AbigailII:
I have had quite a few timeouts where I had to wait 30 days, sometimes more, for a timeout. It is why I always set tournaments I create to disallow vacation.
For members with limited games, like pawns and knights, it can be frustrating having a game occupy a precious game slot that is not being actively played by the opponent.

talen314: I have had quite a few timeouts where I had to wait 30 days, sometimes more, for a timeout. It is why I always set tournaments I create to disallow vacation.
And a 30 day timeout in a tournament is a problem in which way? The timeout is likely to happen before all games are finished anyway. Even if you play against someone who makes a move once a day, many games will last beyond 30 days. Heck, I'm still playing the first round of tournaments that started in 2006 - and the slow player hardly takes any vacation time. Timeouts happened in that tournament - but most of them were before Christmas 2006.

AbigailII: I don't like waiting that long. It is a personal preference. I don't enter tournaments with long time limits which is one reason that the long timeouts stand out the way they do. The games waiting for a timeout are, in my case, often the only ones left. I can see we simply disagree on this issue. It is probably best to leave it at that.
I always look at the time limit to ensure that it is three days or less. When I have nothing coming up in my schedule I prefer ones with just one day.

AbigailII: I think the solution to long tournaments is to not have *auto* vacation. This is an unnecessary accommodation to people who bite off more than they can chew.

grenv: I don't think it matters a lot whether people use auto-vacation or set vacation themselves. I seldomly time out (I doubt I've timed out more than twice - perhaps a dozen games in total). I use auto-vacation to avoid having to calculate how many vacation days I need.

AbigailII: Good for you. Because there will be nothing but automatic vacation in the new version of BrainKing. And everything will be extremely easy, understandable and hack-proof.

AbigailII: Just because you use it properly doesn't mean others don't. Many of the tournaments that drag on interminably have auto vacation to blame. If the games were so important, wouldn't you remember to set vacation? How about restricting auto-vacation to 2x per year to catch the times when someone truly 'forgets'.

grenv: But that requires planning in advance. I use auto vacation because I don't know the exact dates I need them. It will depend on when my opponents in the games with the fastest time controls will move - if I play a game with 4 days/move, and I'm away for 7 days, I may need 0, 1, 2, or 3 vacation days, depending on when my opponent moves. I don't always know when I will be back. And after coming back from vacation, it may take a few days to make moves in all my games, depending on what other pressing things I need to do, and how many games I have to move in. Autovacation is just much more convenient. As for "dragging on tournaments", I don't experience that. Whenever I look at a tournament that has been started a long time ago, and hence is "dragging", it's always because of active games, where people actually move. Note that with vacation days, and weekends, a black rook (assuming he's not bought more vacation days) can only "drag" a tournament for at most 2 months by not playing. Then he's out of vacation days. And she can only do that trick once a year.

Note also that Fencer has pointed out that in the future, autovacation will be the only vacation. But that's all I know about the rewrite of BK.

grenv: As AbigailII does, I never set vacation days anymore even if I know I'm going to be gone - I just let autovacation take over and use what is needed, and sounds like that will be the only option in the new version. So limiting auto vacation to only 2 sounds like something that will punish many because of the abuse of the few.

I would much rather see possible a limit of vacation days be a settable option on new games/tournaments - for example, setup a tournament that limits 5 vacation days per section (so a total of 1 week with weekend days could be taken by someone in one round), and have the same option in regular games. (Maybe instead of the red dot for no days off, it can be a purple dot to indicate there are other restrictions on days off on the game)

That way you the rules don't punish those who don't care how much vacation someone takes, and still allows those who want to limit vacations, but do not want to play the fisher clock games to have the option to set limits if wanted.

coan.net: That sounds good.