Supressed player

If I reload the results of the Circuit Final with Bowen removed, the value of the tournament will be ‘less’ the amount that is added from the 12th ranked player participating and a player rated at 1844.58 participating.

Specifically for that event the value would be reduced by 1.24 WPPR points.

Results are never ‘locked in’ on our site in the past. I literally just had a player realize that they had a duplicate profile with 1 result from 2012. This changes the calculation of every tournament after that point in time.

If we did that with a player of Bowen’s caliber, every tournament in the database since pretty much of the beginning of time would have a new calculated value.

At some point the IFPA can’t be forced to delete any player or event from the system if we choose ‘not to do that’. Back in 2008 there was a Tournament Director that wanted their events removed from the IFPA database, even those events at his establishment that were previously endorsed (similar to the player argument that’s being discussed).

Rather than try to fight him on keeping those results in the system, I simply said, “No problem, those events and all details associated with them will be removed”.

What I did next was create a ‘new event’. Tournament Director name “Unknown”, Location “Unknown”, Details of tournament “Unknown”, and published the results that way:

https://www.ifpapinball.com/tournaments/view.php?t=360

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If your mythical player wishes to compete in multiple IFPA events they can use the same name at every event. It doesn’t have to be their real name. Since they will never claim the profile no email is required. They will receive no sponsor marketing (no way to contact them) and can still compare their tournament results to others in the IFPA.
If Player Doe is that adamant about not being in the IFPA though why bother with IFPA events? Ms. Doe could run their own using Matchplay and never involve the IFPA. They could also track results and award themselves DPPRs (Doe Pinball Player Ranking) if such data interested them.

Fictional profiles won’t clog up the data any more than profiles from players without active results clog up the data.

In short, one can play in the IFPA without giving up any personal information.

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I just had a person sign up for his first tournament and he wrote down his nickname. I asked them if they wanted to go by this or their real name, he was so excited to hear he could use his nickname. So now there’s a Ziggy in IFPA :smiley:

This profile is a perfect example of that:

https://www.ifpapinball.com/player.php?p=1583#active

This is the guy that years ago back in 2008 got busted at work for taking a “sick day”, when there was evidence he wasn’t home sick, but rather was at a pinball tournament competing that day.

He requested that his real name be changed to “Max Power”, and then he would use that name going forward in any event he competes in. The WPPR system moves on without caring . . .the results are just as accurate for this player . . . and I get one hell of a funny story out of it even 10 years later :slight_smile:

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Ha, funny, this exact scenario is what this thread made me think of before you posted the story.

I’ve been guilty myself of plenty of ‘call in sick on Friday morning’ from my hotel at PAPA, or TPF, or NW Champs, or CAX . . or :slight_smile:

I always set the alarm for like 4am and then call right away while in a daze. I figured my voice would sound ‘most sick’ at that time.

Years later my old boss spotted the trend of coincidentally being sick on Friday’s where I mentioned whatever tournaments I had coming up.

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So why not solve the privacy issues by really removing their names/contact from your system rather than just changing the name displayed? Allow a person to be submitted with a name initially to get an ID assigned… and then change all their PII to generic placeholders. Then allow the person to be submitted in future events purely with their assigned ID number? That way users who care can be submitted with results without having to provide names and emails and the rest of the system continues on as it needs.

There needs to be a bit of an honor element if you don’t use a second piece to verify the ID is used honestly… but you kind of have similar trusts with submissions at this point anyways.

You don’t need an email at all for our system.

Most TD’s do not submit using Player ID’s at all. As a TD myself I know I don’t. Submissions come in using names only. So if you decided to suppress yourself and I removed “Steve Kapinos” from your profile, then the next event you played in a ‘new’ “Steve Kapinos” account would be created when the TD submitted results. That new account would NOT be suppressed because I would have no idea it should be.

Currently 0.07% of our player accounts have chosen to be suppressed, so I’m not too worried about it at the moment.

I’m curious if @haugstrup has anything in place on the MatchPlay side to suppress names and then still allow tournament directors to submit results using that player in a ‘private way’?

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So how do you handle name overlaps or changes in presentation today?

The point about using the ID is it keeps the PII out of the equation without just resorting to fake personas. Which ultimately would probably get troublesome as you start playing filter when people start getting cute, etc.

The point isn’t just about how many people chose to be suppressed today - it was about a system that can easily adapt to privacy concerns with minimal change or loss.

We’ll typically designate same names by a country or state abbreviation as the suffix.

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I see two different things being discussed in this thread:

  1. Treatment of emails for registered users
  2. Recording tournament results and suppressing player names

For the first one: MP stores emails of registered users. This need to happen to avoid spam accounts and to facilitate account recovery for forgotten passwords. I don’t share those emails with third parties. I’ve received a handful of requests from players wanting to contact tournament directors and tournament directors wanting to contact players. I’ve declined to share emails in all cases.

For the second one: I don’t have anything in place and generally speaking it’s not something I see myself getting in the middle of. Tournament directors are in full control over which names appear on their tournaments. If a player wants to appear under a specific name that’s between the player and the TD. Only if a TD is claiming a player played a tournament, they didn’t could I see myself getting involved.

TDs can rename players at any time. The player name is independent from any IFPA number attached to the player. TDs can create any pseudonym they want and still attach the correct IFPA number on the backend.

MP Ratings is a reflection of tournament results that happened elsewhere (on MP, challonge, DTM, brackelope). Those names should be suppressed at the source if they should be suppressed.

One advantage of glicko-based ratings is that omitted results from a single player won’t discredit the rest of the results from that tournament. Generally speaking I see MP Ratings as historical records though. There’s nothing on the technical front that’ll let a TD omit results from a single player and I can’t see myself spending time writing code to support such a thing. It’s all or nothing.

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I like this. We’re going with this :slight_smile:

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What about already established players? I’d really like to be shown as Erik wurtenberger USA KY

I wonder how the UTF-8 handling is for MatchPlay/Brackelope/IFPA… I’d like to add a somewhere in my name.

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utf8_general_ci is the collation for the Match Play database. So your snowman will be fine, but emoji will not. Eventually I’ll change the collation to utf8mb4 for emoji support, but more important things always come in the way :slight_smile:

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I feel like having an emoji in one’s IFPA name should be considered a basic human right.

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What if your middle name is a construction noise?

/asking for a friend

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And the IFPA doesn’t support apostrophes. What a world we live in.

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They should be working fine now. We’ve had dozens our tournaments in the last few months created and maintained just fine. The issues in the past were introduced by our Administration console being integrated with Wordpress and it forced stripping fields, where outside of Wordpress, it had no issues.

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Can existing profiles be updated if players want? I assume email the IFPA email address and things can be changed. #askingforafriend