[DougOut]

Instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the current method:
allow the other 3 players to cast a vote to kick the host off of the table.
When the host becomes unresponsive, it is very annoying, and all that is left is to leave and have a continuous stream of players coming to the table and figuring out that it is dead.

Very simple interface: West has started a vote to boot the host: Agree or disagree? As soon as someone disagrees then the vote is canceled. Note that there is no reason to prevent the host from having a vote, this is intended for when the host is non-responsive. If 2 people agree (for a total of 3) then boot the host.
If the vote is canceled then the person who started the vote should probably be prevented from starting another vote for a few minutes.

[steve2005]

Yes even more annoying if you get sent back to the same table. Yes i agree this should be done.

[Echognome]

Or better yet, have a timeout for any host who is inactive for more than X minutes. No voting involved. Even in that scenario, you do not have to kick the player off the table. Rather just change the host to the next most senior player at the table (which may be the partner of the original host). I do not know the best setting for X, but I'm sure that can be reasonably generous too.

[babalu1997]

Echognome, on 2011-February-22, 14:43, said:

Or better yet, have a timeout for any host who is inactive for more than X minutes. No voting involved. Even in that scenario, you do not have to kick the player off the table. Rather just change the host to the next most senior player at the table (which may be the partner of the original host). I do not know the best setting for X, but I'm sure that can be reasonably generous too.

problem with this is that the chat rooms are gone from the web version

sometimes people open a table to chat and not play

[Bbradley62]

babalu1997, on 2011-February-22, 15:28, said:

problem with this is that the chat rooms are gone from the web version

sometimes people open a table to chat and not play

Why is this a problem? Does it matter who the host is if the table is simply for chat? This most recent suggestion stipulated that no one was removed from the table, so all chat continues.

[Rain]

Inactive hosts are kicked automatically right now. It's just that to be sure we are actually kicking an inactive host, there needs to be a relatively long period of inactivity.

Voting is not easy to implement, so we must think along the lines of other solutions. Suggestions welcome always.

[Echognome]

I'm so good at reinventing the wheel...

[Bbradley62]

Rain, on 2011-February-23, 11:42, said:

Inactive hosts are kicked automatically right now. It's just that to be sure we are actually kicking an inactive host, there needs to be a relatively long period of inactivity.

How is inactivity currently measured? If my partner declares a hand painfully slowly and I don't touch the keyboard for 10 minutes, I hope that time is not counted against me. But, when it's my turn to act, I would think that 2 minutes is sufficient. I like Echonome's suggestion that hosting rights should simply transfer to the next person and the inactive host would not be removed. This way, if the host has excused himself to answer the doorbell, the others can wait for him, but someone who has simply disappeared can be booted by the new host. While we're talking about transferring hosting rights, I'd like to repeat a previous suggestion of mine, which is to allow a host to transfer hosting rights to the next person without leaving the table, since some people simply don't want to host.

[Rain]

As I understand it, the problem is that the old BBO version is very rigid and inflexible. That's why we can't implement many changes, or have had to restrict visibly different stuff (client changes) to new BBO only. That would explain why voting is very hard to do, hence not possible.

I think hosting rights transfer choice is not possible also because of the reason above - unless it's somehow restrictable to new BBO version, which is hard to do because of the intermingling of the 2 versions. This is because having to choose to transfer means it has to be visible in client somehow.

• Automatically transferring is possible.
  
• Automatically kicking is possible (currently done). I don't know specific details, but it's not a straightforward measurement of inactivity like Express tourney (Express is 60 sec before kicked).

We can choose to go either routes, and are actually thinking of improving this logic right now. So this topic came up at the perfect time.
I imagine auto kicking is better than auto transferring, because it involves a logic improvement of something already in place. Also, it seems to save the new host 1 step.