Fencer:

Well they say three times lucky

Thankyou

OH, talking of simple things, could we have a different colour dot for Big Bosses in the Team Tournaments list to let us know which Tournaments have actually got one of our Teams in. Its a pain having to open each one just to find out if the Captain has entered it yet

Going back under my rock now lol

srnity: This is the third time i have requested it at least. To me its common sense that the more they play the more willing they will be to pay

As you say, those Pawns we play at present have to wait a long time just for one move, therefore they are not getting to know much about the games or the site itself, so lose interest

srnity: It would be so usefull.

I am always open to play Pawns old and new (mainly), and try to help them with any brainking questions and show them about as such.
Its not very encouraging when i start a game with one, then i do not move for a few days= as it gets lost in my hundreds of games.
I wold probably use that next most after my Goto Next Team Tournament game, and the more time they play, the more they will get to like brainking i hope and join.

Just thought i would ask again for another Move and Goto option.

Could we have, Move and Goto next game with Pawn OR Move and Goto next NON-Tournament game.

I play mostly Tournaments these days(about 95%), but still play Pawns i know or ones that are new to brainking.
It would be a great help to Me, Other Members and Pawns if we could pick these games out quicker

I think it would be a better way to encourage Pawns to join if they spent more time here playing rather than playing a move then having to wait a day or two.

emmett: It was not too bad today (well 10 hours i have been here so far lol), but the last 3 hours or so it has gone crazy.
The downtime seems to be getting longer, it only used to be between 30 secs to a minute for me, BUT last couple of days up to 5 mins at times.
I would like (but do not know how easy it would be) to have a Discussion Board (Simular to the .info Board) separate from the main brainking site (so would have to have a different domain name or that would be down as well lol) that we could goto any time really to find out if it is just 'ANOTHER' few minutes downtime or a major crash , BUT at least we could still have a chat and find out whats happening.
I have a Madhouse one on PalTalk, that i have not opened in a while, but at least could still find people if brainking was down.
I know we could use messengers, but saves the hassle of downloading one or creating new email addy etc...
Saying that, i think Firefox has its own that you can download. I shall look into that

In the Team Tournament list, could we have another colour dot (blue maybe) to let Big Bosses know, which Teams have been entered from there Fellowship. At present we can not tell, only if we are in a entered Team as a player.
There is no way to know apart from going in to each one otherwise.
Would make it easier to know which Teams are waiting to be entered or may need players.

gambler104: Sadly there is no way to guarantee people not using a dictionary, there are so many on line even without the ones on Scrabble sites.
Its easier to just leave it that anyone can use it, because after years of running Tournaments at BugCafe someone always will.
If they want to win that badly, let them
Sad, but true

emmett: I totally agree with you. I think some people think that being a Captain means a lot of work, which of course it does not

The Big Boss should have all tools open to him anyway. I mean, he can accept any challenge anyway if he sees it waiting. It just seems silly he can not send out a challenge because there is no Captain.

I am lucky in the Madhouse really, with so many Teams, it is rare to find one without a Captain

Teams that do not have a Captain can not send out a challenge match
In any other Team that has a Captain the Big Boss can send out challenges, which is right as they should have access to all Fellowship tools.
So why, just as a Team does not have a Captain can the Big Boss not send out challenges ?
I only noticed this really as the Team that has no Captain CAN be challenged by another Fellowship, but it will have to be up to the Big Boss to accept or reject it.
Second problem, the Big Boss will not know they have been challenged, unless they happen to be looking at there Fellowship page or get a PM (like i just did, thanks labbeda).

Could it be made so the Big Boss also send out challenges for Teams that have no Captain and also could the challenge automatically be sent to them if there is no Captain

juls31: Its ok when a Team only has one Knight or Bishop in, and not bad if you have plenty of players, it then does not show the Captain a box to sign you up for a Team Tournament.
But when you only have 8 or less (as the Tournaments are now) players, a Captain has no way of knowing if you are playing in a Fellowship challenge match (AND neither do you).
In your profile, you can see what Team Tournaments you are signed up for or playing in, BUT unless you look at all your games there is no way of knowing about Fellowship challenge matches.
There must be an easier way for members and Captains for find out who is playing where and who is not.
Maybe, in the Teams, it could flag you with a cross to say that you are not eligible. I think all players should have flags to say if they are or not, rather than leaving a Team, BUT could be automatic (by the brainking system) for Bishops & Knights to let everyone know

rod03801: In hexkid's greasemonkey script we had a button in each game which was 'Set as priority'.
Then any interesting games, Pawn game, games people are waiting for to finish etc... would automatically show at the top of your list OR goto next priority game.
Most useful

Fencer, could we have a preview button added to out messages please.
A lot of BB's send messages (silly spelling like i just did) & links etc.... out to all Fellowship members without being able to check them.
It would be very helpful

Eriisa: And the problem is although Fencers Team Tournaments show up in a players profile.
Fellowship challenge matches do not. So if we have a Bishop or Knight playing in a Fellowship challenge they can not enter the Team Tournaments. If we could list whi challenge matches they were playing in there profiles, we could then try to get them finished before the Team ones start

Fencer, in a players profile we can list what Tournaments and Team Tournaments a player is playing in.
It does not appear to pick up Fellowship challenge matches.

Could we have these listed as well please ?

At present when we try and enter a Team in a Team Tournament, if in includes Knights & Bishops that are playing in Challenge matches we are not allowed to sign up of course, BUT sadly there is no way to find out which Knight or Bishop is causing the problem, and then to find out which match is preventing them playing, and stopping us signing the Team up.

If we could do this we could then trying speed the relevant match up so they are free to play in the Team Tournaments

Fencer: Great Fencer, Thank you

I know this has been asked for a couple of times, but i would like to refresh Fencers memory, now we have all these lovely new Team Tournaments

In Fellowships where we have - 'Send a message to all fellowship members' could we have one under it to 'Send a message to all fellowship Captains' please Fencer ?

It will be so helpful

Fencer, are you thinking about Juggernaut Chess at all ? (as it is almost the same as Behemoth Chess)

I like the idea of the random direction including a 'No Move' and a 'Teleport' selection, as well as the 8 normal directions.

Behemoth is great fun, BUT can be over in 1 move as you mention in your blog.

With the Juggernaut rules at least there is a small chance he may not move sometimes, need to slow the Beastie up somehow lol

pauloaguia: yeah, the Behemoth can have his down the side

Could you add all the pieces we play with to the Smileys please Fencer

Then we could have the gunmen shooting the Queen lol , or the Spy dancing with the King.......well you know all those silly things we do with Smileys

Fencer, in Fellowships, on the main page where all our challenges are, could we have the list of RUNNING ones so they can be sorted by Name, Opponent , Game type, Match type & Creator please (well really only Opponent, Game type & Creator to make it simple)

I like to keep track of all the Madhouse ones, but there are so many it is hard to see which Teams have matches going or not

thankyou

At the moment, when you hover over the membership level of someone you get (Fencer, Czech Republic, White Brain King(forever), Male), for example.(would be better over the name though lol)

Presumably it get this information from the profile.
If so could it also pick up the persons actual name, if they have added one.
I often write messages to people, but a lot of the time i can never remember there proper names as i know so many people after 5 years here, i tend to forget lots of the ones i do not talk to often

Its just nice to be polite i think

What would be better, is if we could some how link that hover to the description box in our friends list.
That way if they do not show there name publicly we could have it in there along with any other nice info you may have on that person (family, work etc...) and would all be shown just by hovering over there name or membership level

Great for when talking to someone and even better if that could be a clickable link back to the decription box,. Then if they mention something interesting we could click and go and add it to there description

fakar10: I reckon it must of been about 15 mins ago, when the site was inaccessible for 60 secs or so, that normally happens when Fencer adds something

For those members who support other members could we get an automated message when the person whose membership we are sponsoring is about to expire (say 2 or 3 days).

It would be very handy for those who sponsor Bishops (mainly) and wish to renew it for that person before it expires

I have found a couple that are too polite to mention it to me

Thad: I did ask once before for something similar.

As we can turn of Fellowship messages from Big Bosses, it would also be nice to be able to turn off game over messages either totally or just part of incomplete games ones off.

Also, in Team matches, when the match is over it would be nice if all members of the Team got a result message

mctrivia: It was mentioned a while ago that how about including (where possible) the point scores.

So in one sided games (Mancala, Cheversi etc...)
If both players win a game, it would be a draw, BUT use the points scored to donate the winner overall.

Fencer, could we have a way of telling which invites we have where.
I have some new games waiting in the brainking Waiting Games area and some in Fellowships, but have no way of knowing which ones are where, they are all together at the bottom of the page.
So dont know which have been accepted from where, so dont know where to create more

Maybe put the Fellowship name to the right of the tick box on the Main page or put our Fellowship invites underneath the Waiting games in the Fellowship

Sure this has been brought up before, but is still a problem
Until we have a system that would allow byes in Elimination Tournaments could we have some other way to manipulate multi-games Tournaments so all (or at least most) that enter can still play.

2 ways of doing this i can see:

Either when setting up the Tournament each game can be set to its own number of players 4, 8, 16 etc... which i would imagine would take a lot of programing, BUT would work better & fairer

OR

The ability to go into the Tournament and edit the number after the deadline. In other words if the popular games (Hyper, Back, Ludo etc...) get say 8 players they would start as normal.
If we could then be able to edit the entry number to 4, would the system then start those with 4 players ?

Only problem i can see is what would happen if we had 5, 6 or 7 players
I guess we could delete people, which is not good really, but then neither is getting people to enter a Tournament they will not get enough players in certain games to play.
Just because these people play the less popular games, why should they lose out ?

(or i guess we create separate Tournaments for every game, that a lot of work for 103 games)

Please can we have a system that uses byes so everyone can have a game

The new games page for Fellowships is a nice idea, although most people that belong to Fellowships, normally only ever goto the Fellowship Discussion board.
How about having a line just under the DB heading saying something like:
Fellowship Waiting games (xx)

It may attract more people to use it then if its on screen all the time

emmett: Random as default would be common sense , then if people wish to have and advantage or not they can still choose.

Team Tournaments, i asked Fencer a couple of weeks weeks ago and he said , but agreed they should be regular

On our main page our Favorite Boards are in alphabetical order, but the Fellowship ones below are in date order they were created.
Could we have a way to set the order of the Fellowship ones. Most of us are in alot of Fellowships, but probably only support a few of the ones we are in on a regular basis. It would be nice to put these at the top of the list.
Something like the little arrows in settings for doing the Context Menu would be ideal

In multi game Tournaments where games maybe a mixture Open, Running or Finished it would be nice when you look at the whole Tournament if beside the finished games we could see that particular Tournament winner, rather than having to open each one to see who won it.
We could then see how many and which players have won which, a small thing, but nice

Fencer, Could we have a Fellowship Stats & Ratings page for our Fellowships please.
It could be set as the Main brainking ones, BUT just for all members within each Fellowship.
Of course we would not need all the options the Main brainking ones have.
We could see which player in the Fellowship is rated highest within it at every game, then as with the Main brainking ones we could click on a game & we could see a list of all established(provisional) Fellowship members at that game.
Also here a column to let us know which players play for which Fellowship Teams in that game.
This could help Big Bosses see what players are available to play for Teams without having to look at each profile individually.
It could also include Number of Fellowship Tournaments entered/won and number of Fellowship Team Tournaments entered/won.
A nice way to see which members are the most active within a Fellowship.

Could we have something on the game page of a Triple Gammon game to remind us that it is a Triple Gammon game.
I imagine people will play these versions differently, as in attacking more to go for gammons & backgammons.
I think something on the page to show it is a Triple Gammon game would be useful.

grenv: This has cropped up a few times.
I think if you let Fencer know and there is no chance in you carry on in that Tournament, you can get round it

diogenysos: Could not of put it better myself

diogenysos: I agree, a much better and fairer way to determine a winner

Gordon Shumway: 100% agree

I think the Context Menu is the best way to move about brainking myself, when not on the main games screen. As long as you take a bit of time to set it up with the links you use, i find it a great way to jump about the place

Gordon Shumway: I did not say BugCafe was user friendly, just they have 2 buttons that do things that are useful, BugCafe is very basic compared to brainking but as a user i would rather have options to do things rather that go backwards & forwards in my browser.

After all thats the idea having various buttons and options is it not OR why bother at all if you can always find ways to get by without them ????

Maybe we should stop asking for options here as there are always other ways around a problem, BUT that does not make for site friendliness & usability.

What is wrong having 2 buttons / options that do what they say, rather than ONE that does not do what it says (depending what game you are in). If i hit 'Choose another piece' on my 4th move in Battleboat Plus, i dont select another piece at all, i restart my turn, but anyone new to brainking would not know that, they would go by what the button says it does.

So the question is, Do we need all these different options on brainking about navigating the site to boards, next games, tournaments, ponds etc..etc... the answer is no in your case as there is always a way to get there anyway.

Personally, i want brainking to carry on improving and would rather the way we have it now and the way we are heading.

If something makes sense and it is possible, why not have it ??

grenv: One of the companies that i do work for (when i am not building) is actually used by site owners / builders to review there websites for user compatibility and friendliness.
Guess what one of the gripes that they get pulled on all the time is ? Navigation of a site
Sites that use the back & forward buttons to navigate dont get great reviews i can assure you.
That and not enough or easiness of help facilities.
Brainking would do very well with things like the context menu & game pull down menu, but not inside an actual game. Take many sites a lot more basic then brainking (bugcafe springs to mind as i was just there) when playing moves in a game there are always 2 option available to you - Undo last move & Restart turn, quite simple, clear and useful things to have, especially in multi-move games like Mancala, Logik, Battleboat plus etc....

joshi tm: Try reading my first post, i did put that.
Sadly i dont think its a very user friendly way to navigate round a site, why have any buttons

Gordon Shumway: I trust you, but there is something there that dont work, as earlier i tried to remove a piece and it would not let me, so i had to choose another piece (or restart turn as it should say).
Anyway, it does not work in Mancala, that is restart turn.

Fencer: 1) Agreed, not that i can see many people doing that, but you still do not need to roll the dice

2) I havent got a game where its my go right now, but i am sure you can not click on a piece just played. I think thats what made me take notice lol, will check when i get a go back

Two small things that may have been mentioned.
1.One concerning this doubling dice that i have only just got the hang of and started using. Why if we can not make a legal move, does it still make us roll the dice
2.In logik (and other multi-move games), could the 'choose another piece' button, do exactly that, just remove the last move or piece played, rather than go back to the start of the whole turn. In logic, its rather annoying placing 4 pieces, making a mistake on the 5th, and having to go back to the start.
Be nice to have 2 options really, 'select another piece' or 'restart turn', be covered both ways then.
Yes, i know we have a back browser button, just trying to make things user friendly & understandable

Family Man: And can we have 'Move and goto next game against a Pawn' please

At present only the Team Captain gets a message about a challenge match.
I have already asked that the Big Boss should get a message so they can keep the Fellowship in touch with how the Teams are doing.

Would it not be nice if all members of the Team got a message to:
a) let them know they had been selected, and are playing in a challenge match
b) tell all Team members (even if they played in that match or not) the result of the match

At present when playing a Team match there is nothing accept the match/tournament name to differentiate between that and any other game, and i am sure like many of us most of us just fly through games when in a rush and do not even know if it is a normal, tourny or match game.

I think Team games should look different to a small degree. Maybe a different color for the match/tournament name, or a heading at the top of the game. Just something better to tell you it is a match/tournament game (not that it should make you play any different lol).
It would be great if it displayed you & your opponents TEAM BKR and Ratings, as it is more relevant to the game

joshi tm: Its a shame. Its is the ONE thing that other sites have an advantage over brainking. Well 2 others that i play Goldtoken & BugCafe have 4 player games. I know its been mentioned before, by myself and others.
The only argument i remember was that someone said we should have different BKR ratings for 3, 4 or more player games.
What about 3 or 4 player Chess ? We had that at an old club i went to, but as you say Assim, Ataxx, Ludo and poker are the obvious ones

Gordon Shumway: I know someone else who does that a lot

I agree, it is very irritating and a flag would help alot, even though it is our own faults

I am sure this was asked for a while ago (BBW or Tigger i think).
Could we have the option to change our icon (and pictures as well i guess) back to one we have already used, without having to re-submit it again.

I just wanted to go back to one i used a while ago, but no longer have it on my PC. If i right click on the icon stored here (brainking URL of course), i have to re-submit it to be approved.

Seems rather silly as it has been approved already and a waste of time for Fencer (or who ever does it).

Surely a small bit of code to pick up the fact it is a brainking URL and been used before it could change it automatically (until if/when we have a better way to change them over)

mctrivia: Hey, thats great news, just to know he is ok, been worried about the guy, he is always so helpful. We could post a Feature Request here and by the end of the day he would have written it into his script.
Hope he comes back soon

BIG BAD WOLF: hexkids greasemonkey script does 90% of your number 1 and does number 3, and i agree with both them. Sadly he seems to have vanished, would be nice if someone could carry on his great work.
Just hope he is ok