Sorting or posting tournament announcements by region
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Would it be possible to organize tournament postings by region, similar to the old website? Alternatively, could we create "standardized" region tags, and post links to those standardized tags on the tournament announcement page, so that it is obvious how to screen for tournaments in a particular region (while still allowing tournament announcements to be additionally tagged by city/state/country/etc)?
At this point, there appears to be some attempt to tag by region, but the tags do not appear to be standardized, or at least it isn't clear what the standardized tags are. As a consequence, for example, it took me a while to determine that as of yet there are (unsurprisingly) no tournaments posted as of yet for the "West Coast / Pacific / California / etc." It would be nice if this were easier, especially for new users.
Thanks!
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I'd love to see this as well. By the time we really get rolling and we have posts for all of the regular events the Tournament Announcements forum will be really difficult to navigate without some kind of filtering. I would suggest making it mandatory to choose a tag for each new post from a list to be agreed upon. That way, we should be able to quickly find the events in our area.
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It's not difficult for me to add tags to posts manually until people get the hang of them, Are there particular region tags we want? We don't have to be stuck with the old set of regions ... what would be the most useful?
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@Brass-Man In the northeast US, States would probably work best.
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I sort of liked the old regions, but that might be because there are relatively fewer tournaments west of the Rockies, so it was nice to see them in one place.
But even on the East Coast I'd think states might be too granular. Wouldn't we want regions large enough to capture the distance most players are willing to drive?
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how about a google map option? Can't you get a free low volume API?
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I agree about just having "west coast" option at least. There are fewer tournaments out here so even with the large area it wouldn't be too cluttered.
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@aardshark States may indeed be that distance. I know for myself and most of the regular players around me an hour is a long drive for a regular tournament. An open being worth about 2.5-3 hours drive. Basically, I live in NH and will go as far as Boston, sometimes, for a tournament.
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I would suggest looking at how many tournaments there are and where and then gerrymandering the regions so they have equal numbers of tournaments. My though is that people areas with lower number of tournaments may be more likely to travel further. It doesn't really mater what region the large tournaments are in.
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The Regional Tags and Tournament Announcements are becoming increasingly chaotic.
A substantial fraction of the Tournament Announcements posts lack regional tags, and those that do have tags do not use then consistently. For example, there are currently separate tags for "Midwest" and "Midwest USA". Also, a "Southwest" tag was created for an event in Texas, even though it might be best to lump all West Coast events together. (The one event in Los Angeles, California doesn't have a regional tag.)
The result is that I find the tournament announcements far less useful than they were on the old website. Creating a central clearing house for upcoming vintage events has always been a core function of TMD, so I think this is a big problem that deserves immediate attention. And as time goes on, the problem will get harder to solve.
I also fear it puts too much pressure on the moderators to ask them to manually update, and it isn't realistic to expect this will happen consistently.
I strongly recommend prioritizing the creation of a modest number of preset region tags for the major geographic regions (with an "other" option for anyone outside of those regions), and if possible forcing post in the tournament announcement forum to select a forum. Hopefully this is technologically feasible.
Thanks for your hard work and consideration!
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I think we're also already at the point where trying to sort through all of the posts in one sub forum is unmanageable, even if everything were tagged consistently. If I'm remembering correctly, old TMD had subforums for West Coast / Midwest / South and Soutwest / East Coast / Non US and International. That might be a better way of organizing than we have at the moment.
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@GHitchHiker I liked the way the original TMD organizational tournament announcements, but that tags could be an acceptable workaround if they were used consistently and selectively.
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Can we get a sticky on using tags and formatting post titles for the announcement forum? At least as a temporary solution.
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If I get some time later today I'll edit the existing posts to fix their tags (matching the old subforum pattern for now), and write up a sticky. I agree it's starting to get out of hand, and the ultimate technical solution is a ways out (all of my time has been spent trying to fix the TMD archive site)
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This is a good idea. I would like to see at least two subforums, one for north america (Mexico, US, CAN), and one for European. Then tags should go with country, states, town.
But imo, while tag-creation are open to everyone, it looks hard to get something good formatted on the long run, except if all TMDer follow the rules
