grenv: ah, i see. and as to your question, ScarletRose knows whereof She speaks. :)

grenv: oh come on! it's not like cloak mode allows the cloaked person to *do* anything to anyone! why do so many people fear this entirely harmless feature??

or maybe there is some evil application for it and i'm just not evil enough to have figured it out?

alanback: your opinions on cloaking are just that: opinions. they are your own subjective view, which is obviously not shared by everyone or there would not *be* a cloaking feature.

my own opinion about the "if i can't see you you shouldn't be able to see me" issue matches yours but going the other direction: i don't understand the "if i can't see you you shouldn't be able to see me" sentiment at all. it strikes me as silly and childish: "i can't see you? well then you can't see me either! neener neener!!!" - i see no logic behind it. i think that if you don't want to be seen, you should cloak yourself, if you want to be seen, you shouldn't, and i don't see why it should matter to anyone whether a person who can see them is cloaked or not. i don't understand how my being cloaked affects *your* privacy in any way. but maybe it does in some way i'm overlooking.

does it?

* * * edited for clarity and some other stuff. * * *

BIG BAD WOLF: aha! i see! you're quite right, of course, about the "- disabled when you are cloaked -" when the opponent is online and there being nothing there when they're not. thank you very much for pointing that out. i'm happy. *purr*

and to Fencer i'd like to say: hey! "remove" links next to the notes in my notes fields! waaaaaaay too cool. thank you!!

and lest there be any confusion on the matter, "waaaaaay too cool" is a figure of speech - it doesn't mean you should remove the feature. (kidding. i know you wouldn't think that. )

Fencer: how did i know you were going to say that?

"don't be cloaked" is not a solution. please try again. :P

Fencer: doesn't work when you're cloaked.

i'd like the little green "this person is online" dots that appear next to players' names in my games list to appear next to their names on the gameboard screen. that way, if one of my opponents and i are both online and moving regularly on a game - almost-real-time play - i can leave that game on my screen as if i was sitting at a physical board, and if my opponent goes offline i'll know it and stop waiting for Her to move without having to check my main page every so often to ascertain Her online/offline status.

this would make the fact of the gameboard pages refreshing just like the main page more useful. thanks, Filip. :)

and of course you're right, BBW.

oh, and i think *all* messages we write outside of games and message boards should appear in our outboxes. there shouldn't be any "lost" messages, IMO.

can the games that have been added to the site since the Stairs were created be added to the Stairs? i'm thinking of sphere froglet, but there are probably others.

and if i may veer ever so slightly for just one post: i'm happy to report that the person i thought was so horrible really wasn't at all responsible for the horrible act that was attributed to him. the act was more likely the doing of his accuser...who has a reputation around here anyways...

ugh. politics. i'll stop right now.

Bry: hmm. that's a good idea. like eBay's username history thingy.

the notes/description option and that would make it very easy to keep track of who's whom (and who used to be whom) and what they've done that led us to block them.

i'd like to enter - again - my plea for the ability to add notes to the names of the blocked users on our lists, like we can for our friends. it's a nuisance having to keep my notes telling me why someone's on my blocked list in a separate location like the notepad, and it's even more of a nuisance to look up the notes that way.

one of my blocked users is a dangerous, viciously hateful person - really. he should be locked up and the key thrown away - and i don't want to forget why he's on that list.

well, i do and i don't, if you know what i mean.

but when all you've seen of a person is a name and a photo, it's surprisingly easy to forget what else you know about them - that it's them you know it about, and all that. notes next to their name would help.

playBunny: lol...you're right on all counts, my friend...

having just received a hostile PM from a memeber i've never heard of, i would like to request a "whitelist" feature: the ability to block PMs from everyone except those people i've approved to send me PMs.

adding someone to one's "friends" list should automatically add them to one's whitelist, but one should also be able to add a person to the whitelist without making them a "friend".

thanks!

Lamby said: yes absolutely you can choose to use the cloak option, I totally agree that's up to you entirely, but if you do then don't moan that you can't see what others are doing! They can't see you, you then can't see them....fairs fair!!! :o)

i see what you're saying - i just wonder about people who don't *want* to be cloaked to somebody just because that somebody is cloaked. the auto-cloaking seems to me to take away an aspect of the user's control over their appearance, and i think such things should always be the user's choice.

but yes, this is for discussion elsewhere. and this will likely be my last post on the subject anyway, because i really don't think it's a very interesting topic of discussion.   :D

Lamby said:

... if you hide yourself, explain why should you still have the privilege of seeing what others, who aren't hidden, are doing?

why shouldn't i? because the cloak option exists, and it's there for anyone and everyone to use it, those people who choose to be cloaked should be cloaked, and those who choose not to be cloaked should not be cloaked. it seems perfectly clear and simple to me: the user controls their own visibility - period. end of story. what is so difficult to understand about that?

Besides it's been said so many times, why does anyone need to hide on a games site?

no-one needs to. but they might want to. because, for example, they're not in the mood to chat, and so don't want to be accountable to someone who, if they see that person online, will expect them to chat and be all civil and nicey-nice.

that's really what it comes down to: accountability and a sense of obligation. a person might find themselves able to pop in quick and move on their games at a time at which they told another player they wouldn't be around, and so want to do that without feeling obligated to account for their presence here, or to chat when they don't have the inclination or the time.

it's an option to maintain a certain level of privacy. if you hate and resent privacy as it seems so many people on this site do, then don't seek it out. but you have no right to begrudge it to those who don't hate it.

sheesh - yes, let's outlaw privacy altogether!

these people who hate the cloak mode should all work for the u.s. department of "homeland security."

maybe they already do.

why does cloaking oneself now cloak everyone else? it seems to me a person should be able to choose whether they're cloaked or not, but if i cloak myself, everyone now appears cloaked *to* me. that's not right...

someone on the Feature Discussions board asked me to elaborate on how my idea for polls in the fellowships and discussion boards might work, and this is what came of that:

i'm thinking polls would appear on a separate page that was a sort of subpage of a fellowship's main page or its discussion board pages. in each fellowship there would be a link to the polls section, which would take the user to another page dedicated to polls and on which any polls that have been created for the fellowship appear. people would go there to vote in the polls and to create them or close them (provided they have sufficient privileges, of course).

polls could be a help to the big boss in choosing directions in which to take Her fellowship. finding out what the members want in there and stuff.

as regards privileges for the creation, editing, and closing of polls, my thought was that it would be for the big boss of the fellowship or the moderator of the discussion board to decide whether everyone could create, edit, and close polls, or only managers and the big boss/mod, or just the big boss/mod.

and i'm thinking that voting in the polls would work like it does in yahoo groups (and most other places that feature polls) in that you see the current poll results only after you've voted on that poll yourself.

a given poll might also be editable and closeable only by its creator...but then that raises the question of what happens if someone who created a poll leaves BK without closing the poll. we'd need a way for Those Left Behind to rid themselves of the thing if they wanted to...

a feature i'd like to see added to fellowships is the ability to create polls for fellowship members like you can in yahoo groups, and for the big boss to be able to decide who can create polls - big boss only, big boss and managers only, or everybody.

i think it would be nice if, when a tournament ended, the system sent PMs to all participants telling them it's ended and who won.

the algorithm would have to take into account the possiblity of a tie...

BerniceC: i agree that that would be very handy.

and this has probably already been suggested - possibly even by myself - but i'd like to be able to add notes to my blocked users so i'll always remember why i blocked them.

and speaking of adding notes to our people lists, the means of adding a note to an entry on my "friends" list is unintuitive. i didn't even know what it was for until someone told me - largely because there's a "submit" button, but noplace to enter anything to submit. so i didn't know what i would be submitting by clicking it.

i think it should say "change description for" followed by the popup menu from which you choose a person's name, then by a field in which you type your notes, and then by the Submit button (this would also turn what is now a two-step process into a one-step process).

you shouldn't be presented with a button that says "submit" until after you've been given an opportunity to present something for submission (i.e., type something).

can you tell i used to be a software test engineer?

and it's a minor thing, i suppose, but i still think the name of the "enemies" list should be changed to "blocked users" or something. "enemy" is too strong a word for the purpose - calling blocked users "enemies" is akin to calling the "friends" list "lovers". it's inappropriate, and kind of off-putting (in my opinion).

i'd like clicking the red number next to the "Message box" link to take me to the oldest unread message in my box instead of the newest one. sometimes i have several new messages whose order of arrival is significant and if i click the red number and see the last one first it doesn't make any sense. so i don't click the red number any more because i find using it more confusing than convenient.

i think it would be nice if choosing "Inbox" or "Outbox" from the popup menu at the top of my message box page would switch me to the chosen box by itself. having to click the "Show" button seems to me an unnecessary extra step. thanks... :)

grenv: irie is a word used by the Rastafari (which would make it a Jamaican word, i guess?) that, as i understand it, means "feeling the best you can possibly feel." i think it says something about our culture that we have no word for that concept.

(sorry, Ms. Dottie - i'll shut up now. for the time being, at least. :)

Hrqls: there's no english word for "irie" either. kinda says something about our culture, don'tcha think?

my legitimate request (which someone may have made already) is that, when we lose a game of dark battleboats, we see the positions of our opponents' boats. it's a little frustrating to have the game end and to not thereby discover where that damn boat was that i'd been knocking myself out trying to find. :)

sounds good. thanks rod.

please forgive me if anyone's already suggested this or asked about it - i did a search and didn't find anything. is there a way to resize the jarmo board? mine's huge and i can't see a control for it in the Settings. thanks...

PGN is a form of notation that represents a game to a computer the way standard chess notation represents it to a human. you can feed a PGN file to a chess application on your computer and it will then have the whole game available to it so you can open and play the game at any time, keep hitting the "move" button to watch the game be played out, add your own notes for later reference and study, or take the place of one of the players at any point in the game to investigate "what-if" scenarios and such. it's quite a useful feature if you're into all that.

and yes, Abalone is tons of fun. it's actually best when played in person over a physical board because the board's plastic and the marbles are glass and - especially with the first edition which was bigger than the set is now - the aesthetics are very pleasing. the game's beautiful to look at - the hexagonal board with the shiny spherical marbles - and pushing the marbles around feels good and makes a very satisfying "chunk!" sound when they fall into place. but it would be satisfying on here too - just for different reasons.

i'd like to request, again, as i will continue to do periodically, that Abalone be added to the games available on brainking. it's one of the funnest board games available to humanity, and we can't yet play it here.

Walter Montego: AOL's browser doesn't behave like a real browser - that's why you don't get a popup smiley chooser when you roll over the grinning smiley.

i'm still interested - as i always will be - in being able to play Abalone on brainking.

i would also like to request that Fencer institute a short delay between the time the user's cursor rolls over the graphical smiley panel popper-upper and the time the panel actually pops up. it pops up for me all the time when i don't want it to just because my cursor breezed past the pop-up point, and then half the time it won't go away until i hold my cursor over it for a few seconds (or choose a smiley even though i don't want one) and then click outside it. hassle!

i agree. i want my auto-login back! :)

yeah, see, Fencer, i'm actually aware that a day doesn't have more than 24 hours in it (i know because i overheard some people talking about it in a cafe recently). my thought was that if you could make a change to the site here and there rather than having to overhaul the whole thing at once, you might actually be able to accomplish *more* in *less* time. i thought my suggestion might - just *might* - even be *helpful*. but between the defensiveness with which you meet my suggestions (and even my compliments) and the continuous tiresome drone of "there's no time! there's no time! thank you for your money, but the site you're paying for is on the bottom of my priority list!" i think it's not in my best interest to care any more. so just forget about my suggestions, and i will too.

it would be nice if 2.0 was sort of "editable," so you could make changes as you go, as suggestions are made, rather than having to save them all up for a future version. not that we'd want bk to be in a state of constant change, either - that would be disorienting - but it would be nice if you had the option to think of something or receive a suggestion, think, "hey, that's a great idea," and just do it.

:)

yeah - i suggested this to Fencer a while back - though i was thinking of notes that would appear on the Friends page so you wouldn't have to take the extra step of going to the person's profile - but i didn't know the Feature Requests board existed at the time. :D

i'd also like to see "Enemies" renamed to "Ignored Players" or something like that. "Enemy" is a much harsher term than is applicable here.

and i'd like to be alerted when a tournament i created is scheduled to start. i think tournaments should still be started manually, as they are now, but a reminder would be nice so the scheduled start time doesn't come and go without the creator's notice.

and a "sent messages" box?

jeez, Fencer, you didn't read the whole message, did you?

chill out. relax. drink some hot tea or whatever'll make you feel better and take care of yourself.

on the one hand, yes, he created and runs BK in his spare time, and i think we'll all agree he does a great job. but on the other hand, a lot of us pay money for our levels of access to the site, and that, to my mind, puts some responsibility on Fencer to keep things functional. the moment you start charging money for a service, arguments like "he created and runs BK in his spare time" stop being all the excuse one needs.

that said, i will say again that nothing i've experienced on BK lately - even four or five hours of downtime at a stretch - is anywhere near as disagreeable to me as the persistent "temporarily down" page of times gone by. the site is far more reliable than it used to be, and i'm sure Fencer is doing the best he can with what he's got. so i'm not complaining; i just want to make sure he's aware of the problem and that this last time was not the first time i've experienced it. just want him to have the facts in the hopes that they'll help him fix the problem.

really: overall i'm very satisfied with the site. hell, it's the only one of the four or five sites of its kind i've used in the past that i still play on. it's got the best feature set of any multi-game site i've found, and i intend to keep playing - and paying - on it. it's well worth it.

there we go: i was unable to get to brainking between midnight and 5 am GMT today. i wasn't trying between 4 and 5, but i was trying pretty constantly from midnight until 4 and got no response.

was i the only one? the status of my games indicates otherwise...

yeah, maybe the server's running a maintenance routine at that time or something. but like i say, compared to the old days i don't think it's anything to get bunched up about. i just wanted to mention it in case 'twas of interest.

yeah, don't get me wrong - it's still a *lot* better than it used to be in the days of the "brainking is temporarily down" page...but i do hit a point almost every day where i get blank pages and/or an alert saying my browser "could not load any data for this location" for a period of time...sometimes five minutes, then the other night it happened for a few hours...and then the problem just up and goes away (i like that part)... :)

hmm. i don't think its disappearance has reduced the incidence of lockups on *my* end...i can almost count on the site becoming unavailable around 10 pm eastern U.S. time every night (almost)...

game request: abalone.

game request: Xiangqi (Chinese Chess).

if/when the game is implemented, i'd ask that brainking provide an option for each player to choose between displaying traditional and westernized pieces. some people won't want to deal with learning the Chinese characters, while for others (myself included) the Chinese characters are part of the game's appeal.

ah. i wasn't thinking about fellowships that limit the types of games their members can play. but still - one could just join a fellowship for their favoritest game type and play all the other games they like in one-on-one games and public tournaments...or one could join a fellowship that allowed its members to play all the games that person likes to play.

but i don't really care enough about this to keep typing. so i won't. :)

and what would people think about each BK member being allowed to join only one fellowship? as it is now, association with a given fellowship is pretty much a throw-away thing, because fellowships are a dime a dozen and a lot of Big Bosses seem to invite members for no other reason than to increase their fellowship's member count. if each person could only join one fellowship, i think it would lead to the fellowships' becoming more unique - each developing its own distinct personality and identity which would draw the kind of people who like its style.

oh hell, i'm tired and i've got to go to bed. but i'd be interested to know what people think of that idea.

happy gaming... :)

tiger