Eriisa: Not really what I intended to use the friends list for, but definitely not a bad idea :-)

fismoluni: You are right, but IMHO the point is that one month is a little short.
I don't care that I sometimes disappear of the rankings, and if I would care, as Jason points out, all I would need is to pay the subscription.
But I do care that other top players disappear of the rankings, because when I want to challenge someone strong to a game, I have no way of finding those "not-that-inactive" players again. Not really a big issue, but I now realize that it is penalizing for all users, not only for pawns.

TwoThouSevHun: Basically no rating was correct at the time. With the old system it you earned the same points when the rating difference between you and your opponent was any number between -399 and +399.
Now the rating calculation is 100% correct according to the definition given. I checked it.
If the recalculation made a so high difference to your rating, it meant that you had somehow profited a lot of the calculation errors, without knowing it.
Don't forget that your opponents ratings were wrong too. For instance you may remember having won a lot of games against a 2200 opponent while he should in fact have been rated 1900 at that time.
About continuity : of course Fencer could very well have said nothing about the error, and just corrected it without recalculating the ratings. Then the ratings would have slowly evolved towards the correct values. But wasn't it fairer to openly admit the mistake and to correct it completely ? Who really wants an undue rating ?

Pythagoras: I don't see many of them in the 8x8 chess variants board. Maybe it is just better moderated than others :-)
The problem with deleting a post is that some people may take it as meaning "Your post is garbage, let's put it where it belongs", when it should read "Your off-topic post is adding nothing to the thread, the thread will be more readable without it, let's do this favour to the readers".

AbigailII: I disagree. I have read your post where you asked for a tournament announcement to be moved from the board "Chess Variants 8x8", and for sure there was nothing rude or inappropriate in it. But think again : there was also nothing inappropriate or rude in the way WhisperzQ answered and deleted the two posts about this subjects.
Given that the description of that board very clearly explained that it was partly dedicated to tournament announcements in 8x8 chess variants, it was your post which was off-topic on that board.
Maybe to care for your touchyness WhisperzQ would have done better by moving it (and his answer) to another board ?
I don't like to mess with other people's affairs, but I find it too unfair to put this kind of pressure on WhisperzQ while he was only doing (correctly in my opinion) a helping job. Would you like all boards unmoderated ?

Fencer: Oh cool ! I am sure that in Pro backgammon the ratings will not be a problem any more.

<Luck is definitely a factor in the backgammon ratings but it is not *the* factor. As many said, the real factor is that with the same skill difference as in chess, the better player win percentage is a lot lower. But this has to do not only with luck, but also with the length of the game. For example, if the game of go was played here with the same rating system, you would soon see people over 3000, because in go you almost never win against a stronger opponent (while it still happens in chess).
The solutions could be :
1) Implement and play only "Pro backgammon", matches to e.g. 5 points with a doubling cube, which is a much better game anyway. But implementing that would probably be a lot of work for Fencer.
2) Tuning the Elo formula. In the Elo formula there is a constant of 400 which means that it requires a rating difference of 400 points to have a winning expectation of 10/11=90.9%. Changing the 400 to e.g. 600 would dilate the rating scale so that you are 600 points higher than your opponent instead of 400 when you win 90.9% of the games. But this is not a so great solution as it looks, because it requires for each game to estimate the relation "skill difference -> winning expectation", which can be done only in a somewhat arbitrary way as the "skill difference" is a subjective value.
3) Accept that because of the nature of one-game backgammon the rating scale will always be shrinked and that the rating differences must be taken as meaning a higher skill difference than you would expect !

Grim Reaper: Sure I like math, but the choice of name dates from when I was quite young and because there was a cool symbol with it. Differential mathematics are far from a favourite of mine.

My website has 100000 times less features and is 100000 times less well done than this one, but I gave the possibility to users to choose whether they wanted each of these infos displayed or not (while warning them about spam, of course).
One thing the users like is that when someone has his/her birth date public and it is his/her birthday, his/her name appears between candles. Just trying to give you ideas for silly feature requests :-)