Bernice: I also would think it would be difficult because of the different languages.

But if you have free available dictionaries for different languages (like I know there is for English), I would guess the simplest solution (if they were to make a word game here.) would to be make different games for each language. (Like English Word game, Czech word game, Spanish word game, etc...) - That way if a tournament is made for "word game", you don't accidentally get an English only player (like myself) matched up with someone who can't read English.

Some-what good news for those who would like word games is that I could have sworn that A LONG TIME AGO (years), Fencer was very interested in making a type of word game for the site... and I thought was working on it at one time. Maybe he decided against it... or maybe just got sucked into other projects and the word game had been put to the side... or then again, maybe I'm just imaging it.

Bernice: It is working fine.

The other day (when I posted) it was at 13. On Monday, it was at 12 (which is what you seen.)

As of 1 hour, 31 minutes ago (The start of Tuesday according to Server time) - their vacation days are now at 11 since it already timed out on a game.

Artful Dodger: On BrainKing, as soon as you set a vacation day, a day is subtracted from your total.

Any time BEFORE 12:01am (Server time I believe) you can remove the vacation day and the day will be added back to your total.

And I believe you have BK3 correct - or at least how I would think it would work.

Roberto Silva: Yes, it does look like they had vacation days set - if you look now, you can see tomorrow (7th) also set for a vacation day already (so they were probable planning on having these day off - so they are already deducted from the vacation # total)

The 8th & 9th are part of their weekend, so Monday the 10th if they are not back their vacation # should start to drop again.

This may be more of a topic for one of the chess boards, but for any dice chess games, I will ONLY try to take 1 of any of the 2 "matching" pieces (with the exception if it is in danger of taking my king)

Since if all you have left is a pawn & king, well then you have a 50/50 chance of moving the king each time (so attack with king) - If your opponent has 6 different pieces left, then they have a lot less of a chance of moving the pieces they want.

So yea, if I have a chance to take someones last rook, but that rook is not putting my king in danger - I will not take it to help my odds more.

Fencer: That would be great - but a suggestion - if someone currently has 0 vacation days left, can that be transferred over with the new vacation day system?

Snoopy: I see Fencer on-line now - It is better now.

Snoopy: Same here - I click to make a move, go to another tab with another game site - make almost 8 turns before I seen the BrainKing tab load to go back to make my next move.

Bwild: No, I cam up with with Frog Finder - can find some of the details & "history" of the game here: http://www.coan.net/sweeper.html

MadMonkey: I haven't done it (or tested it) - but believe the BIG BOSS can change the posting "Mode" or privledge level of someone to post on the board and make it almost impossible for anyone to post on that board.

Change the board name to "." so it's hard to see also.

... of course that is also one of the big things Fencer has talked about changing for the new 3.0 Brainking it sounds like...

Herlock Sholmes: Another thing that needs to be looked at is the length of the game - that is Ludo is the #1 game... but at the same time, it takes a long time to complete a game..... I don't feel like doing all the math, but would guess taking in how long a game last would still leave Ludo near the top.

then a game like Hyper Backgammon is shorter, so thinking of that might push that game up some more.

Then #26 game Logik is pretty short (what, max of 8 moves each?) - so if game length is considered, that game might move up some.

.... not that I have much of a point, and the basics of what you said is still true - and I do use the running games as a "general" guideline of how popular a game is... but it can easily be manipulated by a team tournament, or popular (prize) tournament creating a lot of games... and if it's a long game it will push it up that list... and if it's a short game, it will push it up the list but quickly come right back down.

Again... no point... just thought I would add.

nodnarbo: I'm assuming you are asking why someone can't leave a fellowship if they are in a tournament.

I agree that it would be fine if a player could leave a fellowship even if they are in tournaments, I'm not sure exactly why that restriction is in there.

At one time I joined every fellowship that asked me to join. I also joined way too many tournaments long ago - and I went though and left a lot of fellowships I did not do much in and was "stuck" in some fellowships longer while tournaments continued. No big deal really - just waiting until those games were over and then left, but I can not think of any good reason why I should be stuck in a fellowship (of course I could just ask the BIG BOSS to kick me out, but some of the fellowships I wanted to leave had an inactive BB, so that would not work.... so I just waited.)

Sorry Bernice if I did not understand your original question.

Bernice: No, message boards can not have tournaments associated with them.

The problem with that is some tournaments can last years - so if a BB wants (for whatever reason) to kick a certain player out, it is there fellowship and should have the right to do that.

Everything with that tournament continues with no issues. Next rounds will start just like they should. So I'm not sure what your question is about each player that is teamed up with should get a draw to make it even - the tournament will continue - no matter what the status is of the fellowship.

I'm also not sure about your example question - other then being listed for fellowship members only, tournaments have nothing else to do with fellowships - so a tournament will continue as normal no matter what the status is of the fellowship.

Bernice: Well I can tell you that Fencer has always felt that a fellowship, who is allowed in a fellowship, and the "rules" of a fellowship belongs to the Big Boss of that fellowship - so if a BB want's someone out of their fellowship, then they have 100% right to do so.

And I agree with that - if a BB does not want someone in a fellowship, then they have the right to kick the person out - no matter if a player got into some fellowship tournaments, discussions, etc... if they want them out, they are out. Reason to kick person out? Does not matter - that is one of the privileges of running a fellowship, which all Brain Rooks & above have the ability to start.

Snoopy: When I go to another fellowship and see a team I already belong to another fellowship, it says I can't join.

Then right under the team, it tells me why - and that I'm still a member of another fellowship's team.

My only guess is that maybe you were part of a team of a fellowship which got deleted, and even though it no longer shows you part of a team, somewhere in the background it still has you attacked to the deleted fellowships team.

Hopefully Fencer will be able to help.

Snoopy: Does it show the (join) which does not work? If so, what does it say when you click join? (And if it just isn't doing anything, possible try to clear the browser cache and try again.)

Or does it say you cannot join?

Roberto Silva: I'm pretty sure (well 90% sure) that once a fellowship team is signed up for a team tournament (both Fellowship vs. Fellowship & Site team tournament) - it will run with the player who might drop down to a pawn level before the tournament starts.

(The "check" happens when the team is put into the tournament I believe.)

... again, not 100% sure.

MadMonkey: I also believe if a team has 0 members signed up on the team, it will also not show. But yes, Pedro is correct - if a team already has enough players, it will not show.

El Cid: I actually thought that known "loop hole" was one of the things recently fixed. I also would be interested in what Fencer says. (of course it will probable be don't worry about it, it will all change with the newer version of the system he is currently working with.)

MadMonkey: I would guess it goes along with that same bug - something in the code where it created the tournament probable got messed up (which explains the wrong number of player slots), and probable did not get to the point of changing waiting to running or something. So since that is with one of the "buggy" tournaments, I wouldn't worry about it yet.

MadMonkey: .... and my more detailed explanation wasn't really geared towards you, but a more detailed on it for anyone else who might be confused about it. (Did not mean to sound like my whole post was directed at you... that part was more of just a general layout of how the byes should work.)

MadMonkey: Already people complain that some players get "too" much credit for winning a tournament when there are only 4 players in the tournament - having only 2 or 3..... I honestly don't think that is a good idea. 4 is a good minimum number.

But as for the elimination tournaments, you should ALWAYS have either 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128 spaces for players

4 sign up - have 4 player elimination tournament, no byes

5 sign up - have 8 player tournament, with 3 players getting byes

6 sign up - have 8 player tournament, with 2 players getting byes

7 sign up - have 8 player tournament, with 1 player getting bye

8 sign up - have 8 player tournament

9 sign up - have 16 player tournament, with 7 players getting byes

10 sign up - have 16 player tournament, with 6 players getting byes

11 sign up - have 16 player tournament, with 5 players getting byes

... and so on. At first when I looked at your tournament examples you posted below, at quick glance I first thought... Oh, those look OK - but then noticed they were a 12 section tournament with 8 players, and a 14 section tournament with 9 players... which of course would be interesting to see what the system does in later rounds when there is an odd amount of sections to match people up against.

He already wrote he was going to write more tomorrow in the blog section.

I myself have not had any problems with PayPal, but I know of many who have. Here are some sites with some "horror" stories about other people's "bad" experiences. PayPal has gotten so big, and does have a lot of bad users trying to take advantage of others through PayPal. here are some sites if others want to have some good reading:

http://www.paypalsucks.com/
http://www.paypalwarning.com/
http://www.aboutpaypal.org/

Of course feel free to search "PayPal Problems" or something similar to find even more stuff. Some very interesting reading.

Pedro Martínez: Actually she does have one, but it looks like it is "private" so you can't see it

Bernice - go to the main Photo albums page and see if it shows near the top:

http://brainking.com/en/PhotoAlbum

Bernice: Do you also have him on your friends list? (if so, remove him)

Another thing to try - try to remove him from your blocked users list - and re-add him to see if that will help or not.

Bernice: Actually the other person can still type in-game messages, but you won't see them if they are on your blocked user list. (So they may get "mad" when you don't answer.)

Also, Fencer does continue to add new achievements if good ones are thought of.

ALSO - there is an Achievement Discussion Board which is a great place to talk & suggest new achievements (and won't get buried with other topics.

Snoopy: plus they can sign off & be in guest mode and see what a person is doing... again, unless cloak. Adding someone to their enemy list does not really stop a person from seeing what you are doing, if that is indeed what you are trying to do.

I had to put myself in cloak at one time when some idiot was watching me and keeping track of what I was doing - what boards I was visiting, etc... it was really annoying. I finally stopped caring and took myself off of cloak. But cloak is the only real reason to "hide" what you are doing.

Marshmud: Have you ever wanted to move to a square & your opponents piece has that square covered & you can't move to it? THAT is the advantage.

If black picks to start on the SAME color square as white, then black will have the option to "cover" many squared and force white not to move there.... and white will NEVER have that same ability to "cover" any squares.

So as black, if I see my opponent going after a big 9x square, I will try to "cover" it so they can't... and usually they did not plan on that and end up having to go to a much smaller square.

Roberto Silva: In Knight Fight, I agree with lukulus - I would much rather be black.

With black, you can choose to start on the same color as White, which you can then limit the moves of white and "protect" spaces of high value and if you plan well, can then send them to a very low number and mess up their plan completely.

Since most players don't know of this "advantage" of being black & starting on the same color space, if I'm white - I will look on the opponents side of the board - find the highest value space, see what color it starts on - and then myself start on the opposet color, even if it's of lower value

Of course if you get 2 players who do little planning and just jump around until the end, then White might have the advantage of an extra move at the end - but I would still prefer to play as black.

AbigailII:

Score max possible points on all of Dice Poker, Triple Dice Poker, Dice Poker 6D and Triple Dice Poker 6D. ------ That would be hard, if not almost impossible. I would be surprised if anyone has gotten the "max" points. Maybe Fencer can look through the database to find out what the highest score in all those games are, then make an achievement between 50-100 points below that max as the achievement. (of course each game would be a little different.)

Artful Dodger: Good thing you aren't thinking about the so-called auto-pass feature that is currently on this site and not what a good auto-pass system would be such a great addition to the site.... because if you were thinking about that, then you might have something to complain about.

alanback: So that is more of just a display issue - since the site was "built" with 1 point for win, 1/2 point for tie, 0 points for lose.

Probable needs to be changed for when the double cube is used, instead of "1" - it needs to be how many points was won.

Constellation36: All current running games will continue - even if you are over the limit.

If you make it into a next round of a tournament - those games will start also.

The only thing you will be kicked out of is new tournaments you might be signed up for since you will be over your game limit.

But no worries - you will be able to continue to play all current games.

BadBoy7: I've always had problems with the javascript stuff on this site, but haven't had a problem lately - but then again, I have a lot of stuff turned off in my settings.

If you have not, check out this old post of mine:

Computers (coan.net, 2007-03-12 20:16:01)

You can also turn off the Dragon - I think it is the "Enable style animations" in settings - uncheck that. Turning that off helped me A LOT - I could not even play on the site if I was wanting to do anything else with my pc like watch a movie.... BrainKing just took all the processing time away from everything else.... but once I turned off that dragon, I haven't had any issues since.

I have a few ideas:

1. The vacation days you get is the amount you get all year.

2. If you renew a membership, you get only 10 additional vacation days. (10 days max - no matter if you renew 1 or 20 memberships)

3. You can "reset" your vacation days only once a year - AFTER June 15th of the year. (this way hopefully someone won't string vacations days along for 4 months in a row)

Brian1971: Fencer said in the BrainKing.info site back in November that he has been working on a "multiplayer card game" - and the good guess would be the chips would be used for that.

Bernice: That's a good question. I know for myself, I have the BrainKing time set to Czech time - so I know that for example, in about 5 minutes from this post - Sunday will start. (where as it will be 5pm Saturday for myself) [If I need to know what time it is for real, it is easy enough to look at the wall]

Even though this does not answer your question - but can be used as a suggestion so questions like this won't matter.

TigerCat: The forever rook cost the same as 10 years - so since you have about a year left on your membership, possible Fencer will take it down to 9 years worth.

Fencer is the one who makes prices - I would send him a private message to work out the costs and any deals.)

Artful Dodger: Before, i had it set to the no-font layout, and then used my own external .css (but had tried all 3 with the same resultes.) Problem before, even if you did not see the dragon, it was still loading with many of the pages of BrainKing (you could look at the page source and still see it loading - but just not flying across the screen).

I could open my Wndows Task Manager, and look at all my running processes - sort on CPU, and as soon as I starting doing anything in brainking site, Firefox would peg out between 80-99% of the CPU (slowing everything else down) - and if I let the page just sit there, it would stay that way for about 45 seconds to 90 seconds (which is about the time it takes the dragon to fly across the screen.) - and then brainking would stop using all the CPU. I can have 20 other tabs open with very little issue, but as soon as the BrainKing tab is opened - boom - there goes my CPU.

Fencer: I just tried that setting, and tried out a few pages while watching the CPU - and firefox seems to be staying between 00 - 03% while I have this site open (a quick jump to about 70% for a second while the page loads - but I see that as normal and only lasted for under 1 second) - so looks good so far - Thanks a lot! (I'll give it a good test later today as I have a movie I want to watch on my computer and plenty of games to get through.)

Rose: Well what it looks like is it is coded into many pages on the site - but most of the time just set to not show - still runs, just does not show (well I use a theme to always hide it so I never see it except for when I first sign in) - but he is still there in the background causing problem.

Like right now, I'm typing this while watching a movie, and now the movie is freezing stopping (and has been working well for the past 3 hours) - open up the task manager, Firefox is using between 85-99% of the CPU. I will finish this post, close the BrainKing tab - and the CPU will go back down to the normal 5-10%

Again, maybe it's not the dragon - but it is definitely this site.

Constellation36: Even if you change the layout, the dragon is still there (just hidden) - and even while hidden takes a lot of resources - I've been playing a lot less on this site since lately I've been watching movies on my PC while playing games.... and of curse this is the only site I can't since the dragon (at least I'm guessing it is the dragon) comes and steals so much of my browsers & computers resources it does not allow me to do much anything else with my computer at the same time.

I've posted about it before on this board, and even recently requested it again on the Feature Requests board - have not heard nothing yet. It is a shame since the winter time is when I usually get the most games played, but this season I've not been able to spend as much time on this site. (My other game sites that I play on are doing quite well though.)

pauloaguia: I hope Fencer will answer, that is an interesting situation. The rules do say "standard Chess rules" except for what was listed, and if that is so - I would guess it is a stalemate & draw.

Hopefully Fencer will confirm or correct this.

(V): That would not work. I know when I visit my sister-in-law, all she has is dial-up, and I set vacation days - but do try to stop by and play a few games - if playing the few games would take me off of the vacation and make may games time out - that would be bad.

Another example would be if I have about 10 games ready to time out (but on vacation), try to play 1, and then suddenly have the other 9 time out because I did not play fast enough because the system took me off vacation would also be bad.

(So doing that would only slow games down more since it would encourage players to not even try to visit the site if they can)

The things I would like to see fixed:

1. Don't allow people more vacation days if they renew their membership. I know this has been done in the past - sometimes multiple times in a row. If anything, maybe a 1 time thing were you get 10 additional vacation days if a membership is purchased, but never more then 10 days. (even though I would like to see it as 0).

2. .... there was something else I was just thinking about, but it escapes me right now.

rod03801: Since it stops showing the fellowship right before the list of games are shown, even if the fellowship does not have the new game - I would guess a small bug that has to do with the new game added to the site.......

Czuch: A fellowship board moderator can go into edit, and change the "Change access level" read & write levels to what they need to.... and make sure it includes Bishops.

nodnarbo: I look at page source, and it is still in there. (so might not show on the screen - but still is loaded.)

.... and again, it might not be the dragon causing the issue - might be another Brain King issue.... I'm just guessing it is the dragon since on game pages, where the dragon is not in the page source - I don't seem to have the issue.

I've had this problem for awhile, and my usually way to fix it is to just close the BrainKing site and play on other sites - but I would love if a solution could be found.

I use Firefox (most current version). I have the no-fonts, use external style ccs (which "hides" the flying dragon but is really still there), have all my JavaScript choices in settings turned off (except smiley window on mouse click).

The issue is whenever I have BrainKing up in a tab - on the main pages, reading the boards, in private message (just about everyone except actual games), my Firefox starts to use between 75-97% of the CPU. If I don't change pages, this will last anywhere between 45 - 90 seconds.

It is a simple thing for me to test - I simply close the BrainKing tab (leaving the other 8 open), and the CPU goes down to very low. Open BrainKing in a tab again - BOOM, CPU pegged.

This has been a pain lately since I've hooked up a second monitor to my PC, I'm currently doing a lot more work - like currently a large batch job on pictures (normally can resize/watermark 1 picture every second - when BrainKing is up, it is down to about 1 every 20-30 seconds), plus I watching a movie. (normally works perfectly, but when BrainKing is up, the picture will stop and usually I keep hearing the sound and the picture just won't move)

Again, when BrainKing is closed - everything works perfectly. (or if BrainKing is open but I've let some time go by 45-90 seconds), but usually I'm done reading a page by then, so when I switch - BOOM, starts over again.

The only thing I can think it is - is the dragon that "flys" across the screen.... since I think that normally takes 45-90 seconds. Even though I have it not to be shown on my screen through my external style, the browser still loads it.

Oh yea, my request.

Can there be a setting option to remove the dragon so it won't even load? You allow us to remove almost all the other JavaScript items from BrainKing, but not this one - and I know it probable isn't a problem for a lot of others, but for some reason the BK JavaScript stuff has always caused me speed issues.

Thanks.

KnightFighter: Yea, happy birthday Fencer - you forget to change the light bulb to a birthday cake for the prize icon!