Hey everyone,
Some people have written emails to let me know they're having connection issues with the site.
Thank you for letting me know, and I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do about it in the short term. There are definitely some networking problems, and my hosting service is working to resolve them. Just wanted to let you all know that I'm aware of the situation. Let's hope the tech people can get the problems fixed soon.
Hi everyone,
I appreciate all the nice people who play cards at World of Card Games! I'm kind of busy with other work these days, and so I can't do much work on the site, I'm sorry to say. It still makes me happy to see how many people enjoy the site, even though it hasn't changed very much in the last couple of years.
I want to bring something up. Sometimes, a person writes to me with a question. I almost always respond to player emails!
However, sometimes when I respond, the email "bounces". That is, my response is returned as unsent. Sometimes, this happens because the person sending me the email has an Outlook account that has not been configured correctly. Sometimes, it happens because an Internet Service Provider has decided that my email is spam and won't allow me to get through.
I don't spam people. I only contact players at the site if they first contact me.
I just want to let people know that if they don't hear a response from me, it could be because I was unable to respond for technical reasons.
I'm bringing this up here because someone recently wrote me an email, and when I responded, the email bounced.
I'm going to post their question here, and my response, on the off chance that this person might read it here.
The person wrote:
I regularly get put into games and find myself down 70,80,90 points in a 100 point game. It would an improvement if I could choose not to get auto inserted into games that are almost over.
Well, I could not agree more with this stranger from the Internet. Here was my response:
What you're looking for already exists. Please choose the "Exclude Games in Progress" Option, explained in this blog post:
It still surprises me that people do not realize this Option is available. When you first arrive at the site, you are given the Option to avoid games in progress. You can change your Option at that time, or any later time. If you're not aware of that, please follow the link above to learn about that Option and some other Options that you might find useful.
Thanks and be nice out there, life is too short!
The site will be down for a couple of hours due to a hardware issue at the server starting in about 35 minutes. Sorry for the interruption in games! Hopefully, the work will be done quickly. It is supposed to take up to 2 hours.
Here's a screenshot of Double Deck Pinochle at World of Card Games. I hope people are having fun with that game!
The Elo ratings for non-team games have been modified slightly. Previously, the formula computed the Elo rating as if each person were in a match against the other three people in the game. The new version of your Elo rating treats the game as a single match. This means that your Elo rating will change somewhat less with each ranked game that you play from now on. It also means that players will no longer sometimes win a few Elo points, even when losing the game, which was a point of confusion for many people. So I think the new method is an improvement. I hope you agree! Thanks to the player who suggested this modification, and was so helpful during the implementation of it!
There's been a problem at the server that required it to be rebooted.
Usually, the site can issue an alert in advance of this happening. Unfortunately, this time, that was not possible.
I'm very sorry for the unexpected interruption in your games! The site was down for about 45 minutes starting at 4:45 AM Eastern USA time. But it is now back up again. Thank you for your patience!
The server company where World of Card Games is hosted is having some network issues (this started at Aug 24, 15:08 CDT and appears to be ongoing).
You may be able to play games, but might experience problems.
If you see things that look strange, like cards piled up, please reload the web page in your web browser. The F5 key works to do this for some systems. If you get a blank page loading, wait a short while, and try reloading the page again.
The server people have let me know that they're looking into the problem but I do not know when it will be resolved. My apologies!
Update August 25 at 9:10 CDT. The server company says that the problem has been resolved. It was a networking issue from one of their upstream providers. And now you know as much as I do! Sorry for any interruptions in your games!