[fred]

Our plan is to release a new version of BBO for the general
membership sometime between Friday and Sunday. The new
version will automatically download and install itself when
people log in to BBO.

First a messages for our translators: Please have a look at the
state of your translations and make the changes that you want
to see appear in the next version. This version has some new
words and sentences that need translations.

The version we are hoping to relase is 3.8.3. You can update
your BBO to 3.8.3:

www.bridgebase.com/beta383/bbo_update.exe

or download everything (including the latest files):

www.bridgebase.com/beta383/bbo_setup.exe

I suggest you use the first method, but however you choose to
do this, please make sure you exit the BBO program
COMPLETELY before you start download process.

If you have seen 3.8.2, you will not see much in the way
of changes in 3.8.3. Still, I would help us if you would try
3.8.3 and let me know if you find any problems.

At the end of this post you will find a description of what was
new in 3.8.2.

We would really appreciate it if lots of our members gave
3.8.3 a good solid workout. It is not much fun when we
initiate the "autoupgrade" procedure and then find a serious
problem in the version we just inflicted on our members.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to try to
post in this thread, but for some reason it was impossible
for people to respond to my previous posts in this forum.

You can always e-mail me: fred@bridgebase.com

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

List of changes for 3.8.2 follows:

Language news in 3.8.2:

- Complete Dutch translation now available
- Arabic, Chinese, Greek, and Japanese members should now
be able to use chat in their native languages (needs testing!)
- Latest versions of all of the translations for existing languages
have been included in 3.8.2
- If you want to be involved in the BBO translation project,
please contact support@bridgebase.com

Flag news in 3.8.2:

- Bermuda, French Polynesia, Jamaica, and Panama flags added
- Let us know if your flag is missing!

New features in 3.8.2:

- You can send a chat message from the Partnership Desk
- The Partnership Desk list can be customized to display only
those people who are currently logged in
- When you register in the Parternship Desk of a pay tourney,
you will have to select one of the following options:

1) I am willing to pay my own entry fee
2) I may be willing to pay entry fees for both players
3) I will only play if someone pays my entry fee
4) I will only play if someone pays my entry fee and
gives me $x in addition

If 4) sounds strange to you, the primary purpose of this option
is to make it easy for teachers and professional players to charge
their students to play online. Besides that, a lot of people are
making good money in this way on our site and it only seems
fair if we get a % of this

The default is that 4) is disabled. In order for it to be enabled
for a given member, that member has to get permission from
us, agree to a bunch of terms...

Hopefully these changes will help to make the Partnership
Desk more usable than it has been in the past.

- Members who receive permission from us will be able to
set up "pay tables" (in Main Bridge Club, Private Club,
or Public Club), "pay partnership bidding tables" and
"pay chat rooms".

When a person tries to join one of these tables/chat rooms,
he/she is prompted with "do you agree to pay $x to join?".

This feature is designed primarily for teachers (who will
have to agree to various terms in order to participate).

- New sound effect for when a friend logs in
- New sound effect for when one of those dialog boxes that
invites you to play in a tourney appears
- Mouse over table in list in Vugraph Theatre will display info
about who is playing at that table and how many people
are watching
- Button for accessing vugraph schedule web page now
available in Vugraph Theatre
- Order of tournament list has been changed so that current
tourneys and finished tourneys are at the top of the list.
Probably we will be make additional changes to this screen
in the not too distant future.
- New options when creating a tourney to control chat->tourney
and Barometer scoring.
- Players can now win achievement awards for success in
pay tournaments that offer masterpoints using the ACBL
scale (right now that means ACBL and BBOLand)

These "awards" appear as symbols on members' user
profiles in the same way that the star symbol appears.
The new symbols, however, do not appear in the list of
names in the lobby or in the table list.

It should be noted that these symbols are NOT intended to
be any kind of "rating system" to measure a given member's
skill level. Having a lot of masterpoints is partly a measure
of skill, but it is also partly a measure of participation.

Here are the new symbols along with the definitions that
we are now using for them (which are not set in stone).
Only masterpoints earned on BBO count in terms of
the following awards:

A=the person who has won the most mps (nancylh)
K=the rest of the top 10
Q=the rest of the top 50
J=the rest of the top 100
10=over 1000 masterpoints
9=over 500 masterpoints
8=over 300 masterpoints
7=over 200 masterpoints
6=over 100 masterpoints
5=over 50 masterpoints
4=over 20 masterpoints
3=over 5 masterpoints
2=over 1 masterpoint

Our rules regarding the star symbol will not change as a
result of added these new symbols.

Our hope is that the introduction of these new symbols
will foster additional cheating and bad manners among
certain elements of our membership.

- The usual assortment of bug fixes and minor cosmetic
changes. The bug that caused some people to crash after
clicking on name in the list of kibitzers is now fixed.

Our plan is release a new version to the general membership
by the end of August. We could really use your help in
testing 3.8.2. Please give it a thorough workout and report
any problems you find to me:

fred@bridgebase.com

Thanks in advance for bug reports and feedback!

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com