If you are a posting a thread announcing a tournament:

A) You MUST include some sort of geographical location in the thread title describing where your tournament is going to take place, with the more info you can manage to fit the better. Posting *just* the name of the gaming store where your event is happening is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Dakka is a global community and it can be a real pain to have to click on a thread just to find out that the event is taking place in another country. At the bare minimum, you must include the name of the city where the even is happening, but again, the more info you can fit, the better (state, province, country, etc).

B) If your event is focused on only one or two types of games, then your thread MUST say as much. For example, if your tournament is a Warhammer 40,000 event, then at least putting '40K' somewhere in the thread title is mandatory. If your event is focuses on 3 or more games, then it is okay to not put any kind of game info in the title, as it is considered to be a 'general' event.

Failure to include this information may result in your thread being locked or deleted, so please take the time to properly format your thread titles!

Discussion about what happened at a tournament can either occur in the original announcement thread for the event (assuming there was one), or a separate thread can be created just for post-tournament discussion. If the latter method is chosen, please notify a moderator to lock the original announcement thread (click on the yellow symbol that has an exclamation mark on it on the right hand side of any post in the announcement thread and in the description field explain that there is now a post-tournament discussion thread for the event).

If the post-tournament discussion is happening in the original announcement thread, then the user that started the announcement thread should update the thread's title to tell people on which page of the thread the post-tournament discussion begins (by editing the 'subject' field of their original post in that thread). If the user that started the announcement thread is not updating the thread's title to reflect that there is now post-even discussion occurring, please notify a moderator to update the thread's title (click on the yellow symbol that has an exclamation mark on it on the right hand side of the first post where post-tournament discussion of the event starts and then in the description field explain that the thread title needs to be updated because there is post-tournament discussion going on).

If you are writing after a tournament to complain about how the event was run or the behavior of one or more individuals, please keep in mind:

A) Be Polite! No matter what happened at the event, you are not allowed to be rude about it when you post about it here on Dakka, even if you feel someone at the event was incredibly rude to you or others. You can explain the facts of situation that occurred and politely give your own opinions on the matter, but you must make an effort to be civil.

B) If you are criticizing the event organizers, please keep in mind that in general a TON of effort goes into putting on an event, and even if you feel like the event was run incredibly poorly, there are often a lot of factors behind the scenes that you were not privy to that led to that situation occurring. So giving the event organizers the benefit of the doubt before trying to run their names through the mud is always a good idea.

C) If you are criticizing another player, please keep in mind that it is incredibly difficult to know what someone else is thinking. The word 'cheating' strongly implies that the party intended to deceive their opponent; whereas accidentally forgetting a rule or accidentally breaking a rule without realizing it ARE NOT CHEATING, because there is no intent to deceive. In reality there are very few situations that can occur at a tournament where such intent is 100% clear, which means calling someone a 'cheater' or saying they 'cheated' is almost always slandering that individual without any concrete proof of intent. So as with point 'B' above, you can freely explain the fact of the situation, and give your polite opinion on the matter, but please refrain from hurling accusations that can't ultimately be proven and will undoubtably turn the thread into a flame war.

If you fail to follow these above 3 guidelines when posting, your post at minimum may be edited or removed by a moderator and depending on how vitriolic your post was, you may also receive a warning and/or suspension on your account.

Threads asking for advice about how best to run a tournament or to give advice on what you've learned running a tournament are totally fine. However, if that discussion is focused on specific types of games, such as Warhammer 40,000, for example, then that game MUST be listed in the thread's title.

Failure to include this information may result in your thread being locked or deleted, so please take the time to properly format your thread titles!

Threads that discuss tactics, etc, about specific games are allowed provided those topics are in relation to how those games function in a tournament, or how even how tournaments affect the 'meta' of a particular game.

However, as before, these types of threads MUST contain the name of the game being discussed in the thread's title. So a thread about 40K tournament tactics, needs to have '40K' in the thread title. Failure to include this information may result in your thread being locked or deleted, so please take the time to properly format your thread titles!

With that being said, as this is a 'general' forum about tournaments, please do not be afraid to post a thread about tournament gaming for a specific game type in the appropriate forum for that game instead, as opposed to in this forum. I know many users see Dakka as a '40K site' and therefore see this Tournament Discussions Forum as a '40K Tournament Discussions Forum' but that is not actually the case. This forum is for ALL types of tournaments, so if you are interested in discussion a tournament topic *only* about 40K, then putting that thread in the '40K General Discussions forum' (for example) is the preferred location for it (although it also IS fine to post such a thread in this forum as well).