Is there a way to get the history of my matches, and specifically my before-and-after rating, directly from the FIBS server? I know my client saves them as MAT files but that doesn't include my rating.

The reason is because I logged in today and my rating was not what I expected it to be, based on my (sometimes faulty) memory. I'd like to find out if the issue is my memory or if there is a bug that affected my rating.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Thanks for your response, Diane, that's probably what it was.

Now for more general discussion on this: Adjudication of bot matches won't deter players from dropping if they don't know about it. It's not in the FAQ and I don't see it mentioned anywhere on the site or in the forums - I found one tweet from Patti back in October.

I'm all in favor of automatic adjudication of saved games, but why just for bots?  If it were a consistent policy across all matches it would essentially eliminate droppers from FIBS - that would be fantastic. I'm a software engineer by trade and I would be happy to help Patti or whoever do the grunt work involved in setting it up.

Bots are the only single case where it can be assumed with real confidence that the human player was at fault.
The bots dont drop, they make themselves available for resuming matches, and they invite players to resume as a priority over starting new matches. This can never be guaranteed so easily with human v human matches.

The grunt work you mention would involve changing fibs code I think, and there is a reluctance to do that, as it may create other unforeseen problems.


As for notification about bot match adjudication, yes it is hard to find, and it would be better if it were more publicised.

Saved matches with bots aren't adjudicated in any sense of the word. What happens is that every so often Patti runs the botdropper script. If you have a saved match with a bot, it will disappear. You will be "fined" a number of rating points for each saved that you have. I seem to remember that it is 15 rating points. This is crude but effective and yes it could be better publicised.
I think you will find that Patti also resets the bots' ratings now and again, adding an arbitrary amount to them to compensate for all the times that they have been dropped. I don't know how much she adds, but it looks like 150 points or so.
Adjudication is a different animal. How it works is that you view the match at the point at which it was terminated and settle the match. If one side is 100% to win, they get 100% of the points. If it's 90%, they get 90% and so on. You use an analysis program for this, Gnu or Snowie for example. It is time consuming for the admin of course, for precisely nil return, so it isn't going to happen. It doesnt even add much to the pleasure of playing either. It will probably make dropping even more likely and it works against the more skilful player, as the weaker player will be credited by the bot with equal playing ability for the purposes of settling the match.
The way to protect your rating from droppers is to avoid playing them in the first place. All the tools are in place to do this and learning how to do it is a rite of passage for newbies. It isn't very hard and once the skill is mastered, you will hardly be dropped once a year. Happy gammoning.

Yes, what you're describing is what I meant by adjudication (play65 does this at the instant of the drop) but I wasn't suggesting it be a manual process. I was suggesting some sort of automated thing that happens after N attempts to resume, or at the time the saved games disappear, whatever is fair ... but as Diane says this would be a change to the code so if that's not an option then my idea is a non-starter and I'll go back to playing backgammon. Thanks for everyone's comments.