On 7th Jan,

ASR "made" an announcement about the EGC 2017, containing several "misleading"/"unclear"/"confusing" information:

1. Misleading title: "Announcement: Welcome to the European Go Congress 2017 in Oberhof (Germany) !"
This makes readers having the impression that it's ASR making announcement instead of other organisation.
ASR should specify that this message is taken from another website.

2. Unclear source: "7th January 2017 (1:1 re-print)"
The URL to the original post is hyperlinked with the text "7th January 2017 (1:1 re-print)" right below the title.
The common practice of providing URL to the original post is linked it at the bottom of the article,
and specify that this article is originally posted on elsewhere by someone else.

3. Confusing information: "The relationship between author and ASR"
As the post on ASR did not specify clearly that the "announcement" is taken from EGC website,
it may confuse readers if Michael Marz, the President of the German Go Federation, is a part of ASR.

All these can be solved by:

1. Changing the title to: "ECG2017 Committee announces: Welcome to the European Go Congress 2017 in Oberhof (Germany) !"

2. Providing the following statement at the beginning of the article:
"
This announcement is originally posted on EGC2017 official website, by Micheal Marz, the President of the German Go Federation.
ASR is proud to forward this message to all the go enthusiasts
"

3. Providing the origin URL at the bottom of the article:
"Link to the official announcement site: Link"

I wonder what happened to ASR,
the team did not make this kind of "Announcement" in this manner before,
I sincerely hope that ASR can be a healthier place so that more go lovers will enjoy playing on ASR.

ASR management is a joke now
Ignore until linuxguuuu gets bored of it and someone more community-oriented runs it

Same thing happened, in the way typical for LinuxGooo, on r/baduk:

“ASRleague” posted with title “European Go Congress 2017 in Germany (official announcement - 7th Jan)”, and,
instead of linking to the appropriate URL at egc2017.eu (the REAL official announcement),
the link (of course) goes to the ASR page which just copies DGoB president Michael Marz’ announcement on that EGC1017 page,
thus giving the impression they had anything to do with it.

IMNVHO the really odd thing is how many people seem to believe that this kind of appropriation is cool, like: “oh, free advertising for me”, but honestly, I for one wouldn't want just anyone to advertise for me.

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I have not been to anything related in any way with ASR so all these posted here have no effect on me. But it amazes me that anyone, anywhere would continue to pay any attention to it at all.

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

A lot of people had put in a lot of work to create and maintain the ASR, which provides a popular league system (currently 400 members?) among other things, and these people and others are understandably irritated at the distasteful behavior of the current leadership.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I counted 117.
The 400+ growing number they keep talking about is the number of people registrated in the asr website. So it's the number of people that played in the league at least one month since march 2016.
This number can only keep growing but it doesn't represent the health of the league.

While that doesn't sound like the best editing job, is there anyone in the world who would honestly be misled into thinking that ASR is somehow responsible for running the European Go Congress?

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The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less!

Is there anyone in the world who has ever fallen prey to a con artist?

The amateurish editing job you mention is one thing, bad enough, another thing is to post links in several places with subjects containing “official announcement”—links that do NOT point to the actual official announcement but instead to some other site where the fact that all info and pictures are copied from the original is just mentioned with a small “1:1 reprint” addition.

This latter thing is called link spam.

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing#Link_spam

And, given the history of the notorious link spammer LinuxGooo, one has to assume that these things don't happen by accident.

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

These threads remind me of the concept in go of a mistake being "self-punishing", when a player has made a suboptimal move that limits his own prospects, and the best reply for his opponent is simply to allow him to do so rather than try to punish him further.

I’m not sure whether you mean these threads or rather what these threads are reporting about—in the latter case I can totally agree with you, and I can also agree with those who say that those people (or probably rather that person) should better be ignored.

At the same time—and for the same reasons—I think it is right that these threads exist —>—>—> so that many more people will know about this malpractice (and the perpetrator’s names, etc.) and will then be able to ignore them.

It’s also about money, BTW, after all ASR is asking for donations … and many passionate Go players are willing to pay a lot of money for their passion, and the more hits ASR gets from those links, the higher up it will rise in search results …

Therefore forum mods and admins, FB Go group admins, Go server admins, etc. should know about all such spammers, known trolls, etc. L19 is a perfect place to communicate such things.

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Thanks - as you see, it is easy to fall victim to disinformation.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.