"The District 8 Solver's Forum" is a bidding contest. Every two months six new bidding problems are presented on the District 8 Advocate home page at URL:
If you go there and look at the left column under "Solver's Forum" you'll see something like this, let's say that the June Forum has just completed.
| June Column |
| June Scores |
| August problems |
Clicking on "June Column" will display the current column. The columns consist of a panel of experts and a moderator that discuss the hands. The various bids for each hand are assigned a score and the panel and solvers receive a total score for the six hands. The solvers with the highest scores become panelists for the next set of problems. Scores are accumulated for the calendar year and the solvers with the highest total scores become panelists for the following year.
Clicking on "June Scores" will display the scores of all the Panelists and Solvers, you can use this to look up your score on the June problems.
Finally, clicking on "August Problems" will produce the screen on which you can enter your answers for the next forum which begins as soon as the June forum is complete and ends on August 1.
You're always the South player. The information you have to work with is: your hand, the vulnerability, the kind of bridge being played (e.g. IMPS, Matchpoints), and the auction that led up to up to the problem you're now trying to solve. To participate, figure out what action you'd take and enter it in the bidding box on the right side of the screen. Optionally, there's a Comments Box immediately below each hand where you can enter comments about the option you chose, options you thought about but didn't choose, your stupid partner, or anything else of significance. At the end there's a space to enter your name, City and Country, and your email address. When everything looks good, click on the "SEND BIDS" button at the end and your answers will go sailing off to District 8 where they may become part of the new "Solver's Forum" article.
The Cranky Forum Program (CFP) will complain about a few things. If you don't enter a bid for one or more of the hands, the screen will return with an error message under the bidding box that looks like this:
No Bid Entered
If you just forgot to enter a bid, you can do so on the error screen and re-submit; if you really didn't want to enter a bid there's a special "No-bid bid" you can use called "XX" (The unknown bid!) in the lower right-hand corner of the bidding box which will stop CFP from complaining about your not entering a bid.
CFP will also complain if you didn't enter a name, a City-Country, or an email address. We use the Name and City/Cntry on the lists of solvers who got high scores. We use the email address to notify you if you're a panelist for the next month and to nag you if you don't get your answers in on time! Mostly we want to make sure you didn't just forget to enter one or more of the fields. If entering personal information makes you queasy it's quite ok to put in Clark Kent in the name field, Smallville for City, and ironbutt@krypton.com for email address! The error messages for missing info are at the bottom of the screen and look like this:
Name Missing
City-Cntry Missing
Email Addr Missing
Comments. CFP won't complain about missing comments, but it will complain if they're too long, as:
Comments Field Too Long
The comments box will let you enter an unlimited amount of data, but...we'll only use the first 320 characters. Since we average about 15 panelists, all of whom (think they) have wonderful, pithy, and utterly correct answers, we don't have room for a lot of long answers in the forum articles. You can tell when you're running over the limit when you start seeing scroll bars on the side or bottom of the box. Make your comment a little smaller and re-enter.
Too Late. Finally, CFP will complain if you wait too long to submit your answers. There's a countdown clock in the upper right part of the screen that gives the number of days left in the current forum. When it hits zero, CFP won't accept any more answers for that forum and you'll see a message like:
Entries are now closed for this forum.
The good news is that the new article should be coming out soon after and a new forum starting.
When you enter all your bids and comments and click the SEND BIDS button, one of two things will happen. If CFP detected one or more errors, you'll get a message like this:
X Missing or Invalid Entries
Where X is the number of errors found. The error messages for a given problem will be below the Bid Box for that problem, more generic error messages like a missing Name are at the bottom. Just fix the errors and re-enter.
...or a message like this:
All OK. Answers Posted.
Which means you're all done. If you like, you can enter another set of answers. The forum will eventually take the last set you entered and delete the earlier ones.