Hello dear community
I noticed something during my last spades tournament, and also when I participated in some other big and well organised tournaments which we luckily have more and more.
For example the tradition is to create a free table approximately half an hour before the tournament kicks off, players can chat there, get informations, and they are sent by the organisers to different tables to play their games when the time comes.
There are also a lot of participants who like to watch games when theirs are finished, when they are out, especially the final match is always fun to watch.
Now, we have something which can get a bit annoying, tables are usually private so random spammers, or someone who doesn't want to press f3 isn't able to join. This means that all players who would like to spectate must write to the table master to invite.
Organisers are enough busy with organising all matches and taking care that everything goes as planned, so inviting is one more thing that they must look at.
Now, if we had an option to create passwords for tables, then tournament organisers could make a unique password for all tables and pm them before the tournament to all participants.
The implementation would surely be used for other purposes, as everyone knows qc is for many people main chatting platform, friends are hanging out on free tables and doing group chats there.
Let's say Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar are at a table, the master is Messi and he's absent, their friend Levandovski enters the playroom and he can not join them. If they had a pw which only their group of friends would know it would save the day.

Thank you all for your attention and I wish you a happy new year.

I like this idea.
It would be an useful one because we would only type the password and join the table we want without asking around who is the master and so on...

Great idea, this can definitely be very useful.

Hello,

This suggestion comes regularely, but I'm still convainced that it isn't really necessary.

Having a password protected table means that anyone having the password can join the table at any time. For the players, this can be quite annoying to see spectators going in and out all the time. It's much better if spectators can only come at the beginning but not in the middle of the game. Too bad for those who are late !

Additionally, don't neglect people having trouble reading and typing passwords. You are likely going to lose much more time solving players' issues of that kind than you think. That's why I have always been against password protected tables and give something much simpler and clearer for everyone: it's open (public) or closed (private), period.

For the specific problem you are talking about, as an organizer, you can do the following:

1. Create the table and make it immediately private
2. Invite the registered players
3. Start the game and check that the players are ready, but tell them to not do anything before your signal. They should of course ideally know this procedure beforehand.
4. Make the table public so that spectators can enter. Since the game is technically already started, you don't need to care about who is or isn't in spectator mode (this is also a suggestion I saw several times, to allow table master to switch spectator mode of other people on the table; here you don't have the problem at all)
5. After a couple minutes and/or when all spectators are present, make the table private again so that no other spectator can come in the middle of the game
6. Give the signal to players, so the game can actually start

This won't work if there's a time limit, but otherwise it's working quite well. Experienced tournament organizers already proceed as such.

This is actually a very good idea. It squares with the one I had proposed long back, except this seems to be a much more convenient and easier solution to it. Many a times, people don't want to make public tables-for obvious reasons;, they want to hang out with their own circle of friends, but sometimes it just so happens that the table master, is afk or just away for a short period of time, in which case people are unable to join said table, as they do not receive an invite. In these situations, a password would be very handy to have; just enter and you're in without needing an invite. I had enicially proposed things such as invite-list, and other things of that nature but they all are rather unnecessary with this simple quirk-I am surprised I didn't think of it. So yes, am in full support and if its implemented it would be greatly appreciated as it would come in handy in more than just tournaments.

There is not a big audience to watch/listen to tournament games and I can think of more useful things that would help spectators/organisers. The last tournament i was involved in I found people only wanted to come in find out the score, wait for a while and go off to play another game, after a while they would come back to do the same thing. This was being repeated 3 or 4 times by 3 to 5 spectators.

This means people require a facility/command where they can view all scores during a tournament at any given time. I can't say how it could be implemented but it is something for people to debate and perhaps come up with a solution.

Well to view the scores on a table there is the shift f10 command at least, and that's the closest way to see the scores during a tournament.
Now, I personally think the tables with passwords are actually a cool idea. Maybe even not to be shown on the public tables list, but you'd need to type the password when trying to join a player in a private table (CTRL j). I also consider it quite useful in case the table master is away. There are many circles of friends that meet in private tables, and it would be nice if they could just type the password as they come, just like, for example, a channel on team talk, where you can anytime arrive and join your group of friends, without waiting for someone to invite you or open the channel for you.

Hello,

Invitations aren't permanent, they expire after a few minutes, and it's going to be hard to change this. It means that a password protected table necessarily need to be visible on the public list if you want to join it afterwards.

This means people require a facility/command where they can view all scores during a tournament at any given time. I can't say how it could be implemented
but it is something for people to debate and perhaps come up with a solution.

In fact it already exists. Helpers have a command to link a free table with a game table. At the end of each round, scores are reported to the free table. Those who want to follow the tournament just have to stay on the free table to see scores as they arrive.
Often, the organizer of a tournament also set up a stream to listen to, that's also a common way to follow a tournament, as well as, of course, have a good evening. Sometimes games are also commented live.

Wow I didn't know this feature existed, "In fact it already exists. Helpers have a command to link a free table with a game table. At the end of each round, scores are reported to the free table. Those who want to follow the tournament just have to stay on the free table to see scores as they arrive.
Often, the organizer of a tournament also set up a stream to listen to, that's also a common way to follow a tournament, as well as, of course, have a good evening. Sometimes games are also commented live.
". This can be handy in future tournaments. Thanks for that info!.