Do you miss something on BrainKing.com and would you like to see it here? Post your request into this board! If there is a more specific board for the request, (i.e. game rule changes etc) then it should be posted and discussed on that specific board.
mctrivia: I just went to a profile of someone with 1700 games - the page showing his games is currently 552kb large. An image tag of <img src="/images/dot.gif"> clocks in at 27 bytes. Even if said person would have half of his games with a message left by his opponent (which seems quite unlikely, he would have to have multiple conversations going on with the same person), the pagesize would increase to 575kb. Big deal. An increase of about 23 kb, slightly more than the size of the dragon image, and significantly less than the latest smiley added.
But I wouldn't like the lone '*', as it cannot be surpressed with a style sheet. <span class = 'message-indicator'>*</span> could handle that, but then you might as well use an image.
mctrivia: Fencer isn't using title attribute, nor grabbing an image from a subdirectory for the "opponent is online" mark; so there's no reason to assume he'll do otherwise for an "opponent left message" mark. But even if he's using 71 bytes for a mark, so what?
In an age where people download entire Dvds, and use graphics where a simple ':)' could do, who cares about 71 bytes, even if it's repeated a hundred or even a thousand times?
AbigailII: 71 bytes * 1000= 71kB * 1000 page loads = 71MB it can ballon quickly. But this one thing would not be the problem. The problem is on a slow connection the page already takes to long to load this would not add much time at all but it would be nice if there was another option say &noextra that gave us a striped down version.
mctrivia: Sure, it you present it this way, it looks like a lot. But find me a person who has 1000 games where it is both his turn, and where his opponent has left a message. Then calculate how much data is downloaded if you refresh his main page 1000 times, and compare that to the 71 Mb.