[barmar]

onoway, on 2017-January-16, 09:42, said:

ok, an example of what I mean. I have a lot of the regular IAC members on friend's list so I can access people I see are free to invite them if I need a sub for a tourney or team match. When I was on web version the other day there were precisely none showing, and when I clicked on Friends or follow, not a name came up. So I logged out and back in with Windows, and about 30 showed up instantly. It's difficult to imagine they all logged in in the two minutes it took for me to change from web to download. So I need to click on two tabs in two different places to find out what is showing automatically on download? That is a perfect, typical example of what drives me crazy about the web version.

That's not supposed to happen, it may have been a temporary glitch. Do you see this regularly?

In fact, for people following lots of players, the web version is better than the download version. The download version has a limit on the size of the friends list, and if you have too many friends than this you may not see them all; you're over the limit. The web version has no such limit.

[Phil]

Last request -

Under the old Windoze client I had purchased many Bridgemaster sets, as well as a few other software packages. These should not be tied to a platform and should be available to me under the new version. If Web version does not have capability to maintain purchased software, perhaps a full or partial refund would be in order?

[barmar]

Phil, on 2017-January-17, 10:27, said:

Last request -

Under the old Windoze client I had purchased many Bridgemaster sets, as well as a few other software packages. These should not be tied to a platform and should be available to me under the new version. If Web version does not have capability to maintain purchased software, perhaps a full or partial refund would be in order?

Rain wrote this a couple of months ago:

Btw anyone who had bought Bridge Master via old client and has now switched to new client just has to ask and we'll add BB$ for use in the new rental system. We've been doing this since 2013 when BM was ported over.

[Oceanss]

Today I was talking to friend of a friend that's trying to adjust to web version, and first time i heard someone confused because there are TWO <Options> buttons; 1 under results and another at the top of the table.
Maybe it wouldn't be bad idea call the latter as "Settings"?

barmar, on 2017-January-17, 10:13, said:

onoway said:

I have a lot of the regular IAC members on friend's list so I can access people I see are free to invite them if I need a sub for a tourney or team match. When I was on web version the other day there were precisely none showing, and when I clicked on Friends or follow, not a name came up.

That's not supposed to happen, it may have been a temporary glitch. Do you see this regularly?
In fact, for people following lots of players, the web version is better than the download version. The download version has a limit on the size of the friends list, and if you have too many friends than this you may not see them all; you're over the limit. The web version has no such limit.

Well, I often suffer from weak connection. And it happens that in web version my friend list won't load, sometimes even gives floating blue message as "Couldn't load friend list" or news feed or alike. And how I used to get around it? By logging thru old window client, that never ever had any problems with connection quality, it counts loged players for some time but then produces friends list, sends messages and joins tables almost without any delay.
As a matter of fact, when one joins table that has played lots of boards, say 70+, in web - if connection isn't great - it may take 3+ mins before u can see pard's profile or bid or click on a card, as takes that time to load all previously played boards. That's not the case of old client, large number of boards delay your action, but only very slighthly, only couple of seconds.

[ylee]

Infidel, on 2016-November-03, 14:05, said:

even if I am the lone voice in the wilderness, I object to the phase out: I have had the opportunity for many years to play with either system, and have "voted with my feet" for the windows version. I have tried the web version only a few times, but each time got frustrated and left it. I fully understand the lack of updates and maintenance, which will eventually render it unusable, but would really like to stay there until the bitter (natural) end, not a unilateral cutoff. I (obviously) will try to make the transition, but it will immeasurably lessen my enjoyment of the site.

You are not a lone voice there are many of us who are upset with the old version being phased out. Rubber only players are not happy. We do not want to play imps most of us have no idea how the scoring or strategy work. To say the least we are very sad.

[onoway]

barmar, on 2017-January-17, 10:13, said:

That's not supposed to happen, it may have been a temporary glitch. Do you see this regularly?

In fact, for people following lots of players, the web version is better than the download version. The download version has a limit on the size of the friends list, and if you have too many friends than this you may not see them all; you're over the limit. The web version has no such limit.

If I just log into the web version and click on friends nobody shows up. Ever. Never have. I have to click on who's online first,then back to friends and then I am allowed to see them. Also, apparently I can only talk to them, I cannot find any way to join their table, right clicking on their name is like throwing sand in the sea, nothing at all happens. So how do people join tables, they have to find out where the the friend is, then go to that area and scroll down to their table to find them?

The web version may have no limit on how many friends it allows, but I can say with absolute confidence that the download version SHOWS more of them than the webversion comes anywhere close to showing. I see it every time I log in on one or the other. I've never counted how many but at least 6 columns will show up purple friends on download. As far as I can tell, there is only room for two columns on webversion. it seemed odd to me that the stuff which should be large,..the size of the table unless you change it, is small and the names of friends, which should be small so as to allow more to show up, are large.

One of our members has written up a "how to" for members who are being booted into the web, she announced tonight that we have that on the website now and she said she instantly got 22 requests for help. I don't know why they aren't accessing the help from BBO, but apparently they either aren't or they are finding it just too complicated for what they are trying to do.

It seems there are lots of features on the web version that you have to be a computer person to access and most of us are not, and more to the point, have no wish to be forced to be. I found by accident how to increase the size of the table, which makes it actually usable,yay! but if I do that to look at pending tourneys, for example, then I cannot change back to the previous screen. Undoubtedly there is some way to do this but it is decidedly not intuitive and I didn't find it, I just logged out eventually.

Also, the arrangement to add co-directors to team matches is simply next to useless. When a match starts, people are not thinking about going back and editting the settings for the match, they are quite reasonably, thinking about the cards, bidding etc. We reminded captains every match and still most of them forgot once there. If you are going to allow for co-directors at all, what on earth is the point of not doing so at the time of setting the matches? Having team match series for groups of players becomes something impossible to offer, really, unless co-directors can be listed. They are not the same as casual random matches.

One thing I have got oodles of complaints about is the kib system and how unhappy people are about not being able EASILLY to see who is kibbing at a table, and having constantly to update the information instead of it being just "there". This is especially a sore point for those of us who are helping out with teaching sessions.

It seems people either don't know about the this thread or are uneasy about complaining, so I end up bringing these things up for them. Sometimes they are very small things: Why, for example, after you delete messages is it necessary to tell us that we have deleted messages, presumably we are aware of that? Having the messages all there at once instead of them coming up one at a time is an advance, so don't mess it up with trying to force us to have a conversation with the program which is both unnecessary and unwanted.

It might possibly be useful to consider having non computer people try out the next edition and see what they think, it should not be necessary to force people into a new system if the system is truly at least as user friendly as the old one was, in whatever form the new one takes. It CAN be done.

I was told that the beta version I saw a million years ago before the web version was released initially was a figment of my imagination, which is/was inexplicable, since I can't even imagine dreaming, awake or asleep, about a computer program. I was quite ready to jump to that one, although it was very different it looked very doable. So it isn't just a reluctance to change or try new things, it's a reluctance to lose the features that make the old one valuable.

[onoway]

ylee, on 2017-January-18, 22:14, said:

You are not a lone voice there are many of us who are upset with the old version being phased out. Rubber only players are not happy. We do not want to play imps most of us have no idea how the scoring or strategy work. To say the least we are very sad.

You might want to check out the Total Points club. The way Total Points works is very similar to rubber bridge in that you are only playing vs the other pair at your table. They run tournament fairly often throughout the day, which consist of a specific number of hands, 8 for the first round, 4 for each subsequent rounds. It is a knockout system, the winners play winners, the losers are out. Players see ongoing scores as the hands are completed. Each round starts fresh.

The scoring is slightly different but the strategies etc are the same as rubber bridge. The difference anywhere else is that the scoring is vs all other players who played that hand anywhere on BBO, or, in tourneys, against all the other tables in the tourney. In Total Points what happens at the other tables has no bearing on the score at your table.

They are a nice bunch there as well.It's a public club so people can just show up before a tourney starts and tell the TD you want to play and who your partner is.Or, you can tell the TD you want to play and need a partner, they will try to get someone who also needs a partner to join you.

The TD assigns pairs to tables with specific opps, you go to those tables, ask to sit, and play as you would anywhere else. The tables are even preset so the only thing the assigned host of the table has to do is let the other assigned players join the table, and report the final score for the round to the TD.

It won't be the same, and they only offer tourneys so not much help if you just want to play for a while, but it's a lot closer than anything else I know about.

[barmar]

onoway, on 2017-January-19, 21:44, said:

If I just log into the web version and click on friends nobody shows up. Ever. Never have. I have to click on who's online first,then back to friends and then I am allowed to see them. Also, apparently I can only talk to them, I cannot find any way to join their table, right clicking on their name is like throwing sand in the sea, nothing at all happens. So how do people join tables, they have to find out where the the friend is, then go to that area and scroll down to their table to find them?

All I can say is that your experience is not typical, something unusual is going on with your setup.

Right click should pop up a menu. But sometimes it seems like I need to do it twice to get the menu to come up.

You can also left click on them to pop up their profile, and there's a "Join Table" button at the bottom of it.

Try a different browser to see if it helps.

[Oceanss]

onoway, on 2017-January-19, 21:44, said:

One of our members has written up a "how to" for members who are being booted into the web, she announced tonight that we have that on the website now and she said she instantly got 22 requests for help. I don't know why they aren't accessing the help from BBO, but apparently they either aren't or they are finding it just too complicated for what they are trying to do.

Altho the "How to.. " was made primarly for IAC members, anyone is free to peek in there and eventually get around basics in web BBO.

Link is: http://iac-at-web-bbo.site123.me/

[onoway]

Setting a tourney last night for this morning, for the first time ever I was unable to see any tourneys that were more than an hour or so further along, so I was unpleasantly surprised to learn I couldn't see it to see if I got the settings right.

Turned out this morning I had inadvertently set the tourney under the wrong name, (under my own instead of BBO_IAC) and had a horde of registrations. It seemed unfair to cancel on them all because of my error so ended up with 41 tables of mostly nonmembers and an hour or so of frantically trying to keep up to the need for clusters of subs mostly for people who weren't getting the scores they wanted for their hand records so abandoning ship. There's no list of banned runners for this profile and there's no need to set completion rates for tourneys restricted to IAC members.

Also, I often announce for tourneys that other people run when I do a daily announcement to the club about the events for the day, I won't be able to do this if I can't see what they've set.

Is this a glitch or something that BBO is deciding to do now?

[diana_eva]

onoway, on 2017-January-21, 16:39, said:

Setting a tourney last night for this morning, for the first time ever I was unable to see any tourneys that were more than an hour or so further along, so I was unpleasantly surprised to learn I couldn't see it to see if I got the settings right.

Turned out this morning I had inadvertently set the tourney under the wrong name, (under my own instead of BBO_IAC) and had a horde of registrations. It seemed unfair to cancel on them all because of my error so ended up with 41 tables of mostly nonmembers and an hour or so of frantically trying to keep up to the need for clusters of subs mostly for people who weren't getting the scores they wanted for their hand records so abandoning ship. There's no list of banned runners for this profile and there's no need to set completion rates for tourneys restricted to IAC members.

Also, I often announce for tourneys that other people run when I do a daily announcement to the club about the events for the day, I won't be able to do this if I can't see what they've set.

Is this a glitch or something that BBO is deciding to do now?

You can see and edit all your tourneys in the Director tab, no matter how far away they are scheduled.

[barmar]

One of the main design goals of the web client was to reduce network use compared to the windows client. One of the ways it does this is by only listing tourneys starting in the next 2 hours, versus multiple days in the old version.

[johnu]

barmar, on 2017-January-22, 22:18, said:

One of the main design goals of the web client was to reduce network use compared to the windows client. One of the ways it does this is by only listing tourneys starting in the next 2 hours, versus multiple days in the old version.

You could always implement an on demand search, maybe filtering by time period. To further limit network traffic, you could limit the number of searches that can be made within a certain period.

[onoway]

diana_eva, on 2017-January-21, 17:17, said:

You can see and edit all your tourneys in the Director tab, no matter how far away they are scheduled.

ah I will have to mention that to the other director ( from another club) who was telling me that she couldn't see her tourneys anymore either. She is on the web version almost exclusively. Thank you

[onoway]

Today in a teaching session the teacher was apparently being booted by BBO fairly constantly, Voice would vanish and he would (eventually) get back and say he had been booted. This happened at least 4 times, once for several minutes.
This is the second teacher who has had this problem, I don't know if both were on laptops or iPhones or what, it seems to be a fairly common problem for people on iPhones.

Also someone today said she had no idea where she was, as when she tried to come to the club she got a not available notification, but somehow ended up there anyway. She could see the table but not the hands. She complained she couldn't hear the voice and I talked her through all the steps to find the settings so I'm positive she was doing stuff right ( eventually )However, when she clicked on start listening all she got was " no service" response. Eventually she understandably left, since she could neither see the play nor hear the commentary.

She is not the first to describe having that problem, in particular getting a not available or some such notice when trying to come to the club. She tried logging out and back in but apparently it didn't help. She was able to chat to me throughout but I was on download with the IAC ID at the time, no idea if that made a difference or not, didn't think to check if she could hear me from the web version. I'm also not positive she was on a mobile device but chances are. She is from the US so a signal should not have been an issue and she apparently had no issues with connections elsewhere on BBO.

[johnjo42]

I was late in learning about the closure of the Windows version and fired a few complaints which some in here called a "knee-jerk" reaction. I accept that criticism but having tried the web version several times, I'm sorry but I don't like it.

It doesn't have the flexibility of the Windows version and today I've discovered that you can't set a partnership bidding table where you can "fix" the hands.
For example my partner and I often practice slam bidding by ensuring that both hands have at least 15 HCP. I can't see how you can do this in the Web version.

[scarletv]

johnjo42, on 2017-February-15, 16:15, said:

For example my partner and I often practice slam bidding by ensuring that both hands have at least 15 HCP. I can't see how you can do this in the Web version.

Practice
Start a bidding table
Start table
Deal source (a button below the green square)
General
North-South HCP
Set your minimum to 15

[1eyedjack]

johnjo42, on 2017-February-15, 16:15, said:

my partner and I often practice slam bidding by ensuring that both hands have at least 15 HCP. I can't see how you can do this in the Web version.

Click on Deal Source after you have set the table. It then allows you to specify among other things point ranges for each hand.

I have not used the partnership bidding facility in either format to any extent, so I am not one to judge, but I get the impression from posts in the forum that the flexibility is somewhat greater in this area in the web version than in the download version, particularly if you have Hans van Staveren's "Dealer" program. But I could be off here.

[barmar]

1eyedjack, on 2017-February-15, 17:01, said:

I have not used the partnership bidding facility in either format to any extent, so I am not one to judge, but I get the impression from posts in the forum that the flexibility is somewhat greater in this area in the web version than in the download version, particularly if you have Hans van Staveren's "Dealer" program. But I could be off here.

The Dealer program is built into it in the web version. The "Advanced" tab in the Deal Source window allows you to paste in the Dealer input file.

[wjacobusse]

Infidel, on 2016-November-03, 14:05, said:

even if I am the lone voice in the wilderness, I object to the phase out: I have had the opportunity for many years to play with either system, and have "voted with my feet" for the windows version. I have tried the web version only a few times, but each time got frustrated and left it. I fully understand the lack of updates and maintenance, which will eventually render it unusable, but would really like to stay there until the bitter (natural) end, not a unilateral cutoff. I (obviously) will try to make the transition, but it will immeasurably lessen my enjoyment of the site.

You are not a lone voice at all, I totally agree with you!!! To top it off the arguments I have seen make no sense at all. This is 2017 and we are forced to use a flash version??? Imho that's at least 2 steps backward instead of forward. Just in case somebody missed the anouncements, most browsers dont even support flash anymore!