WhiteTower: I am not sure if informing on a regular basis would make much sense because in most cases it would contain only "I don't want to reveal this behind-the-scenes issue because it's too complicated to explain" :-)

Fencer: ... and that's why we keep asking you, Fencer, to keep us informed on a regular basis about a loose schedule of what you plan to do. Surely it shouldn't have taken a question about Int. Checkers to provoke you to reveal this behind-the-scenes issue :)

IndiagonalJones: In other words, nothing can be seen only in black and white. International Checkers is a great and interesting game, no doubt, and I definitely want to add it. But it is still a game which affects only one group of BrainKing users. The site stability and performance is always my highest priority because it affects all users. I don't say there are serious performance problems at the moment but there are minor issues which could become serious performance problems in the future, that's why they must be resolved as soon as possible.

Czuch Chuckers: Yes, it would be difficult.

IndiagonalJones: I think you may loose many Europeen players of international checkers as it's already implanted on IYT and they will prefer play there
Don't believe that.

Would it be difficult to make our "moves activity" (how many moves we make in a day) correspond to our own time zone instead of the "server time"?

Fencer:

I have talked with many players about international checkers on a board 10X10 and in your reply to jolat you say that it can be done but have to be reworked first. Does it mean you have still the intention of making it available on Brainking anyway and can we have an idea of when.
I think you may loose many Europeen players of international checkers as it's already implanted on IYT and they will prefer play there...

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?

Since the BKR ranges for different games are different, it would be nice to be able to specify a different BKR range for each game. For example, if you want to set up a tournament in Backgammon and Nackgammon, there is no BKR limit that will identify, say, the top 10% of players in each. If you set the lower limit at 2100, you won't have a Nackgammon tournament, and if you set it at 1800, you probably won't get the backgammon tournament you wanted.

BIG BAD WOLF: Ok, I'll explain better, as I should have in the first place.
Take this page for instance. It has a list with all game types from a given tournament. I can see in which ones I'm playing and how many players are playing at each one of them. But to see how many of them are actually completed, I have to manually enter every one of them to see.
If the winner's name was displayed in front of it, or at least an indication of "closed" or "finished" or something like that, I'd know that information at a glance.

pauloaguia: The tournaments that are completed are in the finished area. In progress tournaments are in the running area.

On the game list in the tournament page, once a tournament is completed, maybe the name of the winner could appear in front of the game type. Not only it is a "reward" for the winner to see his/her name there, but it would also help to know in a glance which ones are already over or which ones still have games pending.
If not the name of the winner, at least the number of completed/total games. That would help a lot when I'm browsing through tournaments to see what's finished or not... but I prefer the winner idea better ;)

pauloaguia: No question about it. And, of course, you will shorten your list more by playing opponents who are offline than by playing those who are online.

alanback: However sometimes it's usefull to go thorugh them all at once (like before going on vacation, for instance) and it's good to know that all those settings exist in case you need them ;)

I have had the same experience, logging on to find a large number of games needing moves. My list is sorted by time remaining to move. If an opponent in a game with a short time window happens to be online and sorts his games the same way, then we will be passing moves back and forth rather than working through our other games.

This can be disconcerting if you have it in your head that you have to get through all the games that were there when you logged on. However, if you think about it logically, do you really want to bury the game with the shortest time window under all your other games, just because it is also the one in which your opponent moved most recently? You will still have the same number of games in your list, regardless of which one you choose to move in next.

The way I think of it, I have a certain amount of time for playing, and if I don't get to the games with a long time window, so be it. Those are the games that can wait, by definition. I will play the most urgent game first, regardless of when my opponent moved.

pauloaguia: Ohhhh.. okay, order your list by "time last moved"!

Thats the solution, of course...

Czuch Chuckers: I think that happens if you choose the "time left" setting instead of "time of last move"
(sorry if the english version is different but I'm not in the mood to go back and forth between portuguese and english )

pauloaguia: That would be my suggstion as well. This would not help though if the online person is playing a game with you with a long time limit. Then they would continue to pop up a the top of your list. But it is not often that people who play long time limit games are the ones making many moves in one sitting.

When booting someone from a fellowship...would it be possible to include a message box for the Big Boss to inform the person being booted as to why they are being booted? I think it would be a handy feature!

SunFire: I think you can do that by going into Settings and then, on "Sort next game by" choose "time of last move" ascending.
Haven't tested it though because I don't have any waiting games right now

To sophisticated contestants,

Please message me for faster matches.

Happy New Year,

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.

mctrivia: maybe an option that would bring anyone on your friends list to the top of your play list?

mctrivia: that could be a lot of sorting for the server

tazman7474: I usually prefer to play the ones that are online. If you make that option you should have the reverse also. Maybe if you go with my idea of grouping you should make it like itunes were you can define smart play lists as well as static ones.

SunFire: I've been on both ends of that one! lol

I would love to see ( Move and go to the next person not online ) Sometimes I get home from work and I have over 100 moves to make and it's hard to catch up on my games when players are playing right back.

How about instead of goto next non dark game. Have a goto next game in group option and let us groups our games into several user definable categories.

For example I can create a group called Friends and put all the games I am playing with my frineds in that catagory. It does not need to be automatic as long as we have the ability to move them from category to category.

Actually you can 'set this action as default' by clicking on the little dit square beside it....

This may have been requested before, but is it possible to provide an option to post messages in a fixed width font? This will allow tables and diagrams, including ascii board positions, to be posted.

playBunny: I suspect it would be popular with many web surfers who have no interest in BrainKing ;-)

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".

playBunny: Well, that's a risk.

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

mr. shumway: Just use the dropdown box to select a game that is not dark.

Fencer: By looking at his screen

mr. shumway: How could an opponent see your battleboats setup?

pauloaguia: yes, but that's not what i mean. i want to have a setting similar to "go to the next game" or "go to the next game of this tournament" or whatever, which is able to be the default setting for a while. So then, while i'm playing at the campus next to my fellow students i choose the "go to next nondark" (or similar) as default and from that moment just click the move button to get to the next game withut the risk of letting my opponent see my battleboat setup.

mr. shumway: As a paying member you have the option to have a combobox stating which game you want to go to.

since I use to play sitting next to my opponents often, it would be a great feature to have the option to go to the next game which is not a dark game (dark chess and the battleboats-games), so I don't have to take the trip over the main page always.

Also, PGN files for games on boards other than 8x8, such as Los Alamos Chess, should probably have the starting position specified using the FEN tag.

Beren the 32nd: I agree. I have opponents timing out for the 8-10th time in a row in the same match. A match should be one unit when it comes to timeouts.

I am playing a multi-game match where my opponent has timed out for the second time, this time without making a move. See
http://brainking.com/en/ArchivedGame?g=1296624
I expect he will keep timing out games until the match is over.
So ... I think it would be a good idea for matches to be defaulted if an opponent times out twice in this way.

It would be really nice to program 10x10 checkers with international rules, as proposed by Jolat.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/alemanni/comparison.html

Another suggestion is to have a special web page for a poll vor new games or variants.

It would be nice if the PGN files for chess variants included a tag identifying the variant being played. For example, the PGN file for a game of Berolina Chess should include the line [Variant "Berolina Chess"].

mr. shumway: I know that it is but maybee it was stolen by LUCKY

BIG BAD WOLF: I thought of that myself. Without making a hugely complicated model taking spin into account and just using gravity it would be 50/50 as the pegs would remove the lateral move ment when the piece squezzed between them. In real life spin would have a much greater effect as this would not be entirely removed by the pegs. It would however be altered.

playBunny: I agrea that we may want to play with the odds. I just thought the game up while on a walk as far as I know it does not exist in reality so we would need to figure what makes the game the most fun but also involving some skill.

i'm missing the melmacian flag ;)

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.