Conference paper rejected after positive review and TPC comments I submitted a paper to an IEEE conference, and this paper was rejected despite of almost all of the reviewers’ comments being positive. In particular, all three of the reviewers recommend to weak accept the paper, and even the TPC chair recommend to weak accept it. However, the paper has been rejected.

Due to this weirdness, I asked for the chair’s motivations for this decision, and he answered


  Your paper didn’t make the conference capacity line. Please resubmit to another venue.


What does this mean? What is the conference capacity line? Does that mean that there were not enough slots, or something else?

I have never encountered this kind of situation before.
3 reviewers recommended "weak accept," as did the chair, but the paper was rejected.


This is a common situation. Other papers probably got better reviews or your paper was perceived negatively during the discussion phase or ...


  I asked the chair why and he said "your paper didn't make the conference capacity line. Please resubmit to another venue." 


Conferences have upper-bounds on the number of papers they can accept due to time constraints.