[uday]

Hey there,
I know it's about time this happened . There are going to be quite a few changes to this now that it's up, but we've crossed a major milestone.

This is the second form of the Forums which thanks to all of you have been vastly successful over the last few months. The Invision package is far more powerful than the YaBB package we moved away from and is going to mean we can do many new things with the Forums that simply wouldn't have been possible, such as private forums and in support of the upcoming changes regarding fee-based services on Bridge Base (such as pay-for-private forums, etc.).

All passwords with standard characters should continue to work, but if you use non-standard characters in your password you may need to reset it.

Many language settings have also been lost in the move - it was a necessary sacrifice. Also most of the polls did not make it either due to database corruption (another reason for the move!).

Feel free to play with the new functions we have to offer - I assure you the experience here will be better than on the old forums, and I will do my best on the limited time I have available to dedicate to BB to making them better.

Take care,
John

[ack_hh]

any chance for a 24hr time format (w/o am/pm)?

[Mike]

Heureka! Finally the Forum has been revitalized. Thanks Uday. But that is only the framework. I hope the contents will be revitalized, too.

The most important would be if the immens membership of BBO would make some noise here. Otherwise it is just like rgb most of the time, exibition of outrgrown egos and I am quite bored with the "expert" posters.

By the way the qualification of poster persons by the number of something they usually post is a terribly negative factor. It will continue to discourage people to come up with real world subjects. Make quality from quantity sounds familiar .....

[inquiry]

Hi Mike,

The new format is definately nice. While we all have a lot to thank UDAY for, but the thanks for the new site is better directed to the BBF administator, John Tuttle (whose nick is skrshawk).

As for you comments about the BBF.

1) Yes it would be great if more of the nearly 100,000 registered users of BBO gaming site posted here. We should all try to encourage others to join and become active posters, I know I do.

2) Your comments about "expert" posters and number of post miss the point of the classification of "expert poster" and "novice posters". This has nothing to do with bridge skill levels, but instead is just as you said, a reflection of the number of post the person has made. In fact, many of the expert and a few of the world class posters here are self-identified bridge beginners. They use this forum as an opporutunity to seek advise on issues of bridge. And many of the "novice posters" are world class bridge players who drop in and offer a piece of great bridge advice from time-to-time.

Without the "expert" and "advanced" posters there would be very little content here. For instance, as of right now, the top 30 posters account for 73.3% of all the post, the top 20% of posters for 62.5%, and the top 10 for 45.6%. So while it can be tiresome to hear from the same people so much, it is even more tiresome to click on a forum where no one is posting anything. Which brings us to your last point...

3) Everyone hopes the BBF will not become like rgb. But rest assured, the BBF at least will not become like rgb at least in some very key ways, because post that are overly harsh, attempt to humilate another person, or obsenity filled will be deleted, edit, and the offender warned, suspended or banned. We even have sub-forums. You only interestediin SAYC and 2/1? Don't even look at the unusual system forum. You too good to be bothered with beginner stuff? Ignore the Beginner/Intermediate forum. Don't like post by me or some of the other posters you are tired of? The names of the poster are right up front, skip over them. Find a poster you like, click on his/her name and read all their post (if they have a lot of post, stop the search after a few seconds, you will get the latest post by that person).

Ben

[Mike]

Hi Ben and John,

First apology, I thought this site is revitalized by one person, so the applauds shall go home to the whole trupp.

Second is much less kind. BBO has successfully avoided any given rating system, thanks to Fred. Bring it back on the back door like this here will help that 73 something % will grow near 100% and you will go well under rgb level which is still at least a democratic forum!

Even self rating is totally meaningless as we can see on BBO in life. Why that new forum should keep an old mistake which is good for nothing, I can not understand. I put it into the same basket as humans has no limits to fall into the same trap again and again

Mike

[skrshawk]

Mike,
I'm not sure what you mean by a rating system on the back door. Is it the things like "Novice poster", "intermediate poster", etc.? If so, those have nothing to do with a person's bridge ability - they are simply titles that denote now many posts a person has contributed to the forums over the course of their history.

The idea of ratings is one that will probably exist as long as BBO does, but I'm still content with no permanent public ratings on the service. They are available for anyone who really wants to know and that's good enough for me.

Take care,
John

[Willem]

[QUOTE]Bring it back on the back door like this here will help that 73 something % will grow near 100% and you will go well under rgb level which is still at least a democratic forum!
[/QUOTE]) Everyone hopes the BBF will not become like rgb....
[/QUOTE]Otherwise it is just like rgb most of the time, ....

I think this may be a stupid question, but can anyone please tell me what "rgb" means?

Thx, Willem

[inquiry]

hi... there are no stupid questions. RGB stands for a newsgroup called rec.games.bridge. You can register to it like any ohter news group or you can use google to see it. This is a google linke to it....

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=rec.game...G=Google+Search

But to be honest... why go there when BBF is so much better...

[mishovnbg]

Hi all!
I don't know what is the "powers" of new forum, but many of advantages of old forum are missing (like 24 hours time format) and nothing usefull for posting bridge here, only same stupid smiles . Instead of them is much more usefull to have bridge symbols and abbreviations, as was wrote in discussion about new forum.
;;; - not so hard, if sombody like to think about posters, not about "powers"?
Misho

[luis]

Personally I don't like the new software. Text formatting was easier using the old software and the box showing the last 5 posts was what I used most to see if something interesting that I may want to read and comment appears. I only needed to refresh the home page for that, now I have to use an "assistant" that opens a horrible popup and then I really don't know how can I see things that are NEW for my session. Then close the popup, the browser is reloaded, it's really a complete disaster.

What was wrong with the old software? You were able to post/read/comment, etc? What else would you want in this phorum ?
If there's a chance to go back to the old software it has my vote, if not I think I will just have to disappear :-(

[Free]

I also don't like it that much, but maybe when using it after a while I start to like it. I personally don't see the problem with the old forum: it always showed up, worked just fine, the little box with the last 5 posts was great, if you don't read all posts of some group, it didn't say you have unread messages,...

Free

[inquiry]

Formatting text in the old forum is really not all that easier than here. Simply type alt+p and hit enter. Delete the word "undefined" and type however many lines of text you want between the the two code tags. It would be nice if you could just change to courier font and the spaces would remain.

As for the my assistant, it really works better than the old "last ten" or five most recent (unless you come only once a day). For instance, using it this morning, I found 14 new post since I last logged on. The old way would have shown me 5 or 10. Try this. Go to the bottom of the first screen, mark all post as read. Now the assistant can be used to find any new post.

Anyway, what makes a forum great isn't the software but rather the people. We would sure hate to lose you luis (how else will I find tricks like simple tsar)? So please give it chance. It will take a while to get use to... I like to enter a) and c) and d) when itemizing things, but if you use a b in such a list you get this instead of b ) without the space. Arghhhh... We will learn the tricks soon enough. You can avoid the problem with the b ) simply by removing the check by the Enable emotiocons as a post option, for instance.

The new software does have some nice new abilities: Private forums, the assistant you don't like, the ability to quickly find your last 10 post (and then see if anyone replied to them), The ability to sort post forward or backward, or by author or by date range. You can use this date range to find all post in say, last five days, look at them, then mark all post as read so you can use the assistant more effectively if you like. Perhpas over time more features will be added, especially if we offer useful suggestions, like the 24 hour clock and the need for easier text formating. Like find the file with the smiley emoticons and replace a few of them with a GIF for hearts, spades, diamonds and clubs. Allow fix spaced fonts so the "code" command doesn't have to be used to get text looking right for hand layout, maybe even enable HTML-tagged tables.

Ben

[Gerardo]

§¨©ª

Testing the symbol font.

Still cumbersome to get the right characters.
I used the Character Map for this test.

The characters in a normal font are:

§¨©ª

[font=Symbol]
[color=green]§[/color]
[color=orange]¨[/color]
[color=red]©[/color]
[color=blue]ª[/color]
[/font]

Any font works, not only the listed ones.
If you use Mozilla or derivatives as your browser you won't see this,
as Mozilla doesn't show the Symbol font on strict adherence to the standards.
See Enabling Symbol font for Mozilla on Windows and/or Enabling Symbol Fonts in Browsers under X

[Gerardo]

• One: Test of
  
• Two: the List
  
• Three: Tag

[inquiry]

Gerardo, on Jan 8 2004, 11:03 AM, said:

§¨©ª

Testing the symbol font.

Still cumbersome to get the right characters.
I used the Character Map for this test

It is neet that you used a font that was not in the list of "fonts" from the code buttons (the symbol font). Maybe if we could find an easy no-printing character for a "space" we might solve the hand layout problem ...but entering tags for each character (switch to symbol font tag, the character for the font you want, close font tag...type a few cards, then do all over again, would be a pain. Better if we could just find the little GIF for the clickable smilies to the left and switch out four of them. Then the symbols would be one click away. That would be

[Erkson]

luis, on Jan 8 2004, 12:42 PM, said:

the box showing the last 5 posts was what I used most to see if something interesting that I may want to read and comment appears.

I prefer the "View new posts" of the newer software. It searches and lists all new posts since one's last connection.

For me it is much better than the "View last 5 posts" or "View last 10 posts" of the older software. My impression is that with the older software a post anterior to the last 10 had very low probability to be read.

Erkson

[Gerardo]

Agree. However, I just opened the FONT tag, and modified the font.
I'd prefer a global text replacement, if that is possible, like

:he: replaced by "[FONT=Symbol][COLOR=red]©[/COLOR][/FONT]"

that way, you can treat them just as text


1©


2©


3©


4©

[Gerardo]

About hand formatting:
There is a way. This forums has a template facility which can be (and is, in another site), used for that purpose.
I never saw the final result, as it doesn't work on Mozilla, but we could implement a similar thing.
It could be very nice if you can feed such template with a LIN file, for example.

[inquiry]

Gerardo, on Jan 8 2004, 01:05 PM, said:

About hand formatting:
    There is a way. This forums has a template facility which can be (and is, in another site), used for that purpose.
    I never saw the final result, as it doesn't work on Mozilla, but we could implement a similar thing.
    It could be very nice if you can feed such template with a LIN file, for example.

I think I know the site you are talking abou.t that is based upon this same software. They have done a few things we would like to see here... for one thing, they have replaced a number of the smiles with nice, large bridge symbols. For another, they do have a template for inputing hands just like you suggest that allow really nice display of one hand, two hands, or all four hands, complete with a green table square with positions marked in white.

When using the template, you create html table code that you then cut and paste into the body of the text you want. Sadly, for some reason the html code doesn't work on this site (maybe what code that is allowed is adjustable and it is turned off). Thus, I would like to think that we should be able to have similar things happen here in this forum at sometime in the future, but this is really way beyond my abiliity to know if it would be tecnically feasible or not given the design of our current pages (maybe private forums wouldn't work or something if table code allowed, etc).

Ben

[Gerardo]

I installed my own version of the forums to study how it works.

• Put clock in 24 hour format, my favorite, but it is a global setting in this sofware, at least in current version
  
• About suit creation, there is a badwords list, which can be used for this. Problem is, it has to be parsed again, and currently, it isn't. Working on it.
  
• Templates: no time to look at them yet.
  
• Strangely, I see the spaces I type in the published posts in my version. Not here.