nabla: Those don't get recognized as URL's. I think the problem is the fact I put the URL in brackets. That's probably messing with the parser... because if I put it alone, like ( Tugas #16 ) it does get replaced ;)

pauloaguia: Hmm... it didn't get replaced here either. So I'd say it probably has something to do with the fact that it's a fellowship tournament...

Fencer: Hmm... Then it may have been something different. A bug? Could it be?
Ok, I've used the "Send message to all fellowship members" feature to send a message that went something like: "Foi criado um novo torneio (http://brainking.com/pt/Tournaments?trg=22609)."

The URL didn't get replaced on the message. Then again, this isn't a PM, but a distributed one, so my request was incomplete to begin with

Can the link conversion system used on DB's be used on PM's as well? I've grown used to having BrainKing automatically convert links for me when I post a message on a DB, so I get confused whenever it doesn't do so on my private messages...

AbigailII: Point taken. You are right, of course.
But I still don't see much of a difference between having to accept AutoPass or having to Accept AutoVacation.
(except, maybe, on Fischer clock games - there AutoPass gives you an advantge, because the clock is less time on your side).

Gordon Shumway: Maybe it requires both players approval because it's still in an experimental phase and Fencer is being cautious.
I aggree when you compare it to AutoVacation. I find AutoVac much more intrusive in a game (since my opponent won't timeout when expected and a game may go well beyond the time I intended it to in the begining) and I'm not asked if I allow my opponent can use AutoVacation or not.
I hope AutoPass will be like this sooner or later, let's just wait a while...

mctrivia: If I understand the concept correctly, it's like the bug tracker but with the ability for severall people to contribute to each feature's priority (instead of simply replacing it, like in the bug tracker) and for Fencer to provide some feedback on it's status of completion.
Is that it?

I like the concept in general. But I fear it would soon turn into another bug tracker where it's near to impossible to find anything older than a week, and people would just start posting duplicate requests...

But I'd like to have some feedback about Fencer's TODO list, eyc

pgt: That's the spirit - I'm happy using Opera, you're happy with Firefox and somebody else is happy with IE. And it's nobody else's business!
So let's play

mctrivia: If loading partially finished pages is the issue, people can try to change some options in Settings that reduce the page size. Like changing the number of games that can be displayed in the main page, or changing the number of posts per page in discussion boards to five. Smiles popup also comes to mind, although I'm not sure if IE preloads this one as well or not. Adds may also have something to do with it, not sure.

I have many of those things disabled / reduced and the site works blazing fast for me on IE too, just tryed to play a few games and each page took less than a couple of seconds to load. The fact that the pages display instantly even makes the illusion that the pages load faster than in Opera (it's just an illusion, the timing is the same and I still prefer Opera, anyways, since I have much more control on how the page shows up than in IE).

emmett: I use a laptop too. And a press of spacebar scrolls down the page (at least on Opera). PageDown should do the trick too.
Rereading your post tells me I may have missunderstood. So, if what you want is to just press Enter when the page displays, without having to scroll down, then I guess all it takes is for Fencer to change the focus to the Submit Button when the page loads. Then, simply pressing Enter (or spacebar) would 'click' it. However, if implemented, I'd like this to be an option, since I like to use spacebar to scroll the page down...

Fencer: I usually have my browser set at 70% zoom for BrainKing so I don't have to scroll down all the time. And I still need to in some games (like ludo and jarmo, for instance).

So you see, there is some scrolling...

emmett: Well, at least he didn't ask what is EUR

Jason: I think that if you're in a team, you should be ready to play if needed, otherwise you shouldn't be there.

That said, I aggree that it would be nice to have a feature to allow the captains to if any players are not in the mood to play for a while, or because they'll be on vacations, or busy or whatever. That way, they could contact the player and ask him/her if (s)he would aggree to sign in for a match or not. Of course, if the captain still decides to go ahead and enter that player in the tournament, (s)he could have to face the consequences, like the player forfeiting or timing out in all games, or taking forever to move. But that's something to ponder when deciding who will be in the team.

If you don't want to play for a while you have that option - leave the team for a while. (Of course, if there was a place where you could check the teams you want to leave/enter and just submit it once it would be a lot easier to do).

Right now, a fellowship's page is a mess of information. Some fellowships have large introduction texts and you always have to scroll down to see or do whatever you want in that fellowship.
If a fellowhip has lots of teams, and you're in a lot of them it also makes it hard to manage that, like has been said in the previous messages.

Here's my ideas:

• Divide it into multiple pages, like it is on the Profile page. Namely: "Main Page", "Members", "Teams", "Internal Torunaments"
  
• On the Main page, there would be the description as now, indication of the BigBoss and the list of discussion boards. This list, since it's usually small could be on a box on the top right, like the MostVisited DB's in the DB list page. The Main page would also have the "Leave this Fellowhip" feature, at the bottom, like now.
  
• The Members page would contain a list of all the members. With more available space, this list could contain aditional information like how many internal tournaments (s)he won or how many teams the member is in. Maybe even a link for each member that would allow the BigBoss (or anybody) to see what teams a member is in. (Suppose you want your fellowship to enter all tournaments on a given category and you know you have a great player in your ranks. Would be nice to quickly see what teams (s)he is in from that fellowship and if you need to ask him/her to join any more).
  
• Teams page would display the Teams ranks on the top, the Teams in the middle and the Team Matches results on the bottom. These last two could be filtered by game (as happens now on the teams), but could also display "All game types" and "All teams I'm captain of" (so one could manage all the teams more easilly). When displaying all teams, having check boxes to be able to join or get out of more than one team at a time would be a great adition too.
  
• Internal Tournaments would have Torunaments, Ponds and Stairs from the Fellowship.
  </ul>
  
  This is just what I've been making up since I had the idea of spliting the fellowship page in several pages a few days ago. Feel free to comment on my ideas and add your own. I'm sure the more people show interest in this, the faster Fencer will implement it

Can there be a way to see the BKRs of a fellowship's teams on the fellowship's page? And their ranking (if it's 1st, 2nd, etc).
Similar to the list there is in a player's profile.

Also, could the fellowship's main page be splitted into severall partial pages, like we have on our profiles? It's getting to much information in there.

I found out today that there is a link on profiles to see the messages a user has posted in public foruns (it's probably there for ages... but I only found it now).
So I got curious and started looking at some more profiles to compare people in the category Who is the biggest spammer?
If it's not too much trouble to code, it would be nice to have the total messages posted shown somewhere in that page too.

mctrivia: on your number 3 are you referring to the main page? That already exists

On the ranking charts, I'm sure some would find usefull to have the possibility to chalange a player on the spot. Same like paying members have at discussion boards: after the player's name there's an icon to send him/her a message and then another icon to challenge for a game - this is what I'm talking about.

I think it makes much more sense to have the possibility to chalenge someone whose ranking you're looking at and comparing to your own than it does having that feature at discussion boards. So if it's here, why not there? ;)

Could there be an option to disable the "Submit and goto game XXX" or "Submit and Goto Pond XXX" Comboboxes? I have quite a few games right now and every time I start my "playing day", Those comboboxes (especially the games one) is packed with games and, quite frankly, I never use them anyway.

I'm estimating over 20% of the page's source code has to do with those Comboboxes right now. And I only have 100 games where it's my turn. Wait till I get to 200 or even 300...
I'd just like my pages to load a little bit faster and the server to have a little less work because right now, it's building that list for nothing (in my case).


If such a feature alreay exists, could someone tell me where to find it?

Since shooting is by far the most used action, could we avoid the decision between guessing and shooting? By default we'd shoot and we'd need to click a button or a link to be able to guess. This way it avoids an unnecessary click in 90% of the moves which means time for us players, save some bandwidth which is good for the site and us players and other stuff like that.

Fencer: Well, there's at least a couple of possible solutions:

• Have some javascript or whatever update the text name in all the other languages as you type the name in the default language.
  
• Put a button by the default language's name that allows you to copy it to the other languages

dresali: I like the idea of a sandbox or a trial status for games. For the first week or two nobody could create rated games. That way, some flaws would naturally arise while no harm was done and they could still easilly be corrected.

And it would allow us to try the games and learn how to play them before falling for stupid mistakes or such. Especially, since these days one must learn how to play the game before the rules are posted, right Fencer?

I'd never thought I'd be requesting for one of these. But the fact is, that I would find another "move and goto..." option very usefull.

I usually have my games sorted by time of last move, descending. This is usefull to play games against online opponents, because once they play the games is shown right back at me. However, with the ammount of games from the team tournaments I have right now, I'd also like to play the games with the least time left, mixing the game pool a bit every now and then.

As a matter of fact, the way it is now, there's a lot of "move and goto..." options that you can switch between, even in consecutive game plays, but there are some that you can have only one of. Basically, most of the options under "Sort next game by" in Settings, can't be switched between them only using the "Move and goto..." combobox in the game page.
So, options like "Move and goto game most recently played", "... played longer ago", ... with least time left", "...with most time left", "...with least movements", etc. would be helpful for somebody, I think. Especially for those people that have the corresponding sorting option available in the Settings. By the way, if all these options would be turned into "Move and Goto..." options, the option to "sort next game by" in Settings, could probably disappear.

Also, I support mctrivia's suggestion for a differently organized "Move and goto..." form option set. As long as it includes the "sorted by most/least recently played" option ;)

I remembered, for the first time this month, to check my Stairs. I just found out that I could start a new game in 5 of them.
Thinking about it, I figured that may be the reason why some stairs show so little activity - people just forget they're participating in them.

To go with the rest of the page look, can there be a red number showing us how many stairs we can start new games in?

Why are Froglet's games mixed up with "Other" games?
Battleboats is a category with 3 similar games. Same with Go. Why not a Froglet category then?
Now that I'm at it, Attax and Assimilation are very close to Reversi games too. So, maybe they all should be included in the same category?

Just a thought!

emmett: That I wouldn't aggree with. You may want to test some openings with a particular color, or choose some color to give some advantage to your opponent when you're playing with a weaker friend or trying to teach a new game...

I have some ponds with less than a day per move. On my main page they show as having 0 day per move when, in fact, some of them are 23h or 18h permove. Could the value be displayed correctly, please. That is, days AND hours?

mctrivia: Vacation days will run out, yes. The problem remains for the games with no timeout set. For those, holidays are irrelvant.

Summertop: I think it's unfair to claim that all inactive players are pawns. Black Rooks, for instance, can become inactive just the same and they'll never revert to 'pawnood'.

MadMonkey: I takes a higher power than me to answer that one ;)

MadMonkey: better yet - if all you want to do is to get a link to their profile just right click their name and copy the link address

MadMonkey: If you over at their name, and if you have the URL showing in the status bar, for instance, you can find their ID by looking at the end of the URL

rednaz23: Or, if that's hard to do (because of the many different languages) use the yyyy/mm/dd format, that is less ambiguously interpreted.

Tripod Tom: You can always aggree with your opponent on the outcome and one of you resigns the game or aggree on a draw, if that's the case.
I suppose having the computer automatically check these situations would be computationally hard to do on every turn, and a big strain on the server (just think of how many moves are played each day by hundreds of players).

But I have a request for this and other situations - what if one of the players could call uppon such an algorithm manually? Take chess, for instance - it has precise rules about draws. Over a number of moves without capture anything, or repeating 3 times the same position. This puts a strain on the server if checked for every game, but if there was an option to call such algorithms at player's request, it would allow to quickly and automatically solve those games that now require a lot of explaining to do for beginner opponents or sometimes an administrator's intervention when you end up with a stubborn opponent that doesn't want to finish a lost or drawn game...

jurek: I used the wrong value for komi. In that case PM Fencer and he'll make you win the game...

joshi tm: yes, it's tough sometimes, when your opponent doesn't know to play the game well.
But why don't you start capturing them? She won't have any dead pieces to mark that way...

El Cid: The problem is the rules are whole texts. It's hard work to write the same stuff over and over again for the over a dozen chess variations (I know there's copy paste but you still have to go in and find the differences to change). And then, if someone says "Oh look, you made a mistake there" you must go through all the texts to see if the mistake is in the others or not.

A suggestion for Fencer - why not have the rules broken down in small bits that can be used to compose the actual rules page. For chess, for instance, you could have a text saying how the pawns move, let's call this text 1. Text 2 saying how the king moves etc. Then, text 30 says how the game is won after 3 checks. Then text 31 that the game starts with random positions.
Rules for 3 Checks Chess would be composed of 1+2+...+30;
Rules for Capablanca Chess would be composed of 1+2+...+31.

Of course, I know this is easier said than done. But in the long run, it could also make the complete rules easier to maintain and translations easier to do (it takes lots of motivation to go and translate big texts like the present rules).

And in an ideal way, you could even link this texts to bits of code in the game engines and so the rules would come out automatically :) (yes, I know, I'm daydreaming now)

redfrog: Just hit Backspace or the Back Button of your browser. That should do it...

In the Discussion Boards page, right now boards are sorted according to their creation date.
I think they should be sorted alphabetically, because that way, all Brainking boards from the different languages would show up together, and it might be easier to look for one particular board as well.

Also a new category might come in handy to allow the BrainKing/Game boards (Feature requests, Brainkings, GC, etc) show up appart from the "off-topic" boards (like gardening, automotive, etc.). (By off-topic, I mean that their subject has no relation to a game site, not that their best or worse than the others)

Just a thought...

Could it be possible to sort the waiting games list according to any of the columns present? Sort of like it is done in the main page...
I pay much more attention to the time setting than to the game type, and would be easier to find, in 4 pages of games, a game with a particular time setting, whatever it was. Or to easilly detect games against a certain opponent. Or...

rednaz23: I don't think that information is in your profile. But you're an american, you can check that out ;)

pabloca: Wow, number 1 seems so obvious I'm wondering how nobody ever thought about it :)
It would sure take 1 click away of every move.

Just not sure if the current game engine supports that. But I support this request !

emmett: Or by number of finished games? Or by tournaments won? Or... ? :)

Summertop: 30 days is a bit harsh, as some people can take long periods while on vacation, for instance.
Besides, games drag on much longer because of active players that play once a month, than because of 'dead' players that will eventually timeout.
That said, I support your request - a team captain should be given as much info as possible to select the best players for the task

Request coming from the Spanish forum:

Could it be possible to sort the games in the MainPage list by the online status of our opponents? Or by time of last action?
That way it would be easier to start analysing the games that are most likely to be played soon, instead of having to go through the whole list (especially in the case when I'm displaying 5 games at a time, for instance).

Could unrated / uncounted games be marked somewhat differenlt than others? It's happened to me on some occasions to made a brilliant win (or an humilliating loss, as well) only to find out in the end that my BKR wasn't updated. The last time it happened to me just a little ago, I was 1 game away from an established rank. And now I still am, because I just accepted the game almost blindly not looking at its properties carefully enough.

Suggestions, by order of preference (and probably ease of implementation too):

• The text "unrated game" at the game page could be made red or something that stands out easilly.
  
• On the waiting games list (or incoming invitations) the game could show up with a little grey dot next to it.
  
• There could be a Setting to choose wheather or not Unrated games should be displayed in game lists.

grenv: I think it used to be called Enemies List didn't it? Or maybe I'm just mixing it up...
Anyway, you got the idea ;)

grenv: It wouldn't work. As per my example, that user would be able to nag you for a whole week...
A better requirement could be "only replies to posts made after putting the user on block". Which would probably not work very well, if the unsuspecting user would first block someone and then sent the other a message saying "you're blocked now so you won't be bothering me any longer". In this case, he would have inadvertly oppened a hole through the block.

How about if a warning message was issued pointing out that "you have this user on your enemies list. He will not be able to reply to your message" when someone is trying to send a message?

grenv: Picture this: someone picks you at random and starts sending you crazy messages. At the first one or two you even reply, but then the other one just get's crazier and crazier and you end up blocking him to avoid receiving such crazy messages.
As long as that user keeps the first couple of replies you sent, (s)he'll be able to go around the blocade and keep sending you messages...

Try to ask someone to send your message to that user instead. And to ask why (s)he has you on their eneemy's list, while you're at it...

Fiona: Try png