Fencer: hey i got my gray color back!! thank you so much, Fencer!!
and thanks for caring for the visually impaired AND me...

and on the subject of the blog about the new colours. Where is the link to Wikipedia? The name is a link back to the same page!

currylms: You can set the Gray at the Settings page.

currylms: I like the green. I also put my settings to show the numbers too. It strikes the logical side of me.

pauloaguia:Nope. Only the Dutch can get that green with ease :)

currylms: In my notes, I use 2 letter abbreviations for colours. If Gray is replaced with Green, I'll have to replace all "Gr"s with "Gr". ;-)

Fencer: Don't you mean "I like the green. It helps me to calm down " ?

currylms: I like the green. It helps me to calm down.

who the heck had this appalling idea to swap the gray color with green in the logik game? it destroys every color sense, psychological feeling in started games, notes for oneself, remembering of certain moves, and so on... Fencer could at least have implemeted it now for every NEWLY STARTED game...
i can see the reason that it is much better to distinguish from the other colors especially for visually impaired people. BUT why such a terrible color? there are so many beautiful kinds of green...
and, how about a feature that allows each user to decide wether they want to play with green or gray?
i loved the gray color and the nice combinations you could do with it. will miss it alot!!

srnity: We could get a 'I'm feeling lucky" button!

Any chance on getting a "move" and "go to anywhere on BK but this page" button - it's gotta actually work tho

pauloaguia: Maybe you just need to give him more of an assentive. Try getting the names of 10 people willing to become black rooks if he will implement a autopass/automove system that does not require the oponent to also use.

mctrivia: I meant Fencer might be more pressured to improve the site's autoplayer in that case...
But yes, I understand what you mean. The AutoPlayer / AutoPass / AutoMover was never a project Fencer was much interested in...

pauloaguia: you would most likely be stuck with no autoplayer from both then.

mctrivia: if only you had said 3 to 4 months...

Jim Dandy: thanks it has been a fun project but I can't wait for the day it is no longer needed. Fencer can you please implement it before I move to the middle of no were. You got 3 to 4 years.

mctrivia: I just did,but hats off to you for the feature,you're a bright guy

Jim Dandy: By default the ad feature is turned off. To log in go to: http://www.mctrivia.com/autoplayer/login.php there is a check box for the ad feature uncheck it then press update.

Eriisa: I don't log in seperately.I guess I should find a way to access it

Jim Dandy: yep. that's where.

Eriisa: If you are speaking of mctrivia's version,yes

Jim Dandy: do you mean the auto player setting? You need to uncheck the box on his website when you log in.

mctrivia: I appreciate the feature,I really do,but is there any way to do away with the explanation in the messege box?
People think I'm hawking a product.

joshi tm: Instead of that, a team BKR will be used.

I think I mentioned this earlier, but since Fencer has "site-improving"-moods I will ask it again.
On this page, Perseus shows for the team (average player) BKR a zero. But I think the team has already a rating: the players' average BKR on the games included, and those meaned. This way the tournament will be seeded better.

coan.net: To fix the fisher clock problem you could give users the option of chosing witch server they are on instead of making it automatic. So if you know you are going to play a 1 hour game you will pre arange to both use the same server. Most people are just going to use witch ever is closest and ideally that would be done automatically for them with the overide option for those rare cases were people are playing super fast games.

mctrivia: After reading what was below, you said what I was thinking.

It would take some planning, but first you could figure out what is time sensitive vs. what is not.

Waiting room & such can be time sensitive, so if someone was hooked with the #2 server, it would take a little extra time to perform those operations since it would need to check with #1 server first.

Things like discussion boards are not. That is lets say someone posts a message on a discussion board on server #2. At first, give it a temp # (so you don't get a message on both servers with the same ID), then server #2 sends that over to server #1 where it gets the "real" post #. So possible at the most there would be a deal of 10 seconds or so between time the post is made and is viewable to everyone on both servers - but that would not be an issue. (live chat might be - but we don't have that here)

Most games would not be an issue - even though I could see a small issue with those who like to try to play "live" games with very short time limits like 1 hour total time with Fischer clock and such.

Thing is, 95% of the things most players do (play games, read discussion boards) do not require that the main server know about it immediately. That is most everything could be played on the #2 server while it is updating itself with the main #1 server in the background. It could work - but some good planning would be needed.

Fencer: It may be true that some things like accepting games could have problems with a complete clone but playing them would have no problem at all. If I am playing you I can get the game off the US server(It is cheaper there then Canada) and then submit it back to the US server. You can pick up the game some time in the next week off your local server.

Even board are not that time sensitive since you are not using a real time model like on my server. If someones post shows up 1 or 2 sec late we
can chock it up to just not refreshing at the right time to see that reply before responding.

Things that are really time sensitive like game accepting could be left all on one server so you don't have the update error problems

Just pictures is a workable start. Often I will have a board slow down because of pictures and I have a huge cach.

AbigailII: Actually, during a game, images can represent most of the abndwidth... and I know they should be cached but the fact is, many times they aren't (for instance, I have my browser set to display only cached images for BK, but sooner or later they go out of cache, either because I browse other pages or simply because some of them are very infrequent, like some positions in Backgammon or Chinese Chess, for instance). And some people simply disable cache altogether (I could really never understand why, maybe as a desperate measure to save disk space?)
So, a mirror image server might be easier to accomplish and definitely easier to manage... as it is, images are already served from a different server...

Anyway, Fencer will know if the images represent a reasonable percentage of the bandwidth to figure out if this could be worth exploring or not...

AbigailII: Of course, if brainking were a graphics heavy site, it could benefit from having the images served from elsewhere. But I don't get the impression the graphics takes that much traffic wise.

Fencer: Well, the way to do it is to have a master and one of more slaves. Read access can be done from any slave (or even the master), updates go to the master. So, someone reading the boards would only query a slave, and only if you post something, you need access to the master.

But this really only works if it's ok to get data that is a little out of date - which isn't the case for BrainKing. You certainly don't want to go to a particular game and get the position after the penultimate move. So you want your slaves to be "close", which either means decidated high-speed lines (unlikely to be affordable for BrainKing), or having the slaves on-site. But, if it's the Internet that is the problem, having slaves on-site isn't going to solve anything.

I work for a company that makes its business on the web as well. We're much bigger than BrainKing. The only way we can deal with the massive amount of traffic is to make use of hundreds of database slaves. But they are all on-site. The network has never been a bottleneck - the database is.

mctrivia: Actually, it would not be impossible if it's only a master-slave architecture because it could work even with a data copy delay. However, to host two full featured BrainKings would require a full two-ways fast Europe-America replication and that, uh, that would be a real problem. For example, consider a situation when a user in Europe accepts a public invitation but another user in USA accepts the same invitation at the same time. So the European server sends a message "hey, mark this invitation as accepted!" and, in a few seconds, it receives a message "it is already accepted by another player!". Bang! A replication conflict.

mctrivia: You read my mind. But the database replication is the main problem. Unless we want two isolated BrainKings which could share the list of users but not the table of games and moves.

mctrivia: The big thing is it takes time to code the syncronization algorithms and having a second server farm is not a cheap thing when you are talking this much bandwidth and space. It would though also act as a redundant system. Should one go down everyone can use the one that is still operating.

pauloaguia: Syncronizing servers is a very common task and happens all over the world. The two servers would have to comunicate back and forth any changes that are made. This I am sure would be a lot of data but still a lot less then the data used by everyone using the same server since no graphical data is sent in these exchanges

mctrivia: I think there would be a problem there - how to ensure synchronization between the database in Europe with the DB in America?

After reading http://brainking.info/archives/403-The-world-of-delay-and-waiting.html I wounder how hard and how expensive would it be for you to get a clone server in North America? Google is always fast because they have servers on every continent and even most major cities. How about researching your client base and seeing if a North American Clone is worth while.

Two or three requests that have been made several times, but it's always wirth to remember

- Possibility to edit in-game notes (it's horrible to try and use notes as they work now, in games like espionage)

- Possibility to hide ponds on the main page, like it happens with games

- Keeping a game filter on until we de-activate it (I have my games to show only 5 on the main page. When I select an opponent and want to see all of my games against him(her), when I press the "more" button, the filter vanishes)

- An auto-play that doesn't need the opponent to be using it as well, or to accept it

MadMonkey: Now that makes sense!

Its Monday, and a fresh week, so a feature request i think
Hopefully this will be easy to set up as it is just an extension of something already here.

At the moment when we look at Fellowship Members & Team Members in a Fellowship, if they have not been on in 31 days they are coloured Grey background.

Would it be possible for the Grey backgrounds to show up when we get:
a) A challenge match, at present we goto the link and it shows ALL players available.
b) At the Team Tournament sign up page (for the same reason)

This would help greatly in starting matches with players no longer playing here

Hi,
are there any plans to introduce Nine Men Morris to BK?
And if not, how about it?
(Yeah, its probably a FAQ )

Would it be possible to be able to imbed parts of an RSS feed into a post? Would be cool if I could put my autoplayer stats into an RSS feed and then have your site auto update the numbers from my feed.

tippyc: I agree. My autoplayer has currently made 67945 for 63 users most of them in ludo. Of course the autoplayer needs to be user based to make most people happy.

autopass really needs to be available i more games than just backgammon. ludo would be nice

speaking of ludo, i know a variation of it called aggravation. it has a slightly bigger board and a shortcut, and you cant pass your own piece. it can also be played with 2 or 4 players

Fencer: oh! I understand what you are saying. Thanks Fencer!

Eriisa: Go to the Bug Tracker page, change the Status to New, click Show and use RSS URL of the resulting page. You will make a feed of reports with the New status only. Or is it not what you want?

Eriisa: What do you mean by that? Any RSS feed will keep you informed of the most recent items posted to it.

pauloaguia: Can you set the RSS feed to show only new items?

Not really a request as the Feature is already there, just not seem to pick up a certain option.

In the Move and goto ........... (wherever) box when submitting, there is an option to 'go to the Tournament' when playing a Tournament game

Could we have that show when playing a Team Tournament game as well please so we can go there

mctrivia: I don't use this feed so that might be the reason why I haven't noticed that yet. I'll check it.