[FM75]

My partner and I use a Full Disclosure Convention Card using the web version. (Yes, it is a royal pain to get it there - impossible even, if you have no access to a windows machine and BBOWin.)

I noticed the following day that when I looked at the hands we had played, there were no "alerted" bids. We play precision, so in uncontested auctions, most of our bids have an explanation.

Is this the intended result?
Are some of the explanations too long for the handviewer?
Does it matter whether opponents or kibs are using browser or windows client with respect to seeing the "alerts" during play?

Is there a way, on the web, with an FDCC loaded, to force the alerts/announcements to be visible only to opponents and not your partner?

[brian_m]

FM75, on 2012-August-19, 13:55, said:

My partner and I use a Full Disclosure Convention Card using the web version. (Yes, it is a royal pain to get it there - impossible even, if you have no access to a windows machine and BBOWin.)

Not quite correct. The BBO Windows client will run quite happily via WINE on a Linux system, assuming a couple of simple changes in your BBOVER.INI. For all I know, the same is true for Apple users too.

FM75, on 2012-August-19, 13:55, said:

I noticed the following day that when I looked at the hands we had played, there were no "alerted" bids. We play precision, so in uncontested auctions, most of our bids have an explanation.

Is this the intended result?
Are some of the explanations too long for the handviewer?

I don't know the format in which the hands are stored, but I suspect the problem is that the space for alerts just wasn't allocated, and they're never recorded. I think you may be on a loser as regards storing the explanations, that would have to make the data structure considerably more complex, but it wouldn't seem impossible for BBO to be able to flag an alerted bid in some way without requiring major changes unless the data structure has been really tightly packed (for example, there are a couple of methods out there to store an entire hand as a 128-bit integer - you can't add anything to that sort of format)

FM75, on 2012-August-19, 13:55, said:

Does it matter whether opponents or kibs are using browser or windows client with respect to seeing the "alerts" during play?

The answer to that depends on what system you're playing. There's a particularly nasty bug for opponents using the web client if you're playing a system where the bids vary by seat and vulnerability. I can't remember the details now, as it's been at least a couple of years (look in the FD forum for a thread started by me) but FD DID get it wrong for the system I used to play. Some of our bids were one meaning in 1st and 2nd seat EXCEPT vulnerable against not, and a different meaning otherwise, and we confirmed that our opponents (one using the Windows client, the other the web client) were seeing different explanations - the Windows client saw the correct explanation. I did report this bug, but then Fred (AFAIK) decided that FD wasn't being developed any more, and again AFAIK, it's never been fixed.

FM75, on 2012-August-19, 13:55, said:

Is there a way, on the web, with an FDCC loaded, to force the alerts/announcements to be visible only to opponents and not your partner?

Don't know about the web client (I detest it) but AFAIK using the Windows client, it's down to each user to tweak FD's settings. When I'm playing for real, I have to set FD not to show my alerts or my partner's.

[barmar]

I don't think it has anything to do with space, I think it's just that FD's explanations are not actually treated as alerts. They're just transient displays on the screen. This was probably done because FD explains every bid in the file, whether they're alertable or not.

[brian_m]

barmar, on 2012-August-20, 07:56, said:

I don't think it has anything to do with space, I think it's just that FD's explanations are not actually treated as alerts. They're just transient displays on the screen. This was probably done because FD explains every bid in the file, whether they're alertable or not.

OK, as I said, I don't know the database structure. It would seem to involve a fair amount of overhead if space has been allocated to store all explanations made. Maybe not in these days of terabyte drives, but if Fred and Uday have had the structure set up that way from day 1, all kudos to them.

[FM75]

Ok - pardon the thread drift - maybe I will think about putting Wine on my Mac(s). Seems pretty involved, just to get a couple of bridge programs running...

Anyway back to the questions of the thread. For these two in particular I would like authoritative answers - especially the second. I suppose I could try to arrange several people to test the first question.

Does it matter whether opponents or kibs are using browser or windows client with respect to seeing the "alerts" during play?
Is there a way, on the web, with an FDCC loaded, to force the alerts/announcements to be visible only to opponents and not your partner?

As to alert/announcement - does the FDCC software have alerts and the cards are just wrong, or are alerts just not supported?

[barmar]

None of the options related to automatic display of FD explanations exist in the web version. When designing the web version of BBO, Fred deliberately went with a minimalist approach regarding options (compare the web version's simple options/more options/advanced options with the windows version's options dialogue with about a half dozen tabs, some with more than a dozen options) . And FD is something that never really took off, so options related to it were never a priority.

FD has no notion of alertable versus nonalertable bids. There's a checkbox to say whether a bid is artificial, but nothing to indicate whether it's alertable.

[FM75]

Thank you.