[klutzygirl]

Obviously, barmar, no matter what anyone says, all you're going to do is defend your position. You are not listening. It's clear that not everyone likes this new "feature," and with thousands of players it's ridiculous to expect that everyone would. Find a way to make it completely optional, such as three playing clubs. It's my understanding that typing +slow+ merely doubles the time; that is not acceptable either. Frankly, my partner and I would rather play with humans than GIBs, but the rudeness of speed freaks killed our fun. He's a good player but has trouble typing. How about banning speed demons from the Relaxed club and giving them one where slow players are banned? Sounds like a win-win to me.

[barmar]

klutzygirl, on 2012-November-11, 08:34, said:

Obviously, barmar, no matter what anyone says, all you're going to do is defend your position. You are not listening. It's clear that not everyone likes this new "feature," and with thousands of players it's ridiculous to expect that everyone would. Find a way to make it completely optional, such as three playing clubs. It's my understanding that typing +slow+ merely doubles the time; that is not acceptable either. Frankly, my partner and I would rather play with humans than GIBs, but the rudeness of speed freaks killed our fun. He's a good player but has trouble typing. How about banning speed demons from the Relaxed club and giving them one where slow players are banned? Sounds like a win-win to me.

Actually, +slow+ tripled the time. So 80 seconds to play becomes 240. That's more than half the time usually alloted for play of an entire hand in f2f bridge games (generally about 7 minutes/board).

Just so you know, my personal inclination was to just use this for stuck hosts, not other players. I've never been called as a yellow to help boot a stuck player, so it doesn't seem to me that hosts are that clueless about running the table. But I don't get called as much as the regular yellows -- I often login invisible to avoid being bothered when I just want to play a few rounds of robot bridge. If Uday believes this is a common problem, I assume he knows what he's talking about -- he's the boss, and he's been here longer than I have.

As far as giving the host and players more control over features like this, we're often constrained by the limitations of the old BBO version. Anything that involves changes in the client (like a new "Boot Host" voting feature) will only work in the new version, since we're absolutely not making any changes to the old version.