Bernice: But regardless of all that, I think the main point is that no one here HAS to give a confirmed address. If everyone knew that anyone outside the EU didn't have to pay the extra, everyone could just say they lived in any country outside the EU.

So, even if it was true that Americans (or whoever) don't have to pay the "VAT" tax, there is no way currently to prove that you are or are not American (or whoever)

alanback: I asked the same or similar question on 2 January 2008 on this board,but was ignored.....

My understanding is the same as yours....you do NOT have to pay another countries taxes as imposed by them on their own citizens. As I said in my post then....if we do work for someone in the UK for instance they are not and cannot be charged VAT or GST as it is called in Australia...if it a universal tax then that is a different story.

Fencer:  There's no practical difference in any case, since you are (or believe you are) obligated to collect the tax.  As far as I know there is only one kind of VAT in the EU, since the EU regulates it and requires a great deal of conformity throughout.  I know rates and taxable items differ from country to country (within a specified range), but the basic structure is probably the same everywhere in the EU.

alanback: Nope, I am correct, according to my accountant. It's probably a different kind of VAT than you mean, but I don't know the right English word for that.

pauloaguia:  I think you're correct that the problem is one of establishing the residence of the customer.  My colleague also mentioned that. 

I believe that Fencer is incorrect in stating that the tax is imposed on him; in principle it is imposed on the customer, and the business merely collects it.  Businesses pay VAT on their own purchases.  Presumably Fencer pays VAT on the fees charged to him by the company that hosts the site, for example.  He also pays VAT on purchases of computer parts and supplies, etc.  This input VAT paid is creditable against the obligation to pay over VAT collected from customers.  Hence, the VAT is not (in principle, again) borne by businesses, but ultimately by consumers.

I suppose that customers outside the EU might be able to claim a refund of the VAT they pay, but that would hardly be worth the effort.

Fencer: I type to slow... :P

alanback: alanback: Actually, VAT must be taxed for any UE resident, not just Czech Republic. As to residents from other countries, the supplied services takes place where the customer is established. Therefore I think it should be safe to assume that Fencer could charge no VAT for residents outside the UE.

At least I think that's what the European Directives about VAT state (I'm no expert in the area). But then again, Czech Republic may have gone beyond the directives and added some other rules on their own.

The main problem here, I think, is how to prove without a doubt if someone is a UE resident or not? You're just buying an account, there's not even a mailing address envolved. Getting this information from IP address could be a possibility, I think, but it's a rather obscure system (and not even bullet proof, IP addresses can be spoofed)
That's why most (smaller) businesses decide to charge VAT no matter what. They prefer the simplicity of order processing as opposed to any competitive advantage that lower prices could give them. Usually only larger companies, with clients spread out worldwide and a large volume of business go through the trouble of implementing measures to treat their clients according to their geographic residence.

But then again, like I mentioned, I'm no expert on the matter...

alanback: It's a VAT applied to me, not to BrainKing users. It is not important where the particular customer is from (especially where it is not mandatory to fill any personal information to the Profile).

alanback: That makes sense. Any one visiting Canada that buys something with our tax can get that tax refunded back to them by filling out a form. I wondered about that VAT as well.

Since I work in the international tax department of a major accounting firm, I have some experience with VAT issues even though the US is the only major economy that doesn't have one.  The announcement that membership fees would be subject to VAT as of 1 Februrary made me scratch my head a bit.  I have a colleague who recently returned from spending several years working in Prague so I put the question to him.  He believes that in principle the tax should only be imposed on Czech residents.  Obviously there can be a difference between "in principle" and "in practice", but I wonder whether it's worth looking into a bit more closely.  My colleague would be willing to refer Fencer to our Prague office if that would be helpful.

Jim Dandy:LOL! absolutely!   There's a whole list of cool add-on in the Firefox Fellowship.

Eriisa: cool,firefox on steroids

Eriisa: thanks, Ive just added that aswell!

Jim Dandy: no. download the Addon Fasterfox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1269

Hrqls: Well, that's exactly how I understand http://brainking.info/archives/207-Team-ratings-and-new-smileys.html:


"The formula to calculate BKR is the same as for classic BKR for players (so a team must finish at least 4 matches to get a BKR), but instead of game results of team participants, the whole team results are used and they are taken from both team tournaments and simple inter-fellowship team challenges. And although this feature is not fully finished, speaking of integrating to more parts of the site, it already provides BKR graphs with the rating history, and lists of top ratings and positions at the fellowships pages."

I have taken the leap and downloaded FIREFOX.
I'll admit I am experiencing slight improvement regarding site speed,but marginal.Is this as good as it's gonna get?

MadMonkey: i think there was a message about it some time ago .. i think it was me who asked for the change then :)

in real life teams are also rated by their perfomance and not by their current players .. i think it would be logical for brainking to have a similar system .. this way there can be team rankings as well (and not just ratings) .. so we can have a list of teams and how they are doing compared to each other .. in the past there was only a list of signed in teams in team tournaments .. now there is a list which can always be viewed and which is indepenend of the players in the team

but i am not sure yet if its implemented that way .. as i said i didnt check it yet :)

Hrqls, Gordon Shumway & Roberto Silva: Well it would be nice if we could be told how it was worked out now

The last i knew is that Team BKR's were an average of players in the Team, and as was suggested (by rod i think, and i agreed) ages ago that it be changed so it was worked out on Team performance instead

If this is the case lets have more stats & graphs for those that take part in Teams

Still nice to see we can have Teams with no players on, that are rated

WellyWales: i dont know exactly what you mean .. but i guess its a bug you report ? maybe someone else reported it in the bug tracker already .. if it isnt there yet you can best report it there

you can also try to press ctrl-F5 to refresh your page and see if the links work correctly then .. on my old computer my cache sometimes messes up the links

i think the team bkr works the same as a personal bkr .. tme team itself plays matches against other teams and from that gets its bkr points .. just like you would get bkr points from playing matches with other players

i never checked this though :)

Roberto Silva: Exactly! One team match, be it a normal challenge or a match during a tournament, counts as one match for team BKR calculation. And I guess there aren't any team tournaments in which you play less than 4 matches!

MadMonkey: How many matches did the team play in that tournament?

The way I understand it, as long as you played at least 4 matches (not individual players, but team vs. team matches) you would have a BKR.

Gordon Shumway: I still do not get it

We have only played in one Team Tournament, and no Challenge matches

When 'You received a new reply to your post' in PM are the 'Discussion board' link and 'Show context' link the wrong way round ?

Gordon Shumway: Actually it was invented nearly a year ago: http://brainking.info/archives/207-Team-ratings-and-new-smileys.html

MadMonkey: I think it is based on team match and team tournament performance since one of the recent piles of team tournaments started and several improvements to the team system have been made.

Fencer (or anyone who knows lol), where do the BKR's of Teams come from ?

I thought it was an average of the signed on players, but it appears not

I was just asked this question in the Madhouse, and that would have been my answer, as i thought a while ago there was a suggestion which i seconded that Team BKR's should be worked out on Team performance in Tournaments & Challenges Matches (which would make more sense).

Anyway, as i was asked this i thought i would check. Looking at the Madhouse ones, our Anti Chess Team is our highest rated (1806). Now i DO NOT have an Anti Chess Team at present, so it can not be an average of those players as they are not any.

So i looked back at past results, we have not played and Team Challenges, and only played ONE Team Tournament. So i averaged those players that took part in that, and thats not the answer.

So, where does it come from ?

I have checked a couple of other Teams and the same applies, so i guess it applies to all.

Bwild: http://brainking.info/archives/415-Bug-me-anywhere.html

just noticed this insect on my screen....I've concluded it looks like a termite :)
another nice touch, Filip!

Hrqls: I just read that blog entry. Onesimple way to know your UserAgent is simply going to this address: http://whatsmyuseragent.com/
Some people may be infected and not even now about it so, if one of the symptoms for that particular adware is the UserAgent string, that could be a quick way to diagnose it...

Jim Dandy: It's house money so it all goes down on the Super Bowl. lol

My context menu is very small, i havent used it in awhile, but it used to be a lot bigger, I can barley even see it enough to read anymore?

Hrqls: I read the blog,there is no mention of the ability of IE 7's ability to navigete this site.I use IE 7,and from what I have read opinions have changed in regards to this latest release.I also use an adware removal system every time I log on.

Purple: You're still giddy over your playoff winnings

Jim Dandy: In the greatest of all ironies webtv (a traditional problem area) has not been reduced in speed during the last 6 months. Not fast, to be sure, but no slower than always.

Jim Dandy: what i am doing is posting links which fencer posted in his blog .. but which some people might not have noticed because not everyone reads his blog

this last link points to a certain adware which some players have on their computer .. this could be deduced from the statistics from this site (it showed the name of the adware in their user agent) .. read the article at the link or fencers blog at brainking.info for more information about it

i dont know what caused the drop in speed for those people (somehow the speed didnt drop for me) so i dont know if any solution might be a long term solution

at the very least its something that can be tried and by trying you can find out if its a longterm solution or none at all

Hrqls: Let me see if I understand.You are giving links to items that may speed up the site speed.Are these suggestions being made as long term solutions? or just to placate until the site is back to its prior speed.Is the understanding that the site will never return to (or come close to) its prior speed without each player making certain modifications,or has the problem been isolated and in the process of being repaired?
Basically what my question is: Can those who enjoyed this site at its speed (for argument sake) 6 months ago,expect a return to that performance without having to alter their settings or download certain items?

pauloaguia: thats true .. maybe BrainKing was already on the edge of being slow though with all those scripts/queries/whatevers running and this adware just pushed it over the edge for some people

Hrqls: adware could explain slow connections, yes. But in that case the symptoms should be widespread, not related to a particular site. You should start having problems connecting to most other sites, not just this one, like it seems to be happening to most people.

white pages, not loading, got booted ... yadayadayada ...

when you are having speed problems please check Fencers last blog entry

it tells you about FunWebProducts which might have an influence on your speed

to check if you have that piece of adware enter the following line in your address bar of your browser :

javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)

a popup will appear, if it contains the word FunWebProducts then you should look at the page of the bottom of this message for more information

http://www.liamdelahunty.com/tips/fun_web_products.php

TarantinoFan: not sure about liquid being a factor in speed .. but i can imagine that it would have some influence .. he wont be downloading the stats all the time though .. i guess thats an occasional action (about once a year?) so it should be in effect now

Hrqls: Already using the minimal and until tonight no difference. Even stopped my external style to try to minimize the hops between me and server! Doing everything I can to minimize site. Finally tonight after how long??? I get some decent load to play my games.

Well blow me down with a feather. This site is actually running at a halfway decent speed. Still not as good as it used to be but.........................206 players online. 11.07pm DST (Daylight Savings Time) in the Land Down Under (Australia for those you who don't know).

And of course still no answer to my very polite question. There was mention of Liquid downloading stats before and that was slowing the site. Could that have been a problem recently???

TarantinoFan: as said before there are more parts than BrainKing and the users computer .. there is a whole route in between

somewhere down i read that nothing was done about the slow connections .. thats not true : a minimal version of BrainKing has been put online to increase the connection speed for those who have problems

pauloaguia: 5 messages????? Some of my boards have up to 40 or more messages. You want me to reload 8 times just to read my favourite boards? I have 50 per page. I used to have 100 per page but I cut it in half due to the site being slow.

And as long as you and your brother understand "IT IS NOT A BK PROBLEM" It is nothing to do with BK and it must be your server! OK

TarantinoFan: As far as discussion boards go you can adjust the number of messages per page - if you use 5, it should get about the same size as the main page...

As for the speed issues, this issue has arisen in the portuguese board recently as well... just like here, there doesn't seem to be any noticeable pattern for who gets to suffer it and who doesn't. For instance, my brother and I live a mile away from each other, have the same ISP and connection speed. We log in to the site severall times through the day and he's complained of problems every now and then. I've never noticed any particularly slow time... go figure

TarantinoFan: do a google search on aussie sights...there are a lot there, Im sure there would be one for nix.

or2ak.com: No I haven't bought the system mechanic yet. An issue of funds and conversion rates etc. It probably is worth it but I would much prefer to be able to buy it from my own country. Will keep searching and see what I can turn up.

Jim Dandy: Me too. I have been coming in here and only playing enough moves to save me from time out. I shut up over the last couple of days on boards because they take too long to load and the frustration is just not worth it. I got better things to do with my time than wait for a game to load. But I agreed to the challenge of a game with my opponent and don't want to let them down.

As for the future..............time will only tell!

Jim Dandy:Yeah, I still see slowness, but I play most of my games in the evening and the site seems much more responsive.  I just played ~50 games in 20 minutes.  Some things that have helped are the new 'light mode' plus you can turn off both left and right side bars.  This allows you concentrate on your games and just see your fellowships and gunk when you go to the main page.  For me right now, it is livable but there clearly are still site/network issues holding things up.