"GERRY": Try The One and Only Flame Pit
They all seem to accumulate down there

Fencer: Sorry, can't do that from here (work), the firewall won't let me through. I can use a browser, but that's it. I can't even ping a server.

Somewhat slow today
I mean really slow
way beyond turtle
snail is fast by comparison
I'd say approaching Cardinal speed

alexlee: It wouldn't, but the team-t haven't been around that long.

pedestrian: Ok, got it. I need to click running, then again show.

To answer my origninal question, the longest running seems to be this one: ► ALL Checkers for dummies (under 1500 + urated)◄ started in July 2003.

I was trying to find the longest running tournament on BK.

The only method I see is tournaments, select "running" and go to the last, only it doesn't seem to work. If I do that I see only 348 running tournaments and as earliest something that started late last year. That can't be right, with all the zillions created each day and the turtles happily subscribing to each and never moving. I myself have a running one that started in 2007. Anyone know how to go about it?

Asking Fencer is of course a possibility, but the info should already be there somehow.

Mélusine: K and W are a pain, X and Y slightly less, Z is overrated since verb conjugation is permitted which makes the 'ez' suffix legal.

coan.net: It's not only the dictionary that is different in the various languages, it's also the distribution of the letters and the value in points of each. I think the only common thing for all languages is the board layout, but I can be wrong here.

Snoopy: There was an idiot a couple of months ago who amused himself by excreting rubbish all over the place: DBs, poker tables, PMs and walls. Luckily for most of the users he (she?) did it only in French.

As a mod of the French board I kicked him out, then repeated the exercise whenever he popped back using a fresh alias. He finally got bored and vaporized away.

Take it philosophically. The only way to avoid such trolls is by stopping to use the web.

Bwild: In my humble opinion, losing time is the least of your worries in this game :)

Artful Dodger: If, by any chance, you run across my Cardinal, I'd advise to keep a Black rook in reserve. One lifetime won't be enough

I think a certain Cardinal will be most distressed

beach: Here's a simple, logical explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_warp_%28science_fiction%29

AbigailII: You posted earlier about the problem of removing a person from ALL your tourneys. contact MadMonkey, I'm sure he can whip up a script to help you do that automatically.

Pedro Martínez: We should start to see his games timing out tomorrow. Currently Gammonator has some 20 games with the lady, all scheduled to time out within a week or so.

One game which is stretching things a bit is Behemoth Chess (angelstar vs. Gammonator) Started yesterday, angelstar to move. It says

start time 6. March 2010, 20:40:57

Time per move (?): 5 days 5 hours, standard vacation (16. March 2010, 01:40:57 is the last term before timeout for this move)

I've never quite understood how a 5-day game can have a timeout set 10 days ahead with only weekend days, and ok, an extra day to compensate potential timezones. Something is wrong there, but that has been around for a long time and will hopefully go away with the next version.

MadMonkey: Ha! your turtle is just an amateur. You have already 9 finished games. Now look at mine. Now there's a real grandmaster for you!

MadMonkey: Play Cloning Gammon for a prize. has been going on strong since 15. January 2007, 20:05:23 (it's a good thing BK gives the exact second),

Happy 3rd birthday! round 1 still has some happy decades before it can start to think about retirement. My own retirement will surely come first.

DO NOT DISTURB! MASTER TURTLES HARD AT WORK!!!

Pedro Martínez: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Mart%C3%ADnez

SL-Mark: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/

Bernice: This is, of course, valid only for those users who entered their own country and not Upper Nonsensstan, just to have a pretty flag :)

MadMonkey: Thanks! I knew they had one, but forgot how to access it.

MadMonkey: I hope not, I'd hate to play on brainking with facebook's page loading time.

Pioneer54: The address is Fencer. And please DO complain. there has been a lot of that lately.

The ponds are overdue.
Devil Rays Pummel The Brewers 8-2
1h 47mins

Artful Dodger: Al Gore invented global warming, not the internet.

Fencer: BKR should be right for the soup, you don't expect the same BKR order for different games. Just add a touch of random to add salt.

Snoopy: At least the BKR is keeping it's sanity.

Snoopy: Fencer: add an achievement point for the most pointless cheat?

The speed seems fine, today. How long will the no-timeout period last?

gogul: No, it's not French. Look elsewhere.

Correction: even when I refresh manually (F5), I stay stuck at "waiting for i.brainking.com". I succeed in loading only if I click on "Main page". I'm not sure if the browser talks to 'i.brainking" when clicking on "Main page".

I have trouble with the refresh: after a couple of good refreshes of the main page, I get one that stops at "connecting to i.brainking.com", The firefox "loading" symbol for the tab just continues to spin and nothing happens. If I stop and refresh manually, the load terminates correctly. I have this behaviour on both windows and linux with FF 2.5.2. Anyone else?

Czuch: Then you probably never will, either :)

Czuch: hear hear

Fencer: Better not name it 3.0, all releases named 3.0 tend to have so many bugs in them they have to be followed up by a 3.1 soon after. Notable examples are MS word, MS windows, Firefox. If I were a release manager I'd treat a 3.0 as a 13th floor, something to be jumped over

AbigailII: Right. divide again by 8.

Herlock Sholmes:
the right formula is 64! / ((8!)^8) = 1,816572393163080675696402792818e+52 which is still more than the amount of cents I have in my bank account.

There's something I really detest: You get a winning position against an opponent, you know you won, he knows you won, and instead of pressing the resign link he lets the time run out. Now that's asocial behaviour!

Mostly random number generators are fair and pass every statistics test. The problem is that the generator has to be initialized somehow. After all, this is done by a computer. However complex the calculation, if you start with the same data you end with the same results, in this case the same "random" sequence. So what is mostly done is to initialise the generator by reading the system clock. Which works fine, provided you do it only once, maybe at system boot, and not game by game. I'm only guessing as to what might have happened, I have no idea how things are implemented here.

The fact is that two games are identical, which statistically is totally impossible.

ChessVariant: maybe they got created in the same split second and got the same seed for the random generator. I agree, it shouldn't happen.

I should have played the euro millions lottery, The odds would have been far better...

I created a bunch of 4 chess massacres, look at the starting positions of these two:
Massacre Chess (rabbitoid vs. mangue)
Massacre Chess (rabbitoid vs. Luciano672)

Fencer: Just for info: how long did an average paypal transaction take for BK? I ask, because the last time I renewed with paypal (during the easter egg) it was less than a minute between the final click on paypal and the confirmation on BK. I take it that it usually takes a bit longer?

alanback: My ears belong to another species... What's up, doc?

Whatever

Dark Prince: Actually, you learn all about the red bullet in the new Star Trek movie :)

pedestrian: And while we're at it: the system permits to delete without BKR penalty until move 4. With obvious consequences.

Fencer: Some achievement ideas
have 1000, 5000, etc started games and ALL in state of "Opponent's turn"
have 1000 etc games, all in state of "your move", under 1 day timeout, and less than 24 hours later move in all.

Fencer: Well, at least until the next smart invention...
I'll watch my turtle. Thanks!

One thing I would not like Fencer to do is fix something in a hurry. No offence, Paulo, but I know from my programming experience that "simple" solutions tend to hide side effects which often prove worse than the thing they try to fix. Especially with delicate algorithms such as timeout calculation which are bound to have an effect on a large amount of the software.

This problem has been with us for a while and a couple of days or months, whatever it takes, won't make a difference.

This goes to show how many people read the bug board
Well, I don't either, so I wasn't aware of it.
It's not quite the same, though: what I described doesn't need an opponent moving at all. It's a system to have a perpetual vacation.
I Don't know what's the solution, since I don't know how Fencer implemented the vacation / timeout system.