How to Make an Official Complaint

First Try Unofficial Channels

At times you might feel that you have a problem with someone on IGS, and the proper way to handle this is: please discuss it with that person. It may also be useful to ask other IGSers to help arbitrate your dispute -- outsiders can often shrivel any problems back to their proper proportions.

Always a good idea, when at a loss or in case of any problems, is to ask someone more experienced. IGS in particular has lots of "old hands" who most often are all too happy to give advise or otherwise help.

As a last resort, you may notify the IGS administrators of your problem, but this is truly only as a last resort. The IGS team is busy working on making IGS the best go playing facility possible and do not deserve to be bothered by petty issues. Also, because of their workload, they don't necessarily even get around to answering their e-mail, of which they receive LOTS.

However, always when you have problems with interacting with people, please remember that the problems are not those of the people you ask for help, and that it is up to you to make sure that a solution is found and put into effect. Particularily, shouting around is no solution at all, it is just likely to give you the label of a shouter, and lots of players will disregard whatever you shout, and perhaps you altogether, henceforward. Also, many players have the shouts turned off and will never hear you shouting.

Dealing with Escapers

If and when you suspect that someone has disconnected in order to avoid having their loss recorded, please, please, PLEASE make an effort to be sure that it is not just a straightforward network problem before taking further action. This is a procedure fmc has suggested:

  1. Wait a resonable amount of time. IGS adminstrator "fmc" defines 10 minutes as minimum, but at least 20 minutes is a good idea if you really care.

  2. If waiting is fruitless, attempt to contact the opponent. Leave a message by the IGS 'message' feature, or use e-mail.

  3. Use IGS 'touch' command to keep the game from being automatically deleted.

Once these prove unsuccessful for a period of days (cf. Connection Problems), or you have some proof the opponent's not willing to play it to the end like outright refusing, not answering repeated queries, or disconnecting whenever asked about it, we can say with any confidence (s)he actually might be an escaper. At this stage you can take further action, but DO NOT begin shouting around wildly; this is only slightly less impolite than escaping. fmc gives three ways you can go on from here:
  1. Post to newsgroup rec.games.go. Many people will appreciate warning of an escaper. But please explain carefully just what it was that happened, so that others can judge themselves whether it really was an escape. Also, please no insults.

  2. Send e-mail to go-complaint@pasteur.fr. As these complaints collect, it will be possible to trace the misbehavers. Also, the IGS admins have means beyond us mere mortals to check whether it really was a case of escaping.

  3. You can also e-mail the IGS admins, but as said before, all of them really have lots of things to do.

But no matter what happens, it is important to remember that if someone is not polite, it is by no means necessary for you to follow suit. Please be ever polite all the way through. ALSO NOTE, fmc urges you to remember, that if you complain about someone escaping and it proves you were wrong, you really owe an apology to the one you complained about -- this again is common courtesy.

Continue to "getting a game".

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