I have once in a while had my computer account lose on time due to a bug or a problem in the interface. If this occurs repeatedly or early in the game I get a message from bot “JimmyS” saying that the computer account has been suspended from rated play.

Well, I am ok with this. I look at the problem and if possible make a fix. Recently I fixed a bug where an invalid opening move could be played for example. But then getting the flag reset so the account can play rated again is a manual process. I have to find an admin who is available, understands the problem and will respond. In practice I have found this is not so easy.

Why not modify the bot so it can be messaged with a request to reset? If you want to have a human review those requests that is ok, but if so please assign someone who will do it regularly. Or if you trust me and other operators to say we’ve fixed it then let the bot do the reset back to “rated allowed.”

—Jon

I"d like to see a better way of doing this myself. I haven’t run a computer account in a few years but the period through 2009 i did and i got the same message and it was a pain . I also wonder if an occasional flag is the end of the world. I mean can you evaluate over what stretch of games the account flagged. I wrote the pulsar chess engine and we were averaging a flag on “finger citychicken” run actually by another member i worked with every 5,000 to 10,000 games but i had to go through the process. Well personally i went through the process on my own computer accounts for pulsar but with cityhicken i had the operator always run Winboard with a log and i was the one who fixed each time.  I felt that is one reason i stopped running rated computer accounts.