!Undertaker!: the entry fee is used to form the prize - the more players enter the tournament the bigger the prize. The chances of a particular player to win are smaller but the reward if (s)he does is much bigger.
The way you're suggesting, the more people enter a tournament, the less the chances are of winning and that 1 year rook prize or whatever seems to be further out of reach... Especially considering you still need to spend something to enter that tournament - it doesn't seem as attractive to me somehow...

But of course, that's just my personal oppinion... others may think otherwise.

It just came to my mind a simple way to avoid the timeouts for those rare situations when vacation days simple just don't do (other because of a prolonged absence or because you're playing against a pawn that had an unforseen situation and doesn't have autovacation)

The simple answer (at least in my mind) is to allow your opponent a postponement. When it's your opponent's turn to play there would be a new link by the game page that says (give your opponent a postponement of XX days for this game). If you clicked it, and confirmed your action, the deadline for your opponent would suddenly be added of XX days (for that game and move alone). Onde the player moves again, time settings are applied as usual. I think this isn't hard to implement with the current timeout protocols that already exist.

In the FAQ entry that would be associated with this feature write something about how this is an exception and people shouldn't count on their opponent providing an extension for them, they should always expect the initial time ocntract to be obbeyed, etc, etc, etc, so that people don't come and rant like "you could have given me an extension and you didn't - you're mean" sort of thing.


This would certainly help in those cases where I think a game is going far too interesting for it to be solved with an unglorious timeout.

Gordon Shumway: Maybe a setting for that, as I usually prefer to create my invitations with the "second player" color, so my opponent can make the first move right away.

Could the "Number of games on MainPage" setting affect Ponds and pending invitations as well?
That is, if I set it to 5, then I'd like to view only 5 Ponds on the MainPage and then, if I wanted to, the (more) link would show me the rest...

Jules: In Opera you can choose to (un)block only specific content if you want. Just click the page, choose "Block Content" and happily select the pictures / flash / whatever you don't want to see.

Fencer: Are the banners hosted on BK or on third party hosts? Can the advertiser change the banner after you approved it? Or the server be reconfigured to redirect to certain pages when certain files are requested?
anybody: If it really is a banner on BrainKing causing it, can you identify what banner(s) were present on the page when you were redirected?
How come there's only a few people complaining about it when there are thousands seeing these adds? Maybe there's some other external factor involved (like having spyware or addware on the computer, as has been suggested already).

(I don't have adds activated and really don't plan to, so I won't be answering any of these questions )</b>

A request that comes from the portuguese DB: when we create an invitation to a specific player we cannot see how our BKR can be affected by that game. However, our opponent has access to that information before (s)he accepts the invitation.
Is it possible to see how a specific game will affect my BKR at invitation time and when the opponent is already know even when I was the one sending the invitation?

Summertop: On that same blog you can read Since there are many things to test yet, the feature works only for Brain Rooks or higher membership levels. From that I figure that it just for Rooks while it's on this test phase... but of course, I'm not in Fencer's mind, so he'll have to confirm that personally.

jadarite: for screen shots you can open and see anyone's game. Just go to someone's profile and check their "current games" or "finished games".

You can delete an invitation that has not yet been ccepted. On your home page, on the bottom there is a list with all your invitations that have not yet been accepted. You can choose which ones you want to widthraw. Once someone starts the game you have no longer such option.

diogenysos: sometimes you have the bad luck of accepting an open invitation of someone that has left the site in the meantime...

Could there be a better way to remove someone from a number of teams in a fellowship without having to go through each team?
I just pasted the same URL 100 times only to find out I somehow removed that player from the fellowship in the process which is exactly what I was trying to avoid in the first place.

Without giving it much though, I think a cool way could be to add in the players profile a check box by each team. Then, clicking on a button to remove from selected teams would do the trick.
This feature would only show up on our own profile or by the teams you are a captain or Big Boss of (so you could remove other players from your teams quickly).

But of course, this is just a suggestion. It can be implemented any other way - as long as it is less boring than the way there is(n't) right now.

nabla: this could even evolve into a system where people could contribute for one prize (so, instead of having someone pay for a maharajh prize in a tournament, you could have 10 different people pay for 1/10 of that prize).
But a simple automation on the current system would go a long way. The other day someone asked me how to provide the prize for a tournament. After my reply (send money to Fencer saying it's for tournament X) I got a reply that went like "Oh, thank you. Never mind then". I got the impression that, since it wasn't automatic, she just didn't want to go through with it anymore (which doesn't make much sense, since Fencer is the one having to do most of the manual work anyway).

joshi tm: Well, just have Fencer add some support for some cheesy prizes then

nabla: the way it's set up now, you'd have to send that big french cheese to Fencer in advance so he could set the "prize has been provided" flag. And then he'd send it to the winner when the tournament was over.

Since the subject has been brought up I'd like to make a sugestion:
When buying a membership, besides the target player option have a tournament option, where you could buy a membership as a prize to a tournament (when selecting, only the open prized tournaments would show up on that list). The new membership would be added to the shopping cart and the association with the tournament made automatically (no intervention from Fencer). This would also allow for a separate field to be displayed on the tournament details page, with the prize that had been paid (weather or not it matched what was said on the tournament's description).
On the tournament page itself, while the prize hasn't been paid, a link to pay the prize could be visible. This could allow to buy a money prize, or a membership prize, or brains prize or whatever (the big french cheese option may be a bit hard to implement in this system, but the current system would still be available for any option, naturally).

irenebooklover: Look at the menu on your left. The second option is "New Game". Click it and go through the options to create a new game. Then wait for someone to accept your invitation.

Alternatively, choose the option "Waiting Games" where you can pick on invitations someone else has already made and are waiting for an opponent

On one of the portuguese fellowship boards, someone suggested about statistics of finished games per opponent.

Right now we can see similar numbers when we go to the FinishedGames page on our opponent's profile and choose the option "show games against me only". Or, when on a game, it shows the wins/losses/draws of the games of that type between the two of us, below the game board.

But what we're talking about here is the ability to see (maybe on our profile, under finished games?) an option to display the results of all our games but sorted by player. That way we could see who we play against the most; who beat the crap out of us; who is a good opponent to chalenge for revenge; etc, etc, etc.

Maybe the red number by the Ponds link could show only how many ponds we can sign up for (excluding the ones we already entered, that is).
Probably the same reasoning could be made for the number by the tournaments link, but I'd be happy enough with ponds for now :)

joshi tm: http://brainking.com/pt/Profile?trnst=0&submit=Mostrar&u=17053&p=3

In Logik, when you click on a color, you can place it multiple times on the board until you click on another one.
Can the boards for Espionage / Chess / Battleboats work in a similar way? There are 5 Sappers, 8 Pawns, etc to place on the board. If we didn't have to keep selecting them it would be much faster to place the pieces on the board...
How about: as long as a similar piece is available to be placed, the selection will remain on that type.

joshi tm: Actually, I don't think it should be turned on by default. New users may become confused when all of a sudden a game gets passed back to them with a completely different configuration and don't know what's going on.

What I do think is that AutoPass should be a one side feature. If I want to automatically pass when it's my turn, the system should do so, weather my opponent chooses the same setting or not. Weather I pass or AutoPass has absolutely no impact on how my opponent plays the game on his/her side.

Fencer: Thank you very much.

I go to a user's profile. Select the "Finished games" tab. Then click "only show games against me". And then I can see how many games I have won/draw/lost against that particular player.
Could a total of these numbers be added to the table in this situation? There are some players against who I play many different game types and it gets kind of hard to find out who is the overall best...

I think it would be interesting to implement a game mode along these lines:

- One (or both) players would actually be a group of players (I'm calling it group player).
- On GroupPlayer's turn, each of the players that make that group sees the game in their "Games on your turn" list and make a move, as usual.
- However, the move is not actually made. Instead, it counts as a vote in that particular move.
BrainKing waits for all the players in the group to vote (or until timeout).
- When this happens the move for the group is then obtained from the one that had the most votes. If more than a move gets the same number of votes, the BKR of the players that voted for it is considered and the one with the highest sum of BKR is selected.
- The game would have a discussion board accessible only to the group's members, where they could exchange tactics for the next move, for instance. In a game with two groups against each other, there would be two such boards, naturally.
- These games could also have public invitations - the invitation is open for a certain time (like tournaments) and people just join (either) group. When time is reached the game starts.

I know this would be some hard work to implement. But I think this would be interesting in some situations:
- teams could really play against each other, as a team. Right now, teams matches are just a bunch of individual games, where you don't even get to play against all the members in the other team. It would allow for different sized teams to challenge each other too
- (top) players could challenge a "collective mind", supposedly harder to beat. Imagine a "Player against the rest of BrainKing" kind of game.

Anyway, it's just a thought...

I was looking at the 9th page of my message box, selecting the messages I wanted deleted and the leaving the ones I want to read later.
Then I click the Delete button. And I'm taken to the first page of my message box.

Can these sort of actions maitain the page number I'm currently at, please?

grenv: Probably your browser was caching the page. Check your cache settings (I don't know them in IE)

pauloaguia: Never mind, I got it. It's the question mark... (since I often don't have those pictures in cache, I assumed it was just another flag)

MTC: You can see it on castle style? Where?

Maybe the message subject, on DBs could show up 'below' the commands (like show messages from this user, link, etc).

The way it is right now, the subject gets kind of lost in all that clutter. And maybe a small vertical space befor the subject would help too.
(Using simple mode)

Can the "Delete" link for messages in DB's have a Confirm message of some sort? I just deleted one of my messages by accident because I clicked involuntarilly when the mouse was passing over one of those links.

grenv: Ssshhh...
He's either or thinking about it. At least he didn't say NO yet

BIG BAD WOLF: I put those comments because they were the ones used when the autopass discussion came to be. But then I analyzed them under the situation where I decide not to use autopass but my opponent does use it (assuming a situation where one-side autopass would be implemented).

If one person wants autopass, let it autopass just on his turn. (The opponenet who chooses to not use autopass can still play out every move.) That's precisley what's being discusse here :)

About the messages, I can live with the game coming to me if there's a message. I can live with the message (or a reply to my messages) coming to me only a few moves after it was sent. But since this is one of Fencer's main arguments, I'm not going to start a fight over it now. First I'd like to see one-side autopass implemented

As to the Fischer clock games - these players are looking for faster games, yes, but the bonus may start packing up without you being online. For instance, with a 1 day bonus, a sequence of 10 autopasses would almost instantly add 10 days to that player's time. If he's online, fine, that time would have been added anyway (minus the minutes it took for him to actually pass on his own). Now, I think this can be seen as a sort of autovacation - force yourself into a pass situation and start building up on the bonus (mind you, on same games, passing is not a bad thing, it may even be an advantage).
My personal opinion in this case is that it doesn't matter as well and I wouldn't mind playing a Fischer clock game with my opponent using autopass. Winning on timeout is not a good thing - I think wanting to do so reveals bad sportsmanship - but it's usually a substancial part of the contract when using it, especially with the shorter time settings, where some seconds can make a difference.

nabla: I never understood it either. But there's has been quite a fuss about it in the past, I'm sure about that part. Maybe some people think they can control what dice come out if they throw them in a particular instant in time (after all, many pseudo-random-generators are time based, maybe that's it). And I think someone reminded that situation once, when we were discussing if autopass was feasible in the past, so I added it to my list.

Anyway, even if that argument had some substance (which I don't think it has, but what the heck), I still don't think it's an argument good enough to force your opponent NOT TO have autopass.

Fencer: More of my oppinion on this: most of the objections against using AutoPass only apply to me using autopass, not my opponent. Let's see:

- If I use AutoPass, when the game comes back to me it may look very different. True. But if my opponent is suing autopass and I'm not, I'll always see the game as it was the last time I played (because my opponent passed and didn't change anything).

- It may disrupt the conversation the current system as it implemented already prevents autopass from kicking in if a message is sent with the move

- The dice must be rolled automatically before the move to know if it's a pass or not and I don't trust nobody to roll my dice but me, not even a computer. Well, my opponent's dice will be rolled if he's using autopass. If I don't want mine to be rolled I just decide not to. Is it really an issue if my opponent's dice are rolled by anyone else than him?

- I want to try and see if my opponent times out while it's his turn Well, if you play all your moves in a row your opponent won't have much more time than he/she already had. And this is a rather selfish and not sporting argument anyway. (Fischer clock settings may require a different analisys because of the impact of the bonus - but most posts I've read on this issue aggree that Fischer Clock can be taken care of at a later time).

- I don't want my opponent to use AutoPass because I want him/her to suffer, having to click the pass button all those times in a row Well, ok, this is an argument in favour of requiring autopass to be aggreed by both players, yes.


I hope I didn't forget any of them. Anybody, feel free to join more arguments to this list (for or against).

Fencer: It's not a contradiction.
It seems to me you implemented AutoPass as a game setting. The game either uses AutoPass or it doesn't.
For us that are arguing for the "without aggreement from both players", we see this setting as 2 settings for each game - white is using AutoPass / Black is using AutoPass.

I don't need to know if my opponent is using AutoPass or not - the only way I'll probably know is if I play and the game comes right back to me (and even that depends on how I sort my games). This in no way affect my play (well, actually it does - I do all my moves at once until the games reaches a state where my opponent can make a move on his/her own - making it last longer on those moments where we are really playing and not just throwing the game back at each other).

With the dual setting, I'm not forced to use AutoPass and my opponent can. Is this one setting / dual setting issue related to your problem with the "without aggreement" thing?

mctrivia: Great idea. The "Do we need a newsletter" poll is getting kind of old...

tonyh: I just noticed you asked for AutoSave. Well, how does AutoSave apply to starting a Staris game?

tonyh: I'm not sure Fencer has implemented it for Stairs.
I know that in tournaments, this setting is taken from your Settings page, under game filter. at the bottom of the page you can select which games will have AutoPass automatically enabled on your side. Of course, Autopass is only activated if both sides have this option set.

Not sure if this is how it works for Stairs, thoug,

tonyh: It applies to a cubed game. Thing is - when you have the cube you can roll the dice or double. So you have two choices, and anyway, only after rolling the dice does the computer know if you must pass or not.
When your opponent has the cube you can only pass, so autopass will kick in, indeed.

[Maybe this will make people double the cube more often .]

AbigailII: True. Which is why I'm one of those that stands by that it shouldn't depend on an aggreement. If I want to autopass, then my opponent probably won't mind if I do, even if (s)he doesn't want to activate it on his/her side. In the end the game will play faster anyway and I won't have to open all those pages where all I have to do is click a submit button.

(the only exception I can figure out is for fischer clock games, where autopass might become an advantge)

tonyh: If you and your opponent have aggreed on using autopass when the game started it should work like that...
If you're talking about a game with the cube, then one of the players has the option to pass or double the cube, so autopass won't kick in in that case.

AbigailII: Anyway, so that deals with your objection number 1.
As to your objection number 2, you have the same problem if you upload your own stylesheet - it may grow out of date as Fencer changes things.

This said, I'd also like to have the choice of uploading my own stylesheets and use ones uploaded by others (or at least check them out). I'm not trying to argue against this particular idea at all was just trying to offer some alternatives while this option isn't made available.

grenv: If you don't use IE, Firefox or Opera, then you probably won't find people accommodating your needs
How untrue :)

AbigailII I don't use Windows you're the wisest of us all

Hrqls: Put every button above the message while you're at it. I like to move to previous and next without having to scroll the page too.
Better yet: since some messages are to be read all the way anyway, just place the buttons above and below

AbigailII: 1) If you use IE it has this feature as well (never tested it though, but under Tools -> Internet Options -> Accessibility there is an option to specify your own stylesheet - but I don't know exactly how it works). Other browsers may have it too, I just can't know them all...
2) These features are usually incremental - that means you may build a CSS only changing some things. The original CSS will still be used for everything else. So, if you just specify the background color on a personal CSS, the other changes will still be reflected on your pages. Only if Fencer changes the background you won't realize because your own personal setting is overriding the server's CSS. I hope I explained myself properly...

AbigailII: Some browsers allow users to specify personal stylesheets to be used for specific sites (Opera comes to mind, I think Firefox has the same ability, but not sure). This implies no change in the server. If your problem is that you'd just like some colors to be darker, this could be the solution for you. Just download the current CSS, make your changes and set it as your personal CSS to use.

TarantinoFan: The rules clearly state that the 3 of one kind must be of a different kind than the other 2.

Every new feature deserves a feature request. So, how about a link on the BugTracker to "Show my bugs". That way I wouldn't have to go through all the bugs to find one of mine so I can use "Show all bugs from this user".

Nice additions in the BugTracker, by the way

Thad: Statistics

AbigailII: If you can move 30 times a day against a fast opponent, yes, I'd want to pick you

kaluza: that would depend on your opponent's speed as well. If your opponent moves fast, you may move a dozen times in a game. If your opponent moves really slow, you may move oncea month!

AbigailII: Why not simply have a statistic with the average number of days between moves? Fast players willplay at least once a day,no matter the time zone they're in...