FICS Upgrade
Several changes have been made to the FICS server in
October. The 2 most notables ones are: Bughouse
games are finally stored, and guests are only
allowed public tells in channel 4. Among the minor
changes the introduction of showownseek, and the
removal of the match your_handle are particularly
relevant.
There have been some changes to our beloved server in the
month of October. Among the most notable are Bughouse
Adjourn and Guests only being allowed to chat in channel
4. When new features or policies are introduced on
FICS, there has usually been a news item to inform the
general public. In addition, recently a new help file
was added: help new_features is intended to keep
important server changes all in one place, so that users
don't have to keep sorting through literally hundreds of
news items. If you're ever curious about what's new to
FICS, it's now just a help file away.
The most requested new feature added in October is
Bughouse Adjourn. In the past, if a player in a
Bughouse match lost connection, that player's team
forfeited the game regardless of the position or
clocks. Now, the game is stored just like any other,
with a few differences in handling to accommodate
Bughouse's two-board, four-player format. Basically, if
you lose connection in the middle of a Bughouse game, then
reconnect, that game will appear in your stored
list, but the handles of your and your opponent's
partner will not. In order to solve this problem,
the new command bugstored has been added. Bugstored
helps buggers with their stored games by keeping
track of who their partner and opponent's partner were.
Unfortunately the resume command
will not work to resume a Bughouse game, since the server
doesn't check to make sure you have the correct partners,
therefore you will have to match your opponent
directly with the match command, using the
information provided by bugstored. The server will
take it from there. If the opponent accepts and you have the
same partners, the Bughouse game will be automatically resumed.
Surely almost every FICSer has noticed by now the lack of
guests in frequently-active channels. Due to spam
attacks by very persistent
abusers, unregistered users are no longer permitted to
send public tells except to channel 4. Unregs can
still send personal tells, but all of their
communications are limited to 200 characters as
opposed to the 1024 character limit on registered
users. FICS Administrators emphasize that this is
only a temporary situation, and more effective methods
of spam prevention will be implemented hopefully in
the near future.
A few minor modifications have been made too. First of
all if you want the server to show you your own seeks
when you use the sought command, you'll have to set
your variable showownseek
to 1. An
easy alternative way to see your own seeks is to use
the command sought all instead of sought. This
will show you all seeks regardless of your formula or
rating.
Finally match your_handle no longer works to
enter examine mode. You will have to use examine
Remember you can keep abreast of all the important changes
to FICS by reading help new_features and keeping an
eye out for news items.
