Hello, everyone Time for an early Christmas present.

Most of the results of my work from the last few months are now activated on the main site for you to enjoy, and even more will come ! In no particular order, we now have the following:

Speedups. Several performance issues were identified and fixed, resulting in a faster site for everyone. In the future, even more speedups are planned.

Head-To-Head mode speed improvements. Our Head-To-Head mode has received a lot of attention lately. The board updates, which used to take up to 15 seconds to take effect, are now instant. As soon as your opponent makes their move, your board will update and you can make your move. This should make the Head-To-Head experience much smoother.

Fast Head-To-Head mode. And even more speed-ups. We now have a new Head-To-Head mode, in which the turn gets saved as soon as you make a move. No need to scroll back and forth in search of the Save button, everything happens instantly. This will make games even faster, at the cost of not allowing you to review and undo the move - which is why this mode can be disabled, if desired.

Improved Head-to-Head screen. The HTH screen is now separated into separated rooms, one for each game. The main screen will inform you how many players, if any, are present within each of the rooms. Also, when you enter any of the rooms, the list of present players updates itself in real-time, as does the list of invites that you have received.

One-minute HTH timeouts. And for -really- fast HTH games, we now offer one-minute timeouts . Better hurry with your moves!

But our improvements cover much more than just speed or the Head-To-Head games !

Inter-club Challenges. Clubs can now challenge each other to a match in a game of their choice. This requires that both clubs have enough members participating in their club team for that particular game. The club whose members win more games is victorious in this challenge.

Default penalty option. As a popular request, you can now specify (in the General section of your preferences) whether the invitations sent by you will be loss of turn or loss of game by default.

Swiss tournaments have been reworked, they now work as you would expect, including proper ordering and scoring.

Backgammon now has a clearer distinction between DRAW and DOUBLE offers, the word is now highlighted in red, to avoid sending draw offers by mistake when you want to offer a double.

Multi-player tournaments now randomize the order in which players move in each generated game. Each player will still get to play first in exactly one of the games, but the ordering beyond that is random, so that it's not the same in each generated game.

Info pages that list goldies available to Gold/Platinum members should now be properly viewable by anyone.

As well as bugfixes in various parts of the site.

Note that the new changes required rather significant adjustments in core site code, which may lead to some outages for a while, until everything settles down.

Enjoy the updates !