Problems starting BBO tournaments
Almost every time I run a BBO tournament the event won't start because a player is not online.
However, when I speak to them on the telephone their screen indicates that they are online and in the Competitive area.
They have to click on Sign out and then sign in again after which BBO recognises them and the tournament will start.
Does anyone have a solution to this?
It seems to be a BBO server problem because the player still has the 'live' screen showing on their device and, as stated, has to actually sign out and in again.
Comments
No solution - but this seems to happen sometimes during tournaments although it may be the player is answering a call of nature or something - but they NEVER put in BRB or whatever.
As I always contact my players by phone if I have a problem I can confirm that you're correct about it happening during tournaments too.
The strange thing is that it isn't actually a disconnection - the player still has an apparently live screen but the only solution is to log off and then back on again.
And, of course, the player is unaware that there is a problem. They just think that everyone else has stopped playing.
I believe the problem is that players register and leave their device logged on, BBO will disconnect after 15 minutes of no key press. As you say the player sees no disconnection on their device. Try and educate players to register early, log off and log on again within 15 minutes of tournament start.
BBO often becomes disconnected in such a way that BBO's servers believe the connection is disconnected, but the player's computer is not aware of the disconnection. It can be fixed by logging out and back in, or by logging into BBO in a second browser tab (while leaving the original tab open), but only if the player is aware that a disconnection has happened.
When playing on BBO, I frequently reconnect at any sign that I might have been disconnected (during the tournament, a player taking an apparently long time to play/bid; before the tournament starts, chat messages to my partner not getting through). Many of these are false alarms, but I've still been known to genuinely need to reconnect 3 or more times a session.
It isn't necessarily a disconnection due to being idle: it can happen even when I was active a few seconds beforehand. Most likely, it's an issue with BBO's networking code. (This is an easy mistake to make – based on my experience doing network programming, although there are various ways a computer program can try to be notified of an Internet disconnection, none of them are reliable, so the only reliable way to become aware of a disconnection I'm aware of is for the two sides to continuously communicate with each other so that the disconnection becomes visible as a break in the flow of messages. Few websites seem to actually do this.)
Thanks for the replies.
Very helpful.
I would support that it's not due to being idle. I've had this a number of times when trying to start teams matches, players that logged on a few minutes beforehand do not appear to be logged on and a bad-tempered telephone conversation follows ("did you forget the match this evening?" "I logged on 5 minutes ago, I've been watching Vugraph" "are you invisible" "no, the problem must be at your end") etc until they log out and log back in again.
This has happened to my knowledge with 3 different players from three different locations.