On-Page Refresh Button

It would refresh the board and chat in gameplay, and the list of games in the list of games.

There is a refresh button located in the site task bar at the top next to messages, and in gameplay, switching from the chat to gamelog, will refresh the gameplay and chat i believe.

I think it only refreshes the top bar.

The board and chat automatically refresh every few seconds. Only if you're not active on the site for a long while this will stop, but you can easily re-enable it by using the button that should appear on screen. The only reason I can see for adding a manual refresh button is for faster refreshes. I am afraid we can't really support that: the whole reason about the game page only updated once every few seconds is server load. We have a lot of people playing live games at the same time, so we have to limit the amount of refreshes made per user. If we could get more people to pay for premium we might be able to upgrade the server and make improvements on this, but currently we are at the limit at what we can do regarding refreshes. Maybe I am not entirely sure about your request, but right now my answer is: we can't support this for technical reasons.

The refresh rate is very slow on the game list.

Ah, the lobby. Those queries should not be too heavy, especially for the live game lobby. We can see if we can speed those up or indeed add a refresh button to that. Thanks for clarifying.

People just refresh the whole page, which is obviously much harder on the server. Also on another note, the forums seem to phone home every once in a while (I know because you can see invites). Why not have that sync the posts with the server?

[quote=maximum - Sep 22, 11:20 AM]People just refresh the whole page, which is obviously much harder on the server.[/quote] True :P We'll see what we can do, but it probably won't be included in the live version and instead be taken into account for the rewrite. [quote=maximum - Sep 22, 11:20 AM]Also on another note, the forums seem to phone home every once in a while (I know because you can see invites). Why not have that sync the posts with the server?[/quote] This is slightly different. It does a request only to pickup some small data like the amount of turns and any new invites you might have. Also picking up all the forum posts would make those requests a lot heavier. We have to be selective with the amount of data we synchronise: not only the number of requests is important, but also the amount of data we have to process and send back. I think real-time communication is not important for a forum, so I don't think we will synchronise these in the foreseeable future.

But doesn't continually refreshing the forum page use much more server resources? I realize it wouldn't be very high on the programmers' to-do list, but it's something.

There aren't enough people that sit around on the forum index waiting for new posts to make this worthwhile. The amount of additional load a page load creates is negligible compared to the amount of useless refreshes we would make.

Adding a refresh button to the game page would probably end up taxing the server too much. Sametime players would hit it constantly. But actually you can do this like 4960epic said. Switching from the chat tab to the log tab will refresh the whole game if anything has changed.