Extended deadline for Graph Drawing

Ha. Shouldn't we just boycott conferences that are so pathetically bad that they are not even able to get enough submissions by the deadline, and then they punish the people that did submit on time?

There's essentially no way of knowing how many submissions it would have received by the original deadline: most submissions come in on the final day, and the deadline was extended before that final day would have occurred.

As for "punishing" authors who submitted on time, how do you think they are being punished? Their paper is reviewed the same as the others, and if the on-time submission could use a little further revision in the extra days available, that's possible, too: a paper, once submitted, can still be revised up to the deadline.

If the deadline is being extended, then one would presume that this is because they did not get enough submissions, or the PC is worried they would not get enough submissions. False or not, this downgrades the perceived quality of the conference.

Also, it punishes these people because they had changed their schedule to make the deadline - canceled vacations, skipped their favorite soup opera on TV, etc. These people might have scheduled vacations or trips just after the original deadline. Then the PC (or PC chair), goes and change the rules of the game. Its a irresponsible and inherently unfair behavior by the PC, which also downgrades the respectability of the conference to a fourth tier conference. Any author that submitted their paper to this pathetic conference and wants their paper to appear in a remotely respectable conference, should withdraw their submission and submit it to a considerably more respectable conference, like SWAT, for example.

You're trying to drive down the submission rate to give your own papers a better chance of acceptance, right?

I don't send my papers to Graph Drawing because of the prestige of getting them accepted to a highly selective conference (it's not — its acceptance rate usually runs around 40-50%). I send them because the people who go to that conference form a welcoming and receptive community of researchers who are interested in work in that area and are likely to read and cite the papers that appear there. Sometimes the purpose of a paper is to communicate, rather than to show off.

...and, by the way, SWAT has on occasion extended its deadline too.

I never submitted a paper to Graph Drawing, and I am happy with very high acceptance rate (either the paper is good or not - acceptance rate has nothing to do with it), but I find the notion of extending deadlines for a conference to be outragous. Flexibility has its place. However, shifting deadlines to conferences, or changing the rules of a game in the middle of it is inherently unfair. PCs should know that there is a heavy price to changing deadlines, i.e., the conference loses considerable respectability...

I would be quite annoyed if a conference delayed its decision date, because that might cause a paper to miss the deadline for its second-choice conference. But as far as I'm concerned, extending the submission date inconveniences only the program committee — anyone else who preferred the older date to the newer one can just carry on as if the older date were still the deadline. Why should it be a concern to you that someone else might have six extra days to write another paper and you can't because you scheduled a vacation for those days? Write that same paper another time and submit it to another conference.

That said, I also find it mildly distasteful when, year after year, a conference extends its deadline, as some game between authors and program chairs to increase submissions. I prefer predictable deadlines. But although GD07 was also extended, I don't think that's been consistently the case for previous years.

Allowing one deadline to be flexible but treating the other one as fixed does not seem very consistent. In any case, no conference wants to receive submissions that were rejected from a conference as bad as GD. As such, the clear solution is for the GD PC to extend their deadline indefinitely, and never announce their decisions. Solves all problems...

You are tempting me to turn off anonymous commenting to reduce the number of trolls. If you're going to make such strong judgement calls about the quality of conferences based on such flimsy support as their deadline policies, at least sign your name.

The last comment was a troll (trying to be funny), but the rest wasn't. I think the opinion is valid and serious, and whether my name is X or Y does not in any way decreases its value. Whether you want such anonymous discussions on your blog or not, is of course up to you.