At Gameknot.com, where only chess is played, there are 12400 players, of which I estimate 10% are members. This 10% appears to apply at IYT also.

I like this idea. But it must be discussed though before I'll make such a significant change to the current system.
Anybody knows about possible drawbacks?

As a postscript to the previous message, if Pawns were restricted to 3 months registration, I would make them feel as welcome as possible, play many games with them, make it as hard as possible for them to be leave the site!!

Fencer - please would you consider this request.

Brainking.com seems to have reached a paying membership plateau of around 250 paying members. All of us payers need more members so that we may be sure that your excellent site will continue forever! I beieve that will happen so long as you get a decnt income from your site.

Therefore, you need to turn many more Pawns into Knights and Rooks.

Would you consider deleting Pawns after 3 months registration, with all their games and statistics. Even if they sign back on under a new name, they will have lost any ratings, etc. This loss may well be important to them and cause them to take out a paying membership.

I do hope that other paying members will support this request.

Ooops didnt work, just very happy:)

What does that say, TT?

How long are you going away for, Massimo? Don't forget weekend days are already holidays so you only have to put in week days. That will give you 7 days where you will not time out.

ok I think I will lose many games on time:-(.anyway thanks to whom replied and for the wishes.

But as Brain Pawn you can set only 5 days per year.

Yep, just double checked for you, its 'Settings, Calendar, Vacation and Weekend days'.
Just tick the days you will not be here and have a great holiday :o)

Go to settings, and there you will find a holiday page, where you can tick the days you want as holidays. On these days you will not time out.

hi everyone!may I postpone my games?I am going on holiday for 15 days and else I will lose all of my games on time.I am leaving tomorrow so please let me know.thanks

I had about a dozen games to be played and here i am 25 minutes later and I have played them all :)
Thank you so much and you deserve a round of applause....
"CLAP, CLAP, CLAP"

Observations: There were two deadlocks last night, probably caused by infinite loops due to non-synchronized threads in one internal Java function. It's gonna be the subject of the third test for today.
Average CPU load was about 15-20% which is very good [until a deadlock has occured]. It only confirms my theory that BrainKing application is very fast but it occasionally gets jammed because of multithreading and related issues. Good news are that it is not hard to fix, once I know where the problem exactly lies.

It looks good; thank you.

Thanks Fencer.. today no problems in resolving the page; it has been a smooth day.. Wonderful :-) Keep the good work going; we´ll enjoy each day more!

In g:):)d fellowship, ~*Radiant*~

For all your hard work!!

All I know is ... I'm impressed with all that Fencer has done here. I know that sometimes I'll get the 'server is full' screen, but usually if I hit the back button and then submit again, it'll go through.

thanks fencer for doing what you can, I sure appreciate it as I know a lot of us do.

I've just started the second test. Let's see the performance tonight [when the load is usually the biggest].

Good luck with your work Fencer, but we all know, or should know, that anything worth having, is worth waiting for. Thanks for all your hard work and a wonderful site.

Yes, according to my CPU and network meters, there was no big downtime tonight. But the work is not finished yet, I will continue today and tomorrow.

Well Fencer....I dont know if you have started to fix the bits you thought you knew were sorta broke LOL, but access has improved 85%:)

Nothing unusual :-)

i mean, waht side effects will that have to the site during the weekend? :-) If so, could you give us an estimate?

Does that mean, the site will be down the whole weekend?

Bastille Day should not be forgotten though ... :) ~*~

Fencer, if you're planning on making the independence days of all nations public holidays here at BK there won't be many regular days left in a year.

Maybe I've found out what's wrong at last. I'm gonna spend this whole weekend experimenting with my new ideas.

I logged into this site at 3pm my time approx...I had 7 games waiting...it is now 6.08pm and I have just played the 7th game....I know Fencer is sick of hearing these SLOW game complaints but yesterday I had REAl trouble and had to leave some game :(
You do a good job mate and we really appreciate it....this is just for your information....not a complaint :)

Thank You, and you have a nice weekend Fencer.

Ellie: Done.

CET says it's Independence Day since 4 hours ... :D

Best Oldish European Wishes to the
Brain-kings of a Young and Strong Nation ...

May soon a visionary president declare, she is the only one
capable of acchieving, the goal to get all industries too dangerous
for a biosphere, into orbital stations, yet before this century is over,
- not because it is easy but, because it is difficult ...
... - and, because she cAn ...

God Bless America ... ~*~

'

tomorrow is the 4th. of july, that is a holiday here in the states, is it going to be a site holiday. Happy 4th. to all.
thx.

I think a good suggestion would be to examine the rating system Dweebo uses at Dweebo's Stone games. The formula is similar, but would not have some of the odd results obtained with the current brain King formula.

Exceeds the ransom, has to raise the bar...Blaze sit still!

So, what would be a suggestion (or plurality thereof) to improve upon the rating system we have? There is no such thing as a perfect one, but if there are flaws, they could be thrashed over, perhaps even rectified.

I just don't think that a lot of time should be spent on it by the players. I mean, I am much more concerned with won-loss records than any rating, which is at best only a rough guide as to how good (or not) a player is. In contrast, numbers of games won and lost are factual, and although they do not necessarily address the strength (or weakness) of opposition, they are still unequivocal.

However, ratings are always fallible, no matter how good the system used. I purport that in most rating systems, about one-third of the players are overrated, about one-third underrated, and about one-third rated fairly close to where they should be. The variance in rating systems won't change that. The only thing which will make rating systems better is longevity; that is, a lot of the players in a certain game type playing a lot of games against the others in that group.

I know how it works.

If you are rated high and you win - you go up a couple of points. If you are rated high and lose - you go down A LOT of points! :-)

Possible a good rating system for skill type games like chess, but when you start adding more "luck" into games (like a little for Backgammon, and a lot more luck for Battleboats) - it may not bs the best rating system.

-- Which I'm not complaining about the current rating system, but it never hurts to look at different options.

Well, I would just like to point out that I am in the top 20 of three games and the top 30 of another. DmitriKing is the top rated player in four games. It's not that I haven't been able to do well here but I think it is a difficult system to sustain competition if no one can figure out its consequences.

Pioneer54, I partially agree with what you said, mostly in regard to the high number of games. But, just because people can improve their ratings by studying does NOT mean that a possibly flawed ratings system should not be changed. I am not saying that the rating system is definitely flawed, because maybe it isn't, but I think it could and should be improved. The fact that people can study and improve their ratings is no reason to have a weak rating system.

ALso, although it is hardly relevant, I dare say that my ratings in the 4 games I play (in which I am the top rated player) have not suffered any as a result of my spending 5 minutes complaining about the ratings system.

From time to time on here, I've noticed that people complain about their rating(s), the rating system, or one thing or another having to do with ratings. What a waste of time and energy! Ratings are cuious and interesting by nature; they are also a very inexact science no matter what formula is used. It has always been this way, and probably always will be. If those yammering about ratings would spend half that time studying and improving their play, their ratings would improve dramatically! So, why worry? Look up your rating if it makes you feel good, acknowledge it, then resolve to do something about it, or just forget it!

As for extremely high numbers of games per member, I suppose that is Fencer's province alone. Some of my opponents (even friends) fit this category, and I don't especially like waiting days for a response in a game, but as long as they make their time control, I cannot complain, although I have a tough time understanding how anybody can handle several hundred games simultaneously. There has to be a certain comfortable level of peak performance beyond which play diminishes.

There will always be a small number of people (in proportion) who are impatient with what the site offers, and when and how it offers it, and even if they could be placated at present they would find something else to get anxious about, so let them be on their merry way and concentrate on the resolute majority.

I agree with these opints. Players having 300 and 400 or even 700 games going is too much.

ALso, the rating systme is suspect. I took a look at the formula used, and it seems to base the rating on the number of games the opponents have played. But, the way I interpreted the website, it was not intended to work this way--the number of games played was used in determining ratings within a tournament, as I understood it, not over the lifetime of players. I could be wrong on this. But, Once a player is established, I think it ashould not mattewr hoew many games he has played. Dweebo's stone games uses this formula, and everyone knows how it works and knows how their rating will change after a game.

I have been playing on this site for about a couple of months or so now and I really do honestly appreciate the opportunity to play at somewhere other than IYT mainly due to the obvious attention to customer service that is exhibited among all the people on this site not just the official CS reps. Why have I not gotten a membership? Three interrelated reasons. 1) The unbelievable number of games that people can get involved with means that often the games with the top level people in a game's rankings take forever because they have so many games that are often difficult for them to work through in a day. I agree that part of it is my fault because I accepted games from them with 45 day move windows (which I have stopped doing) but I have seen some people with over 400 games. I think allowing that is detrimental to the site and 2) its performance. It is my uninformed opinion that the sit's performance is negatively affected by probably 5% of players due to these high number of games. Now, I am not a Java programmer but I am a web developer and I knwo that with hobby sites that is always the case, a core few usually use the majority of the resources on a site. In this case, I think it is extremely lopsided and does more for frustrating the rest of us than any server hardware. 3) The ranking system is so esoteric as to be indiscernable from magical incantation. ;-) I have no idea from game to game where I am going to come out in the rankings. sometimes playing peoepl higher than me does not affect my rating at all, sometimes I beat people lower than me and I gain huge advances in my ranking. If I don't understand how the ranking qworks thn I dont' knwo what I need to do to get ahead. It makes it very frustrating to compete when I dont' knwo hwo I get ranked, I can;t play fast enough to get ranked higher and I can't get on to get ranked at all. I will keep playing here because I like the people and I hate IYT just that much. I coudl suffer the performance issues and get amembership if I could be assured that the other two issues were resolved to everyone's benefit, not just mine. Thanks for letting me speak my peace. And, of course, I would love to help anyway I can. Have you considered offloading some of the more static or non-game stuff to another less server intensive language liek PHP or Perl?

Thanks for your offer Jason. But there is one problem - such server would have to be here in Prague, at our server rack, due to security reasons. Our main database server cannot be accessed "outside" to prevent hacking and data manipulating.
Moreover, I cannot guarantee that after adding another machine BrainKing will never crash again. I really plan to buy a new server and I hope that it will solve problem - but I am not [and I cannot be] absolutely sure. I have to test it but I cannot ask other people to buy the hardware just for "testing". It would not be fair to them.

is there a way someone could do something like a sub-host to improve the sites performance ? i have asked before but got no reply , if so i will buy a server to help from this end

Maybe some people think that 450 moves / day is a lot :)

At times and currently more often the resolving of the pages takes time; but its not ONLY on this site. Don´t know if you play at IYT, but there it used to be TERRIBLE, for days!!! You just have to be persistent in getting on here; when its touch to get on, I wait awhile until trying it again. When you have friends in here and games and issues you started off discussing, then you DO want to come back in and most of the time, I do succeed again within 30 minutes.

Good job, Fencer and goodluck in bugging all the bugs you can find! ;o))

fencer im not having a go at you .
just telling you how some people feel

Well, what should I say more? I could write server news each day and post something like "okay, I've tried this and that, it didn't help, so I'll use another way of bug tracking tomorrow, we will see" but is it worth occupying the place on the Main page?
I understand that some people are not very happy and I would like to wave a magic wand and say "LET THE SITE BE FIXED, NOW!". Unfortunatelly, it is not that easy, especially when you do it alone.

fencer people have stopped complaining about the access and are just putting up with it , but sadly i fear some people have had enough , people wont feel they can send mail to you because of what you wrote (" i have added new information to Technical info page. It is recommended for everyone to read it before complaining about anything").
even when the page is read it doesnt change anything some people arnt very happy .
as i have said before i like this site very much but the site acess is getting too much