[1eyedjack]

Occasionally, I get temporarily disconnected unintentionally through factors beyond my control, and doubtless also beyond the control of BBO. That has always been the case and will I suspect forever remain so.

Sometimes, BBO auto-reserves the seat in anticipation of my rejoining. However sometimes it does not. I do not know what circumstances contrive to cause each respective reaction to a disconnection. I suspect that if playing in a tourney the seat is more consistently reserved than if playing in a club room.

Anyway, I recently suffered a series of disconnections (problems with my wireless router) while playing in a public club and on no occasion was my seat auto-reserved, with the consequence that before the host could manually reserve it someone else had jumped in.

I would prefer it if the host had an option to auto-reserve seats which are vacated for any reason other than the player clicking on a "leave seat or table" instruction, possibly with that option set by default. The reservation can always be manually cleared if appropriate.

I realise that this problem is partly solved by setting "permission required to sit", but I prefer my solution as it avoids wasting time on applying for permission and having it rejected.

[diana_eva]

In tourneys, the seats are reserved automatically. You lose the reservation when the TD or your partner puts in a sub.

At a table, when a player gets disconnected the decision belongs to the table host. A notice appears, saying something like "Blah has lost connectivity to Bridge Base. Seat now reserved for Blah. Click here to clear reservation" (not sure these are the exact words). So if the host chooses to keep the reservation and wait, the disconnected player can get back. But many hosts do not accept to reserve the seats, or they wait a few minutes then clear reservation and go on.

[1eyedjack]

diana_eva, on 2011-April-02, 08:26, said:

In tourneys, the seats are reserved automatically. You lose the reservation when the TD or your partner puts in a sub.

At a table, when a player gets disconnected the decision belongs to the table host. A notice appears, saying something like "Blah has lost connectivity to Bridge Base. Seat now reserved for Blah. Click here to clear reservation" (not sure these are the exact words). So if the host chooses to keep the reservation and wait, the disconnected player can get back. But many hosts do not accept to reserve the seats, or they wait a few minutes then clear reservation and go on.

For the avoidance of doubt, my problems arose NOT in a tourney.
All parties at the table desired and expected me to resume my seat on reconnection.
I am confident that no prompt was issued to the table host to reserve the seat, else that prompt would have been accepted.

It occurs to me that there are certain mechanisms of disconnection under which the server is confused as to whether it was intentional (and therefore not worthy of a prompt to reserve seat).

It is not I think a huge issue given that, as I said in the OP, there is an obvious albeit short of ideal workaround which is to require permission to sit.

My suggested solution would have the added benefit of automatically reseating the disconnected player, without having to navigate back to the table (in addition to the benefit already stated that it avoids unwelcome seating requests).

[1eyedjack]

diana_eva, on 2011-April-02, 08:26, said:

At a table, when a player gets disconnected the decision belongs to the table host. A notice appears, saying something like "Blah has lost connectivity to Bridge Base. Seat now reserved for Blah. Click here to clear reservation" (not sure these are the exact words).

Is this prompt supposed to appear independent of the interface, ie Windows v Flash?

[matmat]

1eyedjack, on 2011-April-02, 09:24, said:

My suggested solution would have the added benefit of automatically reseating the disconnected player, without having to navigate back to the table (in addition to the benefit already stated that it avoids unwelcome seating requests).

This is actually implemented in the code. People do get automatically reseated, but it seems that there is some sort of bug in the software such that it only happens sometimes. (I've not figured out what that sometimes is, actually; it might have to do with the seats having been reserved pre-game, for example).


The functionality that i would like to see added, related to this (sorry for the hijack), is the ability to "ping" a player in the flash version. The windows version had the ominous red-dot which indicate when someone was losing, or having trouble with, their connection. The flash version has no such thing, and I've seen players just kinda sit there, waiting for a while with a seemingly present player not coming back. Seeing a really long, or non-responsive, ping from someone would at least help clear up what is going on.

[1eyedjack]

Yes, I was aware that on those occasions when the auto-reserve feature kicks in, so does the auto-reseating when reconnection is established. It was simply the fact that these two combined features failed to operate that I was trying to get around. Finding the bug, if there is such a thing, in the code and then correcting it would be one method. Allowing the host power to force a seat reservation in case of disconnection would be another (and my original suggestion).

The reason that I thought that my suggestion had legs is that it may never be possible for the server to be able to detect reliably whether a seat is vacated deliberately or through disconnection, and if that element of doubt is inevitable then control could be vested in the table host. I don't know enough about programming to be able to say whether an improved method of detection of unintended disconnections is a viable possibility.