I'd not say "deteriorated", but the best days clearly have passed.
Maybe Fencer could consider to lower the membership prices?

Just happened: In one game of triple dice poker i roll 34466. i reroll 344 and have 24466. I reroll 244 and get 34466 I enter and submit, going to the next game of the same type, and the dice are: 34466.

This is only a single case, but it is one example of many I have observed yet. More often than should happen by chance, the dice in a dice poker variant stay the same or almost the same when rerolled.

I only trust a PRNG when I have implemented it myself (but then not absolutely) or when it is based on a cryptographic method and checkable, as I have previously described here.

Marshmud: I don't find a rule anywhere that in case of equal ponts and S-B, the rating decides. But here I found an example of a shared victory in this case. So it seems to be a bug or glitch.

Maybe fencer will find time to fix it.

In this tournament table the S-B values are wrong. Me and tolsty2002 should have the same value, since we have the same match results.

Carpe Diem: I forgot: to make it work, one should check "no days off", or the victim will be saved by the vacation (unless they have used it up already)

No, I don't want to seriously advice to do this, but the players should be aware of it. Onee should care about the time settings and not complain if one didn't. And it can of course be reasonable to choose such time settings, as Aganju mentioned.

It is only fun and games, until someone loses temper.

ThunderGr: I want to add that there is a way to lure players into timeouts who have many games running and frequently play the urgent games only, until there is no game with, say, less than 2 days until timeout on the list:

invite them to agame or set up a tournament with fischer time with high initial time and a low bonus, e.g. 12 days + 6 hours per move. If the time has almost run out and a move is made, then after the next opponent's move the time will be only 6 hours until timeout, and this may be at any time, maybe in the night, and when the player comes back next afternoon, the game is forfeited.

I run into this occasionally.

Thom27: But there are also drawbacks. One is, of course, the effort to implement it. A second is that the players might get into the habit to submit moves without thorough thinking, maybe usually looking at the situation after delayed submit and think if they should undo. Then they go to another site where delayed submit is not available, and soon make a blunder.

jadarite: I think the delayed submit is a better solution, because it does not necessarily require additional effort. If you enter a draft move, you must eventually come back and submit the move. After entering a move with delayed submit, you may come back and change the move, but you can also leave it and the move will be submitted after the delay time.

I meant it for situations where immediately after submitting you think: "oh wait, what have I done now?". You would be able to undo the move, but you need not to.

One should be able to enter the amount of delay time individually for every move you submit. You might even enter a delay of 16h or so, if you might look again at the move in the evening.

rabbitoid, jadarite: What I mean, might be called "delayed submit": If you click submit, the move is not immediately submitted. It is eventually submitted when the delay time elapsed. During the delay, the opponent (or anyone else) sees the position before the move in question, as it is not yet submitted.

jadarite: maybe this revert time is not a bad idea (at least in turn based play with long thinking times). Within 3 minutes after submitting a move, the mover can still take it bak, and it is not yet transmitted to the opponent, to avoid a race condition.

Then there is no irreversible action that may be regretted immediately after it is done, while the delay does not force the user to wait for it. The time can be used as one pleases: either think again or go on and forget it.

Fencer: I'm very sorry: I found that I had a filter active that blocked the BK smileys. I couldn't remember to have it activated.

But: un-checking the "show smileys" option in my settings does still not work. They are shown anyway.

Fencer: Thanks! And about the smileys?

El Cid: If I try with your ongoing games list, it works, but not with my own games. When I click on the "opponent" selection box, there is only a line displayed: ----------

I switched it off some weeks ago. The smileys dissapeared not immediately but after some days. About a week ago I switched them on again, but they are not yet displayed.

If they are switched off, there should be at least the number of the smiley displayed, and not just nothing.

Filtering the list of one's ongoing games by opponent does not work also, since some months.

Herlock Sholmes:
maybe this could work:
If an invitation is refused where both players have an established rating and the inviter has the lower rating and the rating difference is not all too big and the refuser has no good excuse (like being a pawn and playing the full number of games) and the players do not already play a game of this type or have played one short ago,
then the ratings of the players are updated as if the game was played and had ended in a draw.

Fencer: But I hope you are not also tired of fixing the bugs (though one may think so because some are open for many years now).

Some bugs still open:

Camelot: sometimes the server lets a player make a canter with a knight while a capture is possible. This seems to happen only when the moved knight could make a knight's charge.

Grasshopper: if both players are blocked, the game should be ended by the server. See for example game 5235400.

Espionage: the server sometimes accepts a move where a piece moves to a square it just came from in the previous turn. Seems to happen only if the moving player has fewer pieces to move than one should move in a turn. (BTW I find it desirable and more logical to apply the spying after the removing of the pieces captured in that turn, i.e. pieces captured in that turn do not reveal and are not revealed).

Fevga: the server should force a player to unblock the opponent if the latter would otherwise not be able to move any dice-roll. And the coordinates at the board do not match those in the moves list.

Crowded Backgammon (maybe also other variants where there are initially pieces on the bar): if the loser has not born off any stone and still has stones on the bar that have been there from the beginning, the server (sometimes?) doesn't count the game triple. (however, the rules don't state explicitely how this case should be handled).

I suggest implementing Arimaa. Till September is plenty of time to cope with the complexity of this game.

Edit: link to Arimaa

Aganju: Me too! Somtimes, when I went quickly from one back-/nackgammon game to another, I got the same dice roll again. I wasn't sure if it is a bug, it may have been coincidence. But if others observe it too, there must be something about it.

I generally don't trust the dice generation on BK very much.

There is a way to solve this topic: by using a CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator). It is surprisingly easy to program one by using a block cipher like XTEA and encrypt a counter value to obtain random numbers, with a secret key. The code may be published so that the users know that the random number generation is well programmed. The random numbers cannot be predicted, though, if the key is kept secret. One might even use a different key for every game and publish the key after the game has ended, so that the users can check if the random numbers in their game have been created correctly.

Pedro Martínez: This is also a way, of course. I personally would not like it to buy brains instead of earning them by playing games, because playing is what this is all about. But every player is free to try to avoid bying them, or at least buy as few as possible.

Gabriel Almeida: Yes! ATM it is difficult to get brains for a player who has 0 brains, like me. I participate in "pedros birthday tourney" and "not so random tournament", but to be realistic: it is unlikely that I will win any of them.

There might be a program like "20 free brains for all": one day soon all accounts are filled up to 20 brains, and newly created accounts from then on start with 20 brains.

Or: regularly (e.g. once a month) a free prize tournament starts automatically, where the first three players win some brains. It might be a random game tournament, so that there is a considerable luck factor in the choice of the game type against a specific opponent; there is always some game a particular player does not or barely know. And players having more than, say, 50 brains might be excluded from those tournaments, so that the "poor" players have better chances.

nabla's post seems sarcastic to me, and he is true. What's the worth of pre-manufactured words of thank, that might be sent out automatically to every purchaser of a membership?

The best thank is to maintain the site well. And there I see some possible improvements. It annoys me that bugs in the game implementations, the most important thing of a game playing site, are often not fixed as soon as possible. For example the return-bug in espionage, see here or here .
Fixing bugs in the games should have priority over all other things. It is not a shame to make bugs, every programmer does it. But it is a shame to put them at the far end of the todo-list, where they may remain for years, as in the example.

And the rules description should be complete and conform with the game implementation, so that the players know what they are playing. E.g. the espionage rules should explicitely say that the spying of pieces takes place after every single movement of a piece, but not after the whole turn when captured pieces are already removed (I would prefer, though, to change the implementation to the latter, but I can't say how big the effort would be). This was discussed and proposed already on the espionage board.

Another thing I'd wish is that the game notation gives always a complete description of the game, containing not only the exact moves made by the players but also the random decisions.
For example Dice Poker: currently it contains only the dice after the last roll, but not the re-roll decisions of the player and the dice before the re-rolls.

This is a pity. I hoped I might get my first brains this way:
1. create a tourney with brains price bougt with money
2. choose the games I am best in for a random game tournament.
3. sign up myself and win

How to create a free prize tournament? Can everybody do this? Say the winner is to receive brains; are they detracted from thre creator's brains account or can they be bought with money?

So one can only gain brains by the Referral or Promotional program? The re is something about "20 brains for free", but I don't get how it wroks, it seems it doesn't work any more...

How can a player with 0 brains get some, to enter tournaments with entry fee?