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Yes, it speeds up the process of finding a potential pair of opponents, because it immediately shows if a team has any players within the desired range of ratings, as opposed to looking thru the list of players for a team.
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Using the Tool
I was doing it the old way to get a feel for how much time that was going to take versus how much time I might save with the Tapanis tool. Oh man the tool is awesome! So awesome.
WAY better than my cumbersome old way--and I'm confident it cannot entail more server load as I will open player pages to the same team multiple times--almost as many times as I open player pages with team ratings who are not on any team, or are not available for a match.
SO much better!
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Old vs. New
My old way shows lots of teams, but there is a LOT of bandwidth waste as I summon so many players who aren't even on teams. I have complained about the lack of team filter on the advanced player search bar many times--on deaf ears. No response to that recommendation.
So with the Tapanis method you must select the team and it displays all potential matches. I like it a lot as it shows everything--things I would have easily overlooked. The drawback is that you only get to pick one team at a time. The players you WANT to find matches for might not have any for the first dozen teams you select.
That is fine--pick ALL available team mates you would be willing to give games. Their active games display on the match bar. Scroll down through the list and set up those you want. It is really slick! When you have enough games for your favorite players pluck them off the challenge list and run against more teams.
There are about 50 fewer teams now than there were this time four years ago. 176 to 228.
Oh--a (very minor) recommendation. I tried to pit my guys against a team where only two hits came up--both for the same opposing player. In other words, there isn't really any match. In that case I would suggest the color on the bar be pink instead of yellow, whether one of my guys against two different opposing players or the same one of theirs against two or more of mine. If either side has only one repeated entry (or only one entry) there isn't really any match.
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COVID-19
My wife, Lily (queenforaknight) asked me whether gameknot has prepared for the worldwide corona virus outbreak. At a minimum, we think that suspending the timeout rules would be appropriate.
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An addenum
This is a relevant question because a number of gameknot players may rely on publicly available computers in libraries, schools and work places. They may no longer have access to these resources.
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On the flip side
If a player is healthy and in a lockdown situation, and has access to a computer and the net, then there is no excuse for timing out.
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But what if...
the person does not have access to a personal computer? I have no data, but I think it is quite possible that some members of gameknot rely upon publicly available computers to play.
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Put it into context!
Timing out isn't the end of the world!
Surely people in lockdown have more important things to worry about than timing out a chess game!
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What are we saying here ? The virus is adapting and hacking into our personal computers adapting to "byte" us
Tricking us and Infecting our cookies obviously to give us a better experience ?
I know I shouldn't joke about this , I'm pretty wound up half expecting to catch this thing , I expect things are going to get worse
Michael you are right we have a player on our team currently playing from a library and some people may still only play at work ( on breaks of course) it still happens , right now libraries are still open in the UK but the situation is changing daily it's the people in denial i worry about
To be honest if I go into voluntary lockdown I maybe glad of GK , better than watching a ticking clock waiting to get worse... 😥
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Not quite sure...
why people are making so light of this? Clearly, timing out on gameknot is not the end of the world. But why can't gameknot do its little bit, even if it is only symbolic? The single greatest problem facing our world is selfishness and self-absorption. I do not think that gameknot should contribute to that mindset.
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Like everything else surely relaxing the rules is open to abuse, one scenario is a player who is limited to a minimal number of games cannot play because none of his opponents are moving.
At the moment his opponents would time out eventually thus freeing up his playing capacity to start more games, if timeouts were suspended you could have a situation where a player needs to resign a winning game in order to start more games.
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TIMEOUTS
I have a simple solution for timeouts. I pair players who have timed out at their timeout rating (almost). That is only fair, after all. I do allow one timeout without penalty. My policy has caused me problems in the past because some players have timed out at a high rating, so it is difficult for them to reach that rating again. I usually let those players go from the team, and am sorry that I felt I had to do that. I do sometimes see one of my previous players on another team. I have two people on my team who have timed out and have not responded to my messages to them. I have not and will not pair them until I know what is going on with them.
I did write GameKnot once and asked them if they would delete all timeouts from players records if the timeouts were three or more years old. I did not receive a response to that, or perhaps it being referred to the "Development Committee".
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I think everybody is taking this virus seriously
Rather than change the rules on timeouts maybe we could have an extension of the emergency postponement rules , more than the current once every 4 months ,
however I suspect both ideas would take a bit of work development and a little downtime making both unfeasible, and for all we know people at GK are also affected
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I didn't know that one could get an emergency postponement once every four months. Are you sure you are correct there, Neil? (amacivn). When my players have timed out, they usually don't get their games postponed. I know we can have an emergency timeout once a year.
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Shirley
'5-day emergency postponement will be automatically triggered if one of your games is about to time out, unless: a) another emergency postponement was triggered for your account less than 1 year ago (4 months for premium subscribers ) '
Members get the option once every 4 months , 12 months for non members , it came in handy for me at the beginning of January and extended my postponed matches due to illness
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Thanks, Neil.
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Emergency timeouts
I think Neil's idea of extending emergency timeouts is a very good idea. They can remain at five days but be automatically renewable for both premium and non-premium members. It seems that this would be a relatively easy fix for gameknot. The notion that somebody would use this unscrupulously is surely less of a threat than that of people can staying home from work if they self-quarantine because of exposure to corona virus or because their place of work is closed down.
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Virus - Health - Safety
Good Morning to all Captains and all team members,
i hope all of you are healthy, your families and relatives are healthy and being taken care of.
Please follow the best possible medical/safety procedures and don't panic.
Compared to all the sports that have been cancelled, so far ours is lucky. This may provide some of us with a bit more sanity and calmness.
Please stay safe and ready for tomorrow.
-Ed
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Thank you, dear Edward.
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What Gives?
Tapanis, I wanted to arrange matches for my guy Micky Maus, who has not been on in 2 days and 5 hours but is still green to go.
Your program doesn't list him in the mates. Why is he being skipped?
Other than that I love the way it works. Again--brilliant!
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I think, myself, that if a player is 3 days per move, GameKnot won't allow the game because the system assumes that the player will not be online to play in 3 days. That is my guess. It will be interesting to see what Tapani says. I have sometimes received a notice from GameKnot saying that the player has not been online for 2 days.
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PS to above post. Micky's signal is now off for new games.
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My program is not in real time. This might cause some delay in listing. It loads team data to a text file and uses this until it is updated. Data file age is shown next to a team. I had to change it this way to minimize load to the GK-server.
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My Bad
The screen I had was older than the Tapanis data. Micky came off as it was over two days. Once he clocked back in he was green again. Tapanis was working fine--I was in the wrong.
Just wanted to clear this up.
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You are clever, Tapani.
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For Tapanis
Hi Tapani,
I hope you know from my earlier posts that I'm an ardent fan of your program! It has saved me many hours of scanning team rosters, and a lot of eyestrain.
Many teams, especially those higher on the ladder, prefer a +/- 50 difference on players' 90-day AVERAGE ratings. In some future version of the program, would it be much effort to add a control for this, similar to the existing one for current rating?
Another very useful feature for me would be the ability to limit an opponent's average time per move. Ideally, there'd be a control where I could pick the maximum difference between opponents' values and ours. But the ability to set a max acceptable average time per move would work too.
Again, thanks. Best Regards,
- Dave
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No 90
The Tapanis program has no way to scrape 90 day highs. It is unfortunate GK does not simply include this on the team screen.
I would like to also see prior year high and all time high, but the cool thing is the team link is available so you can pop the team into a new tab and look at the players.
For high rated players I still have to winnow the old way, just to find teams, but then I pass those teams to the Tapanis program. So it really works great--it is a hit with me!
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These are the changes Gameknot could do with the advanced player search. Team Captain input
about relevant statistics could be built in, like 90 day rating, 9 day average, etc.
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For Lord_Shiva
Interestingly, but not to disagree with your experience, I find Tapanis' program faster than the old way - I just hit the NEXT button till an acceptable match appears.
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