Table Idle time, timing out and closing dead tables
Posted:
May 20, 2009, 3:18 PM
I think Pente.org is a fantastic site, and it just cant be said often enough what a great job dweebo has done and what a terrific service he has given us all here. Thanks Dweebo!
In this spirit I would like to play my little part in making suggestions for future enhancements. Here is one for your consideration.
I find it is a common thing to find tables with one player in there but after saying 'Hi' and waiting for a bit, you realise they aren't there and you leave the table. This is a fairly trivial thing I know, but it does happen a lot to me, as I do log on in the evening from Australia and not many people are online and most of these have presumably left their machines on and gone off to bed. There is almost always one or more dead tables.
I know the easy way to get around this is to either not jump onto tables with just one name listed (particularly late at night) or if you do jump in, to give it 10 seconds maximum and then leave. But the problem with this is that sometimes the player is there and active and someone else just left the table. So a policy of not jumping onto tables is not that good.
I could simply choose to always create my own table and invite the person who is on the table that I am deciding not to jump onto, but that's even more effort and you are still left waiting for a reply.
My suggestion therefore is to have an idle time display on the main room against each table. The idle timer would represent the seconds/minutes that have transpired since the last activity of any kind at the table (pente move, text comment, button click, or player exiting or entering). Further, after say 41 minutes (typical game time plus 1 minute) time has elapsed the table is closed by the system and removed from the list.
An alternative to a timer count being displayed one each of the games listed in the current game list, particularly is space to display is a concern, might be that the word "Table 3" for example is displayed as red text if no activity has occurred for some time such as say 20 minutes, and then as before, the table is close by the system after a certain idle period has elapsed.
Apologies if this one has been covered before somewhere.
