this relates to all tournaments, especially affecting the live ones.

Every tournament has entry requirements, and those requirements must be met at the start of the tournament, not just at the time of registration, which can occur several months before.

Since this last-minute check is not carried out on BGA, the running of the tournaments on this site, especially in the Swiss system, is seriously impacted by games that are over time, often because one of the players did not play any move.
Many of these players are easily identifiable when they have been banned from BGA, when they have bad Karma, or when they have not been connected for a long time.

That is why I support this initiative to allow tournament organizers to eliminate members from a tournament, just before its start, based on objective and previously defined criteria.

If tournament creators had this option then they could remove those players who deliberately register and do not play or make only a couple of moves.

And why not a waiting list? Example: a 32-player tournament could admit 36 players with 4 on the waiting list

thanks to all the suggestions - yes, they all make sense :) (including the waiting list).

I just tried, anyway, to keep my suggestion easy to implement for the developers as it seems that suggestions are hardly considered anyway from the list (matter of urgency/importance?).

My real big idea would be a confirmation link just before the tournament (and the games) start, but that would mean further and more complex work.

While, strictly speaking, the possibility to simply REMOVE a player from the list BEFORE the tournament starts is definitely something extremely easy to implement.

These are good ideas, but the most important thing is to not have the tournament begin because of the timer. Let, the director make changes and then start the tournament. It's silly that the tournament starts on it's own before you can make all the last minute adjustments that are needed.

This is a great idea but would make Tourney host having privileges, the woulçd require selection.
I had several situations where I would have needed this option, but remember, increasing power means as well increasing selection criteria!

There are various ways to do this or reduce the need for this.

Personally, I would like the possibility to have a confirmation period before the start of the tournament.

In the confirmation period, all players that joined the tournament before the start of the confirmation period would have to go to the tournament and confirm their presence.

How it works:
* The players would obviously get a notification at the start of the confirmation period
* They would possibly get an email (user's choice to receive such emails or not)
* Ideally, they would have a big yellow banner like when you are waited at a table and clicking "next table"
* Ideally also, when you are cycling through the tables at which you are being waited for would also include the tournament presence confirmation page.
* Players that do not confirm their presence before the actual start of the tournament would get booted form the tournament at a karma cost (No ELO cost has this all happens before any table is created)
* Players would also have the choice to cancel their participation at no karma cost or smaller karma cost
* Players that join the tournament after the start of the confirmation period are automatically confirmed (to avoid problems for those joining at the last moment)
* If selected, the confirmation period would start T time before the start of the tournament and would last for T. By default, T would correspond to how much time a player has to make his first move in the game with a minimum of 10 minutes.
** Ideally, the tournament master can also add a small reserve period that starts after the end of confirmation period. During the reserve period, players who did not confirm their presence have already been dropped which allows other players to join the tournament if the tournament was previously full. This could be further combined with a waiting list allowing people to be notified when a tournament they are interested in is no longer full.
** No actual confirmation period is made if the tournament is created to soon before its actual start compared to the duration of the confirmation period

For some tournaments, like slow turn-based tournament with 2 players tables, this has relatively little interest. But for some, this confirmation would be very welcome :
* Real time tournament planned well in advance where many players could time-out on their first move
* Tournaments with tables with more than 2 players where any player dropping on their first move in the game would mean that the game is played with N players but with a N+1 players setup and (possibly) N+1 players rules which is very far from ideal and might work very poorly or not at all for some games. It's also kind of a breach of agreement with the publishers as the game isn't really played with the correct rules if the setup doesn't match the effective number of players.

In real life, if a friend doesn't show up, you either setup the game for one less player or invite someone else at the last minute or play something else. You don't play say Agricola with 2 players but with the cards of a 3 player cards

I'd say tournament admins should be able to remove players even AFTER tournament starts. If there are some improper behaviour, or someone is not playing, or not following the rules... why not?

For a realtime tournament, there should be a 15 minute interval where people have to click on a button that says "Yes, I'm online", and then the pairings are made. Everyone else is unregistered.

For swiss tournaments, players who timeout on a game should get booted from the tournament.

+1 for this. It's absolutely preposterous that a tournament admin can't remove a player from the entry list.

Absolutely agree that tournament admins need to be able to remove players. In Roll for the Galaxy tournaments, there are a couple of people who will skip others. In fact, right now Der Systemrelevante has skipped people in 5 out of 6 of the games and is currently in first which makes tournaments a joke.. Because of horribly behaved players like this, I only create tournaments that are invite only. If I could ban players instead, then I would do that and open the tournament up to everyone else. I would also love for tournaments to automatically banning anyone from signing up who the tournament creator has red-thumbed. This would solve a lot of problems.

We can restrict by reputation but that only solves 0.1% of the problem.

I'm in favor of PhoxTrot's suggestion -- requiring tournament players to check in at the beginning and booting (with penalty) those who don't check in so that everyone can start with a game that plays.

I wish admins would answer.

...they're apparently too busy implementing things that no one's asked for, like a gaudy new game listing and game-creation functionality. :-o

Why not just have the system re-run it's requirements check before the tournament begins? If anyone that registered no longer matches the criteria for the tournament they are automatically removed.

This way the tournament administrator doesn't get any additional privileges and also prevents people from being excluded for personal preference.

I agree. There are some tournaments that are series and have the same problems with the same players over and over again.

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It seems no one talk about it, but this function should not be abusive, and if nothing is done for that point, it shouldn't be done

red thumb player can register at the tournament example X rt Y
but X register to tournament Y
yeah I know it's not logic

but people do that , so the host can't remove the player X , also X rt Y

Is this still not implemented? This seems like it should have been implemented years ago.

You guys really need to add this. Tournament admins currently can't admin much of anything. And some of my tournaments are being harassed by a troll with burner accounts that's often using AI to cheat.

BGA is slow (perhaps rightfully) to remove these accounts individually but they still gum up tourneys.

3 years still same bug

Im an admin for group consisting of 342 players. We are kind of connected to one of the YT channel in Poland. We were an open group, which constantly invited a lot of players due to forum, media posts regarding our groups.

However at one point, 1 of the player in that group, started to terrorizing game tables. He didn't make a single move for mutliple games in a row, on multiple games.

People were furious about him, but due to limit to invitation (and that personal invitiations are quite time consuming) I had to reveal the "private invitation link" into the group and he was constantly joining games with his bad reputation.

I had to close a group (group stopped growing), kick him off and warn everyone (he knew at least one person from the group - that person was giving him links to tournaments) that I will eventually find out who helps him and kick him as well.

Now we have piece, but sadly no new members are seen.

Considering this story. Please allow admins to do something with that kind of behaviour.

As a tangent issue, I have created a suggestion about allowing game to define their own scoring system for tournament and I also tackle a bit how we could have game specific handling of "bye" and adjudication of scores for games that cannot be completed failry.

Suggestion:
boardgamearena.com/bug?id=126622

Forum discussion and details:
boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37045

I just made a post about this same problem, in my case specifically for real-time tournaments, and I thought of a solution that I also see mentioned here, confirmation before the tournament starts.

I stream board games and I always try to get more people into the hobby, but whenever I do a tourney here there are always problems thanks to this issue, and people get more disenchated with them.

If you wanna check it out and chime in here are the links:

Suggestion:
boardgamearena.com/bug?id=133040

Forum:
boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38021

I'm not in favour of this suggestion - and I say that as someone who's set up a lot of tournaments on the site. As a random user who happened to choose the tournament-settings, I shouldn't be given admin powers to deny other members the right to join, based on my own whims - and neither should any other user. I also don't want the expectation that I should trawl every entrant's profile before the tournament begins to check if they've logged in recently.

(addendum to my earlier comment above) - I am, however, totally in favour of automated ways for BGA to remove those with low-reputations / those who haven't logged-in for the duration of 3+ tournament games in a row.

Re: mrdoctor's point above, but isn't the whole point of someone creating a tournament that you play under their rules. If someone enters a tournament who you know is going to cause trouble from past experience, the admin should have an option to remove them. Or you could have a feature like people on your red thumb list can't enter to begin with.

Yes, it's giving admin powers, but what is wrong with that, that's how pretty much any tournament in the world works (eg. a Magic tournament bans cheaters, but a local venue could ban players for breaking venue rules etc.), people should be free to setup tournaments however they like.

If granting power to remove players from signup is too much, it would still be nice to be able to secretly preemptively ban players from signing up if the organizer has a good reason to exclude them for past/present behavior.

Examples:
-Obvious multi-accounting, signing up for tournament with 2+ accounts, breaking TOS and the spirit of tournaments (1 account/entry per person).
-Having a major absence in one or more tournaments over multiple rounds/weeks.
-Repeatability abusing the skip players feature (feature should be removed from tournaments IMO) despite multiple warnings from players/organizers not to skip.

Ideally, there would be some simple options to check players prior to tournament start such as:
-Still meeting the reputation requirements, didn't just sign up for a dozen tournaments and AFK for 6 months
-Respond yes to a roll call issued 48 hours prior to tournament start with the option to remove unresponsive players.