It would be handy if the player's name on a graph page could be a link to their profile. And perhaps the game name shown in brackets could be a link to the associated finished-games page?

tazman7474: It needn't be too expensive. The list is already sorted by time-to-go or whatever. By encoding a single key out of the groups that a game belongs to then it would still only require a simple sort. The difficulty is in programming the groups and building the user interface for maintaining them. That's more an issue of development time than of server time.

Fencer: Lol. There's a new product idea for your shop. The BrainKing Mobile Computer Booth. A couple of poles or something and a metre or two of material. It covers the player in his chair plus the PC and screen and on the outside tells everyone for miles around all about BrainKing!

alanback: He does that. The request is for it to be an option with which he can "Set this action as default".

Fencer: Playing against friends in the computer lab at college.

Luke Skywalker: That bell shape is only there if you have a single entry slot in the centre. At the sides the chances of getting your desired position is higher. But in both cases, as the distribution is around the target point, I imagine that the chance of getting exactly where you want is substantially less than 50%. The 70:30 split would narrow the bell and increase that chance.

BBW: Ahah, yes, having different likelihoods is a good idea. If it's 50:50 then the game would be hugely luck-based and I would guess that the number of draws would be very high due to the lack of organisation. I'd suggest a percentage split of perhaps 70:30 with the 70 always in the direction back towards the slot that was used to introduce the piece.

reza: If my "friend" is the friend that I think it is then I want to get friends with your friend who wants to gets friends with my "friend".

alanback: There's only one "proper" English - the BBC's rendition of The Queen's English.

reza: دوست داری با دوست من که دوست داره با دوست تو دوست بشه دوست بشی؟

LOL. If that's a tongue twister then what hope have I of reading it even if I wanted?! It looks very pretty, though.

I think it would be better if Fencer created a huge set of sound files so that we can hear how to pronounce things.

I'll only back the idea of phonetic s and sound files for English if proper - British - English pronunciation is used.

emmett: Simply say "Hi" or something when you make your first move. The date and time is recorded with the message.

grenv: You can read anyone's Started Games page at any time.

McT: Or have BrainKing call their mobile. "Stop! Whatever you are doing, stop! Make your way immediately to the nearest Internet access. It's your move and your attention is urgently required." ;-)

headius: I watch almost more than I play at Vogclub, but that's a realtime site. I've watched a few games here - usually when I'm in an active game myself and clicking on the games that my opponent is playing.

It would be handy to know who's playing something watchable. It is, of course, possible to go through a game once it has ended but it's not the same. In Backgammon I can tell you that I, TC and kie19 tend to play a game right through if possible.

One possible indicator is to have a person's refresh rate shown in their profile. It wouldn't be reliable but could be a good give a hint. Mine's set to 2 minutes. Lol. Even then I often click the refresh button to get to the next move.

mctrivia: 50% is a massive rake. It makes no sense for gamblers to have a separate site when there are other separate sites with much lower rakes. The gambling market is very competitive.

grenv: It's "done good".

I fourth the idea ... perhaps Fencer will forth it.

Hrqls: It's possible but quite tricky, I'd imagine. Most likely the Cheat Watchers of the Backgammon D/B would be hot on their trail at the first sniff of villiany.

I'd like to be able to hide someone and have the Remove-from-hidden control on the Blocked User page rather than at the top of the board. That way I don't have to have that person's name adding insult to injury by being right in my face when I visit a board.

mctrivia: If absolute positioning is used within an html "div" to align gifs with transparency then a whole lot of irregularity is possible.

mctrivia: Are you in software by any chance? The best thing for this would be a custom front-end. It could be done in DHtml in a day or two (or three or four, lol), I'd reckon. UIt would watch the front page for you and then open the message board in a new window. It could watch all the boards, not just one and would only refresh when you close the board's window.

mctrivia: It seems that I'd have to be pressing that link for each new message. That reduces the utility somewhat. The time to read one message is likely to be less than the refresh interval (unless it's one of the ones that certain [cough] people write ), so perhaps it should only be switched off if there are, say 3 or more new messages at once. Trouble with that is that if it refreshes while you're away you lose the "New". Hmmm.

mctrivia: And presumably it would reset if you press the link again or log out, or perhaps after a given period away from the board?

mctrivia: So you'd keep a browser open with the board's page in it and it would refresh every X minutes like the main page?

mctrivia: Wormhole Battleboats when you put part of a boat somewhere and the rest goes down a wormhole and reappears anywhere else on the high seas.

WhiteTower:

Fencer: Aye, actually I was thinking that 'cos it was too coincidental otherwise. You've already got the Froglet and the wrap-around experience from other games so all the ingredients were there for the new recipe.

Er, can we have Sphere Backgammon, please?

diogenes, Fencer: A miracle of timing, or is this a double act?

mctrivia: LOL. Aye that makes much better sense.

takodori: That's such specialised knowledge that it makes no sense for BrainKing to provide it. Among the difficultes would be what "preferred" means. How is it judged? It's likely that it's something with a fuzzy definition and probably you'd want to play with it until it gave what you considered the most meaningful results. I imagine that the best solution, though practically impossible, is that of writing a program to do external analysis of the games.

emmett: A difficulty with that, perhaps, is that the area is also used for a one-line tourney announcer/enticer. However, I have that 'tourney tip' turned off and I've not changed the refresh period in months so I second the request.

wellywales: You mean I'm being nice for nothing? Gah! Well that only leaves tidy-mindedness and that's not even half the reason that the other was. I feel all let down now!

Fencer: I hope so!

Grenv: It's part of a tidy-minded attitude but it's also a courtesy to my opponents. While I'm "browsing main page" they might expect me to make a move sometime and thus hang on when they could have gone and done something else. If I log out then my little green light goes out too and they know not to wait.

In the three column display, could the Logout link be moved to the first group? It's one of the most frequnt actions yet is the hardest to reach.

MiddyMcM: ROFL. And intolerance to spelling is perhaps a touch hypercritical?

(I jest)

Princess Alison: Lol. I've just come to the board after a day (I couldn't get online yesterday) and there were about 60 messages. Looks like everyone's whooping it up, so....

;-)

Hey folks. ROLL UP! ROLL UP!

An offer never to be repeated.

It's OFF TOPIC DAY on the Features Board!!!

               

Princess Alison: I'd wallk a milion milles for one of your smilles.

Yeah, images would be a great addition to the allowable html.

Czuch Chuckers: And if the short month form were used instead of the whole, then no a lot of space need be lost either, except in early-summer.

I'd like the feature. It would be handy to have it in PMs as well.

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.]

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).

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. ;-)

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!

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.

Wee nitpick. It would only be 14 games for an 8-player section.

When reviewing past games (I haven't played any yet, so I only review) it would be nice if it gave the players' name above the boards. Currently it says "Your opponent's board" and "Your board" but I'm an observer and don't have a board.

It would also be nice, given that the game is over, to see the boats in place right from the start.

Dryznik: Aye, it's a round-robin. So, like Czuch asks, how is that different to here? (Except that there can be joint winners of the final section.)

diogenes: A knock-out tournament isn't that much different to a round-robin with only two players per section and no draws allowed, so I'd guess that much of the code is already available.

playBunny: And on the topic of normal service.. I think it's great that Filip doesn't have to take the site down for a period every day to do his backups, that the upgrades are so quick to install and that major downs, like the BKR recalulations, are so rare.

WhiteTower LOL.

wellywales: wellywales: Those sites have such a page when you can reach the server but it's not providing the usual service. Brainking's server is providing the usual service nearly 24 hours of the day. If you were in the Czech Republic there would be no outages or anything. The problem is the "trunk" line from there to certain other regions. Either the page request doesn't get to BrainKing, or it does and BrainKing gives the correct page in return, but that gets lost on the way back out.