tinksbell: Trust me, this has been hashed to death for 3 years. Every idea even yours has been brought up. Bottom line is NO. Doesnt matter how many of us want the feature we aren't getting it.

Rose: My last comment on this topic. Opening moves as an option in the setup(probably also mentioned before) since there really are only 2 was of starting the game of Reversi...

Rose: I would like to know why this is a definet no. Would be a great feature to have.

Please... type "autopass" in the search box on this discussion board, and you can probably find Fencer's reasons. It is futile to go on about it. Let's move on please. :-)

Fencers points are good though when it comes to chess and derivitives of it do not really apply. Most chess players I know don't talk much during a game. And the ability to put messages for each path could be included if you really want to tant your player. Would be interested in Fencers specific thoughts to chess.

I read Fencer's points the last time this came up and I found that each was arguable rather than definitive. Now, having experienced autopass at GoldToken, I'm even more certain that the reasons given against it, from the point of view of the players, are spurious. For instance, there can indeed be startling changes to the board and game position but that's in no way a problem. And yes, messaging does suffer during the autopass period, but BK wouldn't suffer the loss of messages that GT does because BK's messages are always visible.

I do accept that there's a technical difficulty with Backgammon, though. At GoldToken the dice are rolled at the first opportunity. For instance you can make a move and submit it then go back to the game page and the opponent's dice have already been rolled, even though the person may not be online. Here the dice are rolled at the last moment, ie. when the player visits the page. That's a fundamental difference that would need to be addressed before autopass could be added to the gammons.

In chess and other games the conditional moves facility that you're talking about is different from the Backgamon autopass and is possibly even more difficult. The simple case of my-move, his-move, my-move, his-move may be feasible but I imagine it wouldn't really be very effective; as soon as it was available you'd be wanting to add choices at each move thus creating a tree structure. I believe that that would greatly add to the complexity of the mechanism and the user interface required, making it a very expensive feature in terms of Fencer-hours per site improvement.

playBunny: For chess it should be a tree structure right off the bat. As for Fencer-hours if Fencer would agree to place it in I would be willing to write the suto code and storage archetecture. All fencer would have to do is adapt the sodo code to what ever language he is using. I am sure there are other programers on here also that would be willing to improve this feature for free also.

mctrivia: Pseudo-code is nice in principle but it has this habit of leaving out an awful lot of implementation details and failing to anticipate a myriad problems. Real code is the only answer but you don't have an API to work to. Even if you did, there's only one programmer and I rather think he likes total control, lol, not to mention the "all my own work" satisfaction. I might be wrong about that last sentence but here's a $1000 which I'm willing to risk!

Personally, I think playBunny hit the nail on the head on his post 3 down..

At this point however, this topic needs to stop. Fencer has made it immensely clear that he has no plans to change this.

Thanks.

playBunny: Well I can understand that mentality. The storage and strocture would be the usefull and complicated part to think up. Though I guess if you use XHTML that would be easy also(though very ineficient). I mainly deal with embeded aplications so I have goten into a nack of being able to store things as small as posible. What ever happens I must say that if Fencer wrote this 100% by him self he deserves a metal this site is amazing.

mctrivia: The pseudo code is trivial

If (canMove(player2))
{
endMove(player1)
}
else
{
player2.pass
}

I don't think the difficulty of the code is the point, only the fact that for silly reasons it is not implemented.

The point about chatting is not even correct, since what is the difference between making one move and typing a message, and making 6 moves and typing the same message? I don't get it.

It has been discussed to death. Further posts in this thread will be deleted.

When I accept a game and type a nice message for my opponent, the message is gone when the game starts. Re-typing the message is the solution, but it seems to me there is a better solution....

rod03801: If you wish to avoid people discussing the same things over and over again "to death", then PLEASE put a link in the board introductory text where members can see such frequently asked issues, e.g. via contextual posts like Fencer's "autopass" reference you made, or through a suggestion to search for the appropriate string, e.g. "autopass".

The feature allready exists but I would like it if I could chose to have it only send me 1 e-mail. I don't need to know that 6 people moved in 6 e-mails. 1 e-mail saying the first person moved would be fine and I can play the next five games while I am there.

mctrivia: But how would the system know? Do you propose that one email is sent and then the notifications are turned off until the next time you log in and out? That might be the solution I guess.

grenv: That is exactly what I propose.

Would it be posible to set 2 different refresh times? Currently I set my refresh time to every 15 minutes and when someone is online I change it to every 30 secounds or 2 minutes depending on how active we are playing. It would be nice if either where it says refresh time was a drop down books so I could change it very easily or I could set two different refresh rates. One for if no one else is online and one for if one of the people I am playing is online. Not really that important as it is not hard to change and after this month I won't be having a problem with bandwidth.

mctrivia:

Just do it the easy way....
Use Firefox and put BrainKing on your bookmark toolbar. Then with one click U can access the site and play.

(Or is it just me that logs on every 5 min? LOL)

i never actually use the log out button lol

Arctic Warrior: Sounds like a good idea. But instead I will change my home page from google to Brain King. Now if only Fencer could put a little google search bar under neith the google ad baner and I will have my search engine back(and I think Fencer would get payed for my searches wich would be good)

diogenes: we could also have "double elimination" tournaments
----------
would anyone be interested in these?

mctrivia: Why not have both and more... My home page is a copy of the Google page to which I've added direct logins to Brainking, GoldToken, IYT, Vampire City, a dictionary and a few other choice goodies. ;-)

playBunny: Well I installed the google search bar and Brain King is the only other web site I go to on a daily(hourly really) bases.

nobleheart: Double elimination would be great, but I'm not sure how you handle the ending rounds.

You would sometines have to have the same two final competitors play twice.

My feature request is for pawns to be able to delete their posts and a way to reach members who place a moderator on their blocked users list so that i do not look like an idiot again.

A BrainKing member made a post stating that another player was a cheat. The other player responded. When I became aware of it, I hid them both temporarily and sent them each a private message asking them to delete their messages. The second player kindly did and I have unhidden him. The first plyaer sent me the following reply:

Are all moderators stupid?
Pawns - Cannot - Delete - Messages.

He also added me to his blocked users list so I cannot contact him again.

Folks, I have been a paying member for a long time. How am I supposed to remember details about other membership levels like that? And now I look like an idiot! So my feature request is a change to BrainKing so that pawns can delete their own posts and a way to reach members who make posts that need to be moderated, even if they have that moderator on their blocked users list.

Good Day.

Thad: Is it just staff members that can delete messages? Or all moderators. If it is all moderators the pawns could ask them to do it. If not there should be a staff list some were.

mctrivia: I could have done it, but I thought as a courtesy, I'd ask him to delete them himself. It's always best to let someone try and correct their own mistakes rather than be dictorial (is that the right word?) and do it.

It would be cool if posts, and messages between players was auto translated if they spoke different languages. There are many tools out to do it but I don't know how practical it would be to implement. For now I will use http://www.google.ca/language_tools though.

Thad: Dictatoral?

mctrivia: Only pawns cannot delete their own posts. Paying members can edit or delete their own posts.
And moderators can edit or delete anyone's post of the board that they are a moderator on.

Thad has a good point about pawns deleting posts themselves, I believe the reason why they are not allowed was becuase of abuse by multi-nic pawns in the past.

Furthermore, Thad, you do not look like an idiot! No one should have to remember anything. The pawn acted more like an idiot with the response they gave. Thad, you do a great job!

Eriisa: Ya I know I can delete my own messages. It was not that long ago that I was a pawn so I was curious to wether all moderators could delete. The point being the pawns could ask the moderators to delete for them if they screwed up by accidently submiting twice.

mctrivia: very true! Many pawns have done just that, which no mod minds. Its all in a days work.

The only limitation I guess on a moderator is if they are mod on Features, they cannot edit anything on another board which they are not a mod of. For instance, Rod can edit or delete here, but not on General Chat.

Have you hard of the Global Moderators? They are the backup for all boards, and can edit or delete on any, in an emergancy. Doesn't happen often.

mctrivia: If they would work well enough, why this pages would need translators in first place. I insist because they do not work well.

Salkkuman: Just ment for the little things like posts and messages between players. They aren't perfect but they work well enough that you can figure out what the person was saying.

Salkkuman: In what way do the pages not work well?

mctrivia: In one place there was one day or something like that that kind of thing. And did suck and it was removed. One another thing is is that kind of auto translators to all languages? No and they will have to read crappy english and if they are not too good at it. If that could have on/off it would be ok.

Salkkuman: I agree. I use this translator which translates into the target language and then back again so you can see if it still makes sense after two manglings. It sometimes takes two or three edits to be happy that the message will make reasonable sense. Mind you, that's partly because this is the free service. A paid-for translator would be better. However, your point about crappy English is very valid. I-KIRJAIN ei -lta ei tranlater wich antaa epäkelpo langauge ja ajanjakso. (I no of no tranlater wich handl poor langauge and speling).

playBunny: How is this for an idea. Instead of implementing anything on this site what free translation services are there out there? Can we find enough to cover every language suported here? I have not yet find one that did Czech, Turkish, Slovak, Dutch, Swedish, Romanian, or Esperanto

mctrivia: Forgive my ignorance, but are there really people who need translating into esperanto? Where do they live?

mctrivia: Don't know if this link will work but ... InterTran does a whole spread of languages.

[This is no longer on topic for the Features board by my reckoning so I'm done.]

grenv: well only 10 people. Never hered of it myself. and playBunny you are very right.

No computer-based translators are worth relying upon. I guarantee you that. And I believe everyone who knows more that one foreign language and has some experience with on-line translators would also.

scrabble would be a nice addition to brainking

clueless36: ...as long as there was a real dictionary with words which were commonly used in people's vocabulary.

pgt: ... and it doesn't break any copyrights regarding the name ;) IYT have their own version, called Jamble.

On the message boards It gets very confusing sometimes as to the other members local time, Would it be possible to have members local time as well as our own time on the messages

That'd just make the message box more cluttered than it needs to be. It'd probably confuse me more too!

furbster: 27 November 2005, 16:45:04 (+8)