It would be nice to be able to create tournaments which bar players who have more than a specified number of ongoing games. If I had the choice I'd tend to avoid playing against anyone with hundreds of games.

It would also be handy if that info could appear as a number on a player's profile page rather than having to go to their Started Games page and download the entire list. This would be a boon to those on dial-up and could be a useful saving of server bandwidth.

Seems to me that some people fail consistently to understand other peoples viewpoints or, if the viewpoint is explained simply ignore it - because they like to demonstrate their ignorance and intolerance.

If someone expresses a reason to use cloak mode and you don't share that reasoning, that does not make the reason invalid.

Some people have said that cloak mode gives them a sense of security. "What security? How security?" goes up the cry. "Prove it."

That's missing the point. If someone says they feel more secure being cloaked then that in itself is enough. Respect it. Who are you to tell them that they are wrong to feel that way?

SueQ: I'll second that. having just been treated to a membership by a friend I've been receiving form-letter invitations to fellowships and they give me no incentive to join because they are so impersonal.

I think it might be useful to have some links to translators - perhaps in Help or FAQ?

I use the free and excellent value for money ;-) http://translation.paralink.com/. It handes English, Spanish, French, German and Russian (which is very helpful at VogClub) and, strangely, English->Portuguese and Italian->Russian but not vice versa. No Czech, I'm afraid.

If there were a tickbox to make chat within a game public, games could be played in a "teaching mode" whereby the players could talk about their moves and anybody viewing the game could learn from the chat.

Version II of Teaching Mode would allow kibbitzers to contribute their own thoughts and queries.

Version III would allow the game players to control who kibbitzes and who gets to stay quiet.

Version IV .... lol.

If the idea proves workable then eventually there could be Learn The Game archives which could be browsed by beginners and players looking to improve. These games could perhaps be ranked by a "Level of play" and "Was this instructive?" voting panel somewhere on the game page.

Fencer: Wow. Speedy reply!. Thanks. :-)

Can we have another discussion board please Fencer? Call it English or Language or something and then we can take our quibbles and queries about wording and grammar there instead of filling up Features Requests (of all places, lol). :-)

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However
, having said that, I feel it's legitimate (if slightly cheeky) to piggyback some grammatical discussion on this genuine feature request. Here, then, is a reply to Reza's query about my use of "Logging out".

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Merha
ba Reza,

Reza said:
According to you yourself, it is wrong to say "logging out" because it is an instantaneous thing so continuous tenses don't apply.

But in your own message you say : "Logging out is an instantaneous thing so continuous tenses don't apply."

Lol. Indeed the phrase is "logging out" and perhaps I shouldn't post messages when I'm past bedtime and drooping. ;-)

Strictly speaking the process of logging out does cover more than an instant of time. It takes the time from clicking the [Logout] link to getting the guest-login main page back from BrainKing. But that generally takes only a second or two, perhaps more on occasion. For the user who is logging out (;-)) it's momentary. (And now that I've thought of it, that's the word I should have used, or said "near instantaneous").

But from Brainking's point of view (and thus any users querying the person's status) it is instantaneous. As soon as the site receives the log out request it's as good as done because it will take mere microseconds. If a user sees "logging out" as someone's last action then the system knows and it's already happened - they've logged out. So that's why I say a continuous tense doesn't apply.


So how come you use a continuous tense?

Well, apart from the fact that "instantaneous" was not the perfect word, there's no more succinct way of saying it that I can think of. I could have said "the process of being logged out" or "What happens after clicking the [logout] button", or any number of phrases. "Logging out" is short and sweet.

Perhaps another way of looking at it is that "Logging out" is the name of the procedure - therefore it's a noun not a verb.


And secondly, I think it's just like you're reporting something, a fact, to for example, to the police.

If they ask you "What were you doing?" you say "Looking out through the window."

You are no longer doing that but you say it because at that time you were!

Yes, looking out of windows demands "ing" when you look for a decent period of time; it's continuous. If you had said "I looked out the window" then you'd be expressing a look of much shorter duration (though this time not literally instantaneous, or even near it, because humans don't work that fast - judgement must always be used regarding where you divide the momentary and the continuous).


I think it's quite the same here. Even if the last action of a player has been done ten years ago, I think it is right to say "logging out" since at that time, he/she has actually been logging out!

It depends on what you are trying to express. Let's not use "logging out" because of its momentary (and, here, contentious) nature; we'll use eating.

"I was eating an icecream" puts us back into a past time frame so you can imagine being there looking at me eating. "I ate an icrecream" refers back to that time but keeps our point of view in any subsequent time. If you imagine me throwing the wrapper away or wiping my lips or running for the bus a year later, etc, then you'd say "Yes, you did" - you be maintaining the future-looking-back viewpoint and the whole act of eating would effectively be treated as a single point. If you were to imagine me eating that icecream then you'd be putting yourself back into that point and viewing it as a sequence; and so you'd say "yes, you were eating".

Not knowing the grammar I can't give you labels for this but it's about the time frame from which you view the action. Those who have actually studied grammar should be able to explain these ideas better. That would seem to be anyone not schooled in Britain, lolol - [joke, folks, feel free to argue it; I won't].

Hope this clears things up somewhat.

I'm quite happy to explore other English issues with you so feel free to ask. As you can see, I put some effort into this, so no more than, say, 10 per day, lol. If Fencer gives us an English Language board we can do it there, which could be fun.
:-))

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And my first post there could be about one of the most common spelling mistakes in the gaming context.
"It's lose the game, not loose! Loose trousers lose dignity. Loose language loses respect. Loose play loses games."

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Fen
cer: For some reason, no matter how many times I edited and updated this message, it still appeared with arbitrary line breaks - such as in the word However in the second paragraph.

Pedro: Thanks for that list of possibilities for "logging out". With only those two words to go by I would expect to be answering number 4, "What is he doing?" and it is a strong expectation. I suspect that you are using other cues/knowledge to make you interpret the phrase in a past tense.

But what I want is for the language to be answering a different question:
7. What did he do?
"Logged out"
Logging out is an instantaneous thing so continuous tenses don't apply.

But in the case of "browsing the main page" I'd prefer it to depend on the time. If it was yesterday or ten hours ago or one hour ago or ... [some arbitrary but reasonable limit], it would be "browsed the main page", or "played Bg vs Someone", and the ing form would be used for the recent past/present.

Hi Reza,

It's the whole thing:

Contrast:
Unrated games (no BKR will be affected by this tournament): no

with:
Rated games (BKR will be affected by this tournament): yes

Which do you think most people would prefer/find easier? The first one is a form of double negative and, while correct, is not the best style.

It's not ambiguous.
Not in your mind. Probably not in most minds. The possibility for ambiguity exists, however. Can you accept that possibility or must you deny it?

What else could it mean?
Read all these messages again Grenv and you may understand what I'm trying to say.

Over and out.

Walter: Indeed. I've seen those on the game pages. "No, no BKR will be affected". Now that's just awful, lol. I almost put in a feature request for it a day or so ago. The other one's not too bad because "Private" and "send invitations" go well together while the negation would involve "Public" with "Doesn't require invitations", so they're about balanced.

Paulo: Lol. That's when my worries would start - I don't know any other language well enough. :-(

grenv, ah grenv: What page did you see your quote on? On the Friends page the Last Action column has the date and time - which is, as I've already mentioned, not readable at a glance. The Action column has the ambiguous "Logging out" text. On the board pages there's no mention of Action - merely "Logging out" under the opponent's name. Ambiguous or what!

Luke: For some reason the Powers That Be'ed (tense? lol) decided that children in English schools didn't need to learn English grammar. You, as a European learning English as a secondary language, got that benefit. I can't, therefore, say whether you're right or wrong to claim "logging out - no tense".

Let me ask you, though, what tense is implied by:
Action: Logging out

Regardless of any technical terminology, that, to me, is clearly in the present tense. Other interpretations may be possible but any strength for them is very low - in the sense that with the word "ball", for example, people are far more likely to assume spherical object rather than to gather into a roughly spherical region (eg. planetary debris balling together to form an astral body, or balling wool).

And it's fine if you disagree, for that will highlight my original point that "Logged out" is better because it's unambiguous.
;-)

Sure grenv, we both speak English, but Brainking's Action is terse.

"Logging out" - Present tense.
"Was logging out" - Past tense.
"Logged out" - Past tense.

BerniceC: Me thinks you don't understand what I'm saying. It's nothing to do with 7 day limits. And who cares? Well obviously I do and you don't. Thanks for your contribution.

grenv: The present tense is being used for a past activity. Reading dates and times is not an at-a-glance kind of activity.

This is a very minor one, lol, but it gets me every time.

The Action shown for players answers the question "What was the player last doing?" and the answer will be "Logging out" or "Browsing..." or "Playing..." etc.

I would much prefer it to be in the past tense and answer the question "What did the player last do" - ie, "Logged out", "Browsed ..", "Played ..", etc.

If you wanted to get fancy you could use a present tense for actions done initiated in the last, say, 10 mins. [All except the logging out - once done that's done. This is the one that most gets me: What? still logging out?]

A more important reason for this feature is that it's hard to tell at a glance whether the last action was recent or hours or days ago. Maybe you'd even want (lol, like you want a todo list 100,000 items long!) to go as far as using colours to indicate recency.

Pedro, BuilderQ: Yup, he/I sure am/is.
I was perusing a tourney game between two of the top players and was impressed by a whole sequence of moves where the loser was led around by the nose until finally succumbing. It would be nice to see such artistry marked in the notation. :-)

Playing is free at many sites and that is enough for plenty of people; they play and don't pay and yeah verily, it is good. So I rather think it's actually the extras that earn the money. Some sites won't give ratings to non-paying members and people will pay to have and work towards a good rating. Some sites provide customisation and ease of use factors which people who play a lot will pay for. At Vogclub, people pay to have a permanent membership account instead of having to re-register a new name every few weeks and/or for the ability to save matches to disk (not possible here yet), and to access the searchable archives (available on a limited basis here). Here, people pay to be able to have more than 20 games going at once, for the ability to have teams and fellowships and cloaks, javascript(?) and what-have-you (I don't know too much about those things yet).

Fencer: Paying mebers only? For sure! And don't miss the chance to display a range of members' customisations to show the Pawns what possibilities they can enjoy for just a few $$. I think it could even be a better enticement than other features like the 20 game limit.

Ooh, ooh, Great idea. I would immediately use position: absolute and rearrange the page so the stuff I don't want to see goes away.

Things like "Time per move", "Public game", "Board size" "Layout-columns", weendays - these are all sooooo irrelevant when I'm playing a game, even "Game Id".
I'd move the [Move] button so that it's actually visible on the page and change the size of the message area, and, and, and....

But all that would need plenty of elements to be given ids. A good bit of thought would be required to choose which ones can be played with. Or just give 'em all an id. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

It's common in the Backgammon world to use a different rating system to that designed for the Chess world - one that takes into account the match length as well as the difference in ratings between the two players. I've just won a 5-point match and seen myself credited with a single win ...
It's also a much simpler formula, lol - and can't cause a player to lose points for winning!

If you decide that this is an item worth following, among the thousands demanding your attention ;-), and you'd like some commented javascript for calculating backgammon ratings I'd be more than pleased to email it to you.

I noticed a Download Notation feature on one of the games. It would be very handy to have that for Backgammon too. A good file format is the .mat format (defined for the Jellyfish program but recognised by many others).

It would be nice to show which moves have captured men. The standard notation is to have an asterisk after the destination point.

I've been following some games by other players and find it disconcerting that the viewpoint changes on each move. While plenty of watchers may like this change of perspective, I find, when looking for anticipated moves and patterns on the board, that I have to shift it all around in my head before my mental map matches the board.

It would be great if one of the User Preferences could be to maintain a static viewpoint when watching a game, and have a Rotate-Board (or Swap Players or some such) button on the page to show the alternate view. (Once swapped the viewpoint would thereafter be from that player's perspective.)

It would be very handy to see the dice rolls in the game record as well as the moves that were made.

is the most important part of this page and yet it's only 3 lines deep by 50 characters wide. Even the "Features in development" area is bigger!
????

I don't know whether it's been asked for but I'd like to add my vote for a consistent dice order, preferably highest first. Consistency pays off by allowing the player to automatically play the highest dice without having to stop and think whether the dice need to be switched first. It allows the lowest dice to be played knowing that the dice *do* need to be swapped first.

I don't see any advantage in having the dice unordered. On the contrary, being used to highest-dice-first, I find that in every game, I play a few moves which have to be undone, the dice swapped and the move played again. This is especially the case when bearing off. Normally a no-brain operation, there is currently the need for a pause each roll to ensure that a high-placed man isn't being merely moved along rather than off the board.