Summary

  • IGS restricted self-assigned ranks of four-dan and above in 1993; Jim Z. Yu's account records many five- and six-dan labels being reduced to four-dan in June.
  • Later that year, a separate rating calculated from rated games began to accompany self-set rank, shifting more of the evidence behind reputation onto the server.

For a while, a keyboard could be an efficient promotion committee. On the early Internet Go Server, players could give themselves high ranks. In June 1993, many of those promotions received an administrative edit: most previously self-assigned six-dans and five-dans became four-dans overnight.

That is how participant Jim Z. Yu described the episode in his 1993 chronicle, preserved by Pandanet. His name for it was the “6-dan massacre.” The casualties were numbers beside accounts.

A dan is a rank level for strong players. For strangers meeting across a network, a displayed level offers an immediate way to size up a prospective opponent. It is a small field with a surprisingly large social job.

A crowded room needs more than a connection

Yu's 1992 account describes IGS opening to the public in February at University of New Mexico, followed by servers in France and Berkeley in June. The playing room soon included tournaments, professional visitors and spectators.

By September, users were typing moves from a major match into IGS from information on television terminals. Distant observers could follow the same board. The internet had made a meeting place; the people running it still had to organize what happened there.

The growing audience could be quite literal pressure. At the server's first-birthday game in February 1993, an unexpectedly large crowd made the Berkeley server unstable. The game moved to the French server and finished there. Even a board game could overfill a room made of software.

Ranks presented a different capacity problem: how much work could a stranger's self-description do? Yu reports that players could no longer assign themselves four-dan or above without recommendation and approval from the server administration. The June reductions put that authority on display. The account holder could type a claim; the administrator decided whether the high label would stand.

The games acquired a voice

Later in the same year's account, Yu describes another development: a rating alongside the self-set rank, calculated daily from rated games. Later in the year, ratings would be displayed automatically.

The sequence matters. June's change was an administrative intervention in claimed ranks. The later calculation introduced another source of information: play recorded by the service. A flattering description now had company.

This also gave the operator another job. A result-based rating depends on which games count and how the system processes them. The label may be produced automatically; the service still supplies its rules and evidence.

IGS was doing something familiar to anyone who has joined an online community since. Connecting people creates demand for ways to judge one another. The rank beside a name begins as a courtesy and becomes part of the room's working equipment. By 1993, IGS's administrators had discovered that hosting the board also meant keeping an eye on the badges.