Puckish: For me inposible to make a counter. They are extremely easy to make but you need to have access to the server and I unfortuently do not work for BK.

mctrivia: Okay, thanks! I guess i will have to ask Fencer then

Puckish: yep.

A simple game request, in fact probably 1 or 2 lines of code to change and a totally different and HARDER game

I would not normally borrow a game from another site, but BugCafe have introduced Mancala now and they probably got it from here so how about we take one of there ideas

Could we have Random Mancala please Fencer

Both players start with the same 24 stones BUT rather than distributed 4 in each pot at the start, they are placed randomly over the 6 pots

Not only harder, but is less of an advantage for white

MadMonkey: I rather have some other Mancala games that are more balanced. There are hundreds of mancala variants (which, unlike the hundreds of chess variants that were invented just for the sake of inventing a chess variant, are played regularly) many of them not giving a strong advantage to any side.

AbigailII: Any Mancala type games would be great, but this version is far more balanced, trust me i have been playing it on BugCafe and it is nothing like playing with just 4 in each pot, each game is different every time (well up to about 4,096 if my maths is right lol), and like i said it would be so easy to add to the site

MadMonkey: The variant where the player who can't play takes all the remaining stones is supposed to be a lot more balanced, and just as easy to implement. Once this is done, I have then nothing about a random variant - which might in fact be less balanced

nabla: Yes, this is true, and another variant they have on BugCafe already

pauloaguia: (first posted on 6 April 2005, 15:37:23)
Quote: Is it to hard to implement message forwarding? I've been forwarding quite a few messages this morning and it's getting tiresome, having to copy / paste it over and over again...

I'd like to remind it again. Can we have this feature please?

When searching for a player's name, can old names be searched as well? Some players like to change theirnicks on special occasions and, during that period, they become harderto find...

Its nice to have the hover on the red number beside where it says Main Page that shows the first 30 games on our list.

Could you do the same with other red number please, Message Box(would be great), Team Tournaments, Ponds & Tournaments are some i think it would be useful on

Also, on red numbers, could we have then on Bug tracker when a new one is posted

MadMonkey: Also, on red numbers, could we have then on Bug tracker when a new one is posted
If you want to keep track of the Bug Tracker, you can subscribe to its RSS feed ;)

pauloaguia: Never thought of that, good idea

Would still be nice for those who do not use RSS feeds though

Fencer can you please put the actual publication date on the game list feed? I am sure you store this information so you can calculate how much time is left. It is a bit of a pain with the publication date always being the current time I want to know when the game switched over to my turn not what time it is now I can look at a clock for that.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

MadMonkey: Now that makes sense!

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

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.

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

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: 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.

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: 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Jim Dandy: yep. that's where.

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

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.

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

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