MadMonkey: thanks Ian. Does Fencer do fix-its these days? Shall I drop him a line?

Nackgammon (grillyx vs. *_*)

does anyone else think this is looking suspicious? I have not made anything like move 17. 18-off? what's 18-off?

don't know if anyone has had this, i got some invites to some atomic games, from aaarghhh, this evening, and in the invites themselves i was unrated, but when the games kicked off my rating came back. i know my rating's been going downhill....the way it's going i might jump at the chance of being unrated soon :) aaarghhh's was there ok..

yep, i timed out on four games which i had at least five days left on as of yesterday, i dropped fencer a note

don't seem to have a lot of takers for this question rose. but i remember when i was at school i found out that "cerny sabat" was czech for "black sabbath". that's all i really needed to know at the time.

i canned them all, they are games i have already played. not really bothered with the bkr, it will sort itself out over time

like the idea of members only at peak times, is it easy to implement though?
rat mentioned 10-30% of users will be willing to pay, is that a percentage of registered members (given that here there are over 4000 and 10% would be a bundle more payers than we appear to have) or a percentage of regular users? What is the actual percentage here? if it is about right then the only clear way forward would seem to be to wait for the membership to increase naturally?

Some observations on tony and una's points made (i hasten to add that i play here and virtually nowhere else and will continue to do so)

nobody wants to discourage people from coming to the site, and tony is not suggesting we try to.

the economics of this site appear to be such that fencer is struggling with both time and money resources to keep the site going in a smooth fashion at all times.

we therefore need the site to generate more money to support its operation, and one major way to do this would be to encourage non-paying members to become paying members, and certainly not to discourage them! the incentives to become paying members rather than non-paying need to be looked at, it appears to me that we are giving away an awful lot of bics to sell a very few and as a result the service being provided sometimes suffers.

tony's suggestion is one way to increase the incentives for pawns to upgrade. three months is a long time and pawns would get to play all games for free during that time. as una says, there are plenty of other sites which offer free games, so they are free to play wherever they want. if however the site gets so full of non-paying members that it struggles to provide a correct service to paying members, then that is not right, and that will discourage everybody!

it may be that fencer could consider some of the other facets of the site which could be made available only to members once they have upgraded to paying membership, without excluding non-payers who want to play games. it is already possible to create tournaments for paying members only, fellowships are only available to members. maybe 20 games is too many for non-payers, after all, they are getting to play for nothing - but then as una says, they enhance the site for all users so nobody wants to exclude non-payers at all.

at the end of the day i don't know what causes the problems with the site, fencer must do - is it just a question of money? how much money are we talking about? does the rate of increase in membership mean that fencer will get enough money to achieve his new server aims in 6 months? a year? 10 years?? be nice to know what you think about it fencer, you know what the problems are better than we do.