Great! Really glad this helps, as I wasn't able to find a colourblind person to test it on. Anything else we can do to make life easier for you? How do you find reading the press? Currently we don't change those colours, but would making all the press black help?

We should monitor the change in GR of our colour-blind members to see if this has any positive or negative impact. If it turns out that they actually achieve more when the map is harder to read, I suggest rolling out purely black maps for all members.

@ATC
Press is not such an issue, as its colour is not essential to its proper understanding of the content (whereas the colours on the map really do change the meaning). I cannot speak for all colour-blind people, as the condition takes three principal forms and I experience only a moderate form of protanism. I am rather prone to sending my press to the wrong person, but I think that that may not be attributable to the deficiencies of my eyes but rather to the deficiency of the organ immediately behind the eyes.

@Octavious.
It isn't really about providing colour blind people with a service which may or may not improve their performance. It is about improving the quality of their (our) experience and enjoyment of the site.
I assume you are suggesting the provision of monochrome maps rather than of maps which are "purely black"

I hope that my (re-iterated) request for a further improvement will not be read as a lack of gratitude for what has already been achieved, but:
an important improvement would be to eliminate the unnecessary delay caused by waiting for a player to make a disband when no avenue of retreat is available. Disbands made inevitable because no retreat is available should be automatic and immediate and should not await the intervention of the player.

This has been discussed many times. The issue, I think, is you still technically need to order the disband. Imagine if you logged in only to find your unit had disappeared and the game was on the next phase. I think that's worse than people occasionally having to wait.

This makes no sense.
If no-one has any retreats to make, you move from Spring Diplomacy to Autumn Diplomacy without the intervention of Spring Retreats. You do not say, "that's a surprise, I really wish I had some retreats to make!" You get on with the next phase.
So, with this oft discussed modification.... You log on, you discover that one of your units was disbanded because it had nowhere to retreat. You get on with the next phase. You do not ask the rest of your fellow players to engage in an act of collective purposeless mourning of indefinite duration.

Having no retreats is different than having one of your units dissapear without your knowledge.

For experienced players, I agree it's not much of an issue, but we cater to a wide variety of players and to some I think it could be very disorienting.

"You do not ask the rest of your fellow players to engage in an act of collective purposeless mourning of indefinite duration."

The phase is, by definition, not indefinite. Many times people will ready up right away. And if they don't, why does it matter? It gives everyone more time for Diplomacy.

There are also over 1250 pages of evidence to suggest that many of our members are rather fond of engaging in acts of collective purposeless of indefinite duration.

Having consistency in gameplay is very important and its something that a lot of this site's users take for granted. When you sign up for a 36 hour phase game, for example, you do so with the expectations that each phase will take place and each phase will last a maximum of 36 hours. If the game suddenly skips a phase, it loses that important element of consistency that a game with timed phases needs.

For sake of a bad analogy, lets say you don't have anything planned for this Saturday. You don't have anything specific to do, but you still have activities - chores, getting groceries, maybe calling your grandmother. If Saturday was skipped because you have nothing planned, it would throw off your whole weekend and you wouldn't get to do a lot of the tasks that you otherwise would have done.

I agree with Thomas.

Besides, barring stabs, we often know when a Retreat / Disband is coming our way. If we are truly concerned about the "without your knowledge" aspect, certainly the system could generate and send to the player in question a standard message similar to: "Your unit at ________ was disbanded due to the unavailability of a retreat square."

I would like to see Global messages posted when a great power NMRs, CDs, or is taken over.

Even in no press games.

Jeff - that is a great idea.

"Your unit at ________ was disbanded due to the unavailability of a retreat square."

This is actually a pretty good idea

Thanks! :)

@2WL
But you do NOT know how long each phase is going to last. In some retreat or build phases you have no moves to enter. Your opponents can ready up and the game will proceed without your being able to prevent it. Therefore some phases are of indefinite duration. Even under the present phasing arrangements, "Saturday can be skipped without your having any control over it" The arguments against my proposal lack rationality.

"Your unit at ________ was disbanded due to the unavailability of a retreat square."

I'll vote for that. No reason a forced disband needs to be done manually. Because, as has been pointed out, build and retreat phases can be readied up immediately anyway.

Also, I don't know if this is the right thread for this, but the possibility of zero-center survives (and worse yet, zero-center draws) is a pet peeve.

Not having forced moves as an option comes up every so often, and it is - in general - a good idea. The way I'd like to see it done would be instead of having a forced order, a line in your order log would say "The Army in Vienna is forced to disband". Maybe this could be sent as a notification too, as Eadan suggests (although players already get a lot of notifications).

However, there are a few reasons it's unlikely to be at the top of the todo list for a while.

1) This is actually a fairly substantial change. Currently, the adjudicator doesn't do anything with the possible future options of a unit at adjudication time. This change would bring forward some of that processing, and would need to take great care to not make the code messy.

2) Testing this is a *lot* of work - there are a lot of edge cases. The adjudicator is tested automatically with the DATC tests, but they're not designed to catch the kinds of bugs that could be introduced with this change. For example, if one player has a forced disband, and a retreat with options, then we don't want the phase to auto process (in fact, the DATC doesn't specify any tests that deal with progressing the turns - that's not what it's about). There are other edge cases that would need careful testing to make sure that we're not breaking anything. Currently the adjudicator works correctly, and I think players would be understandably pretty upset if we changed that, even accidentally.

3) I still think we'd get complaints about "not having a retreat". Although, every few months we get an email complaints about not being able to retreat to a square that had a bounce in it (which is correct), so perhaps this is no different to the current situation.

The real killer here is the large time investment to make and test this change provides a only a small benefit (I don't think a forced move sometimes holding up the game is a big problem, so fixing it is only a small benefit). Additionally, I think if we added a "rulebook press" mode (ie, no talking during builds and retreats), then forced moves would be readied up more often.

If anyone wants to put in the legwork to cleanly make and test this change, I'd be happy to accept it though.

~webDip dev team

Hazel: Per the rulebook, you need to wait until a power is defeated completely (ie, unitl spring the next year) before drawing if you don't want to include them in the draw.

That bit's annoying but definitely in the rules. Is there a similar rule for zero-center survives with a solo?

I don't think the rulebook says anything about other player's results in the event of a solo, but I'm not certain.

Since a Survive equals a Defeat in my mind anyway, if not in my homepage stats, it's never been a big deal, just something I always thought was weird. I never draw until the player we're trying to thin out is officially Defeated for that reason.

@ATC - While I get frustrated waiting for forced disbands - when you sign up for a game, you sign up for each turn being a specific length. Sometimes, when travelling, you need to time when you can log on. So you might need that 24 hours on a Retreat Phase. So I vote that no change needs to be done.

I played a couple games on another website. They had different phase lengths - one for Diplomacy, another for Retreat and Build phases. So you could set a 24 Diplomacy and a 6 hours Retreat and Build. That makes more sense to me - at least if you need the time, it's consistent.

Forced disbands and half-phase-length retreats/builds could be game options.

been discussed to death, like online indicators, a blacklist, and other features on the list that I wouldn't hold my breath for change on

@ATC

I'm a bit confused as to why the code change would have to be so large. The adjudicator already presents the user with all valid options. If there is only one option (disband) surely the adjudicator could check that and move on.

I agree, not worth the time, just curious if there's something I'm missing.

ATC: "would making all the press black help?"

Yes, I think a black-coloured press text option (independent from colourblind settings) would be helpful. I'm not at all colourblind, however, in a sunny environment it's sometimes a bit difficult to read certain press (especially Turkey's). Optional black text would be helpful, occasionaly.

There is something else I'd like to see included in webDip: anonymous ("grey") press, both public and private, where the receiver don't know who's sent the message. I'm sure it has been suggested before. Yes, I do realize it will probably be a bit hard to implement; nevertheless, I believe this feature would make the game significantly more interesting :)