Start dates in daily tournaments

I have joined several daily tournaments and one of them started a few hours ago. I was disappointed to see that this tournament only has three participants. I can't remember the maximum number of players in this tournament, but I know it was many more than three. Apparently, tournaments can be set up to start on a specific date regardless of how many players have joined, so I guess that's what happened in this case: it was set up to start on 11 September no matter what, so it started with the three players that were registered today.

That's quite disappointing, I don't find a tournament so small appealing. I'm going to complete the games, but I'd like to avoid this situation in the future. Is there any way to tell if a tournament is set up to start when it reaches the maximum number of players or on a specific date?

I know that tournaments can be set up to automatically start when the registration is full. If a start date and time is configured, the event will automatically start at that time, even if not full.

TDs can also manually start as well as far as I know.

https://support.chess.com/article/119-how-do-i-create-a-tournament

I know, but my question is whether it is possible to tell which of the two options is selected for a given tournament.

I believe it will show the date and time if one is selected. Otherwise, it won't.

That doesn't seem to be the case. Many tournaments have a start date IN THE PAST, even though they haven't started yet.

It's possible there's a bug. The help article suggests if a date is configured, that's when they start

I see. I have sent a bug report.

I think we should start a new tournament

The Upcoming Tournaments list is packed full off tournaments whose start dates have passed and aren't yet full. Many of these have Tournament Directors whose accounts are closed, so presumably they will never start.

Unfortunately they head up the list in many of the ways of viewing it because of their start date, which makes it more difficult for genuine upcoming tournaments to find players IF they themselves have entered a start date.

The whole thing is a sad mess frankly, and needs to be cleaned up by chess.com. Last I looked there were 1200+ upcoming Daily tournaments, but the vast majority will clearly never start.

Yeah, chess.com hasn't given a lot of love to daily tournaments, obviously. For what is worth, though, technical support replied to my report, they acknowledged there is a problem, and said they are working to fix it.

Besides a fix to the way things work, it also needs someone to trawl through the 1200+ upcoming tournaments and close or force start all those that are clogging things up.

I'd be happy to give my time if anyone from chess.com is reading and cares. the situation as it stands costs me hours of extra time promoting my VFD tournaments, the latest of which you just will not find in the default list by starting date despite 133/162 hard won registrations already made and a start date of 29th September

https://www.chess.com/tournament/the-very-fast-daily-vfd-2023-open

... if the list was working properly and not clogged by unstarted tournaments with June, July and August start dates, the above tournament would already be under way.

My conversation with support is proving quite interesting. I asked them if they can tell us about the upcoming changes and whether we can provide feedback, and they've told me this:

As with any projects like this, it is usually discussed and tested in the Beta clubs! I don't know exactly when they will start it internally and at what point it is released on Beta for testing by the users, but if you are interested and would like to help with the testing, I recommend activating the Beta in the settings (last setting in the list, named "Beta")! Once you activate the Beta, you may join the official Beta Club: https://www.chess.com/club/chess-com-beta 

So I've done as he suggests and joined the beta club. There hasn't been an announcement about this project yet, and I guess it's gonna take some time, but in the meantime I got one month of premium membership just for joining the beta club, so I guess I can't complain!