwear, or selfies as you were an Instagram influencer there. Let's be simple for once please.

By the way, if you like to hide your smogon profile I'll tell you: nobody cares about you to the point of opening your profile for more than twice an year. Embrace your irrelevance, and then you will notice how living can be easier than you think.

 

[Sneakyplanner]

Why don't the ADMs just disable the option of hiding a profile? This tool doesnt add anything relevant, as I can't think of a single reason to justify anyone trying to hide their message walls on a pokémon gaming forums

There are plenty of reasons to want your profile to be hidden. Smogon users can be, uh, special and persistent. It doesn't take much for some soon to be banned deucer to start harassing people. Privacy features like hiding your wall are a good feature to have in cases like that. Privacy features are always helpful when you need them, and people don't need to explain to smogon user eternal spirit if they want their wall to be private for whatever reason. There's no reason to remove the feature.

 

[mkizzy]

There are plenty of reasons to want your profile to be hidden. Smogon users can be, uh, special and persistent. It doesn't take much for some soon to be banned deucer to start harassing people. Privacy features like hiding your wall are a good feature to have in cases like that. Privacy features are always helpful when you need them, and people don't need to explain to smogon user eternal spirit if they want their wall to be private for whatever reason. There's no reason to remove the feature.

if there is trouble thats what the moderator team is for, or you can delete their posts on your wall, or you can click ignore on their profile. a private wall is not necessary to avoid harassment if thats your concern

 

[roxie]

Reporting someone doesn’t prevent banned users from miraculously appearing on a different alt or offensive users from making sensitive comments (re: Palestine) on your page. Everyone knew who bulufan was when that alt came out but let’s think about how long it took for the alt to get formally banned. What about the socialization / security aspect of this. There are many people that get banned from being involved with inappropriate and sensitive topics like grooming but what about the POV of someone that went through such a situation. As someone that went through INAP interactions I feared my safety at one point. And after becoming a moderator I know evading is much more abusable with IPs so I made my profile private since I wasn’t in tours. There are other aspects of Smogon outside the tournament scene and I’m don’t think disabling a socialization feature is in alignment with tournament rule that can just be enforced more harshly. “Do not join tournaments unless your profile is public” should just be a direct rule for any tournament or late round (ie: whatever round Leru and ima was in for example) to enforce it. Infractions exist to enforce the rule more harshly and it doesn’t require an advance Xenforo/technical change for something that’s punishable.

edit: mods have the option to issue 0 point warnings and a system leading up to a tournament banned is a midground that leads up to a harsher punishment consecutively. If you have multiple warnings you can just get tour banned. We have the resources available and I believe the feature is great if you’re on LOA

 

[soulgazer]

Requesting participants to set their profile to public to participate in a tournament is fair. I won’t comment on the feature itself, but as far as it goes in tournaments players should always make it easier for their opponent to contact them. Having to jump through hoops to contact you is genuinely disrespectful to the competition.