Have a look at the "What's New" for details.

Temporarily withdrawn while we investigate a couple of issues in the upgrade.

We have been informed that the EBU are changing their software which could result in some access being unavailable Ad far as Bridgewebs is concerned, this means the Ranking and NGS Databases.

".........We've recently been working on a database migration for all of our session and NGS data. It's not just a change of location, but a change of the whole structure and platform, so there's quite a lot of complexity. We're nearly ready to go, though, so this is to warn you about a bit of downtime next week.

Assuming we don't encounter any problems, we hope to migrate all the data and switch the systems over on the weekend of 9th to 11th November. At some point on that Friday morning, My EBU will be disabled and it'll likely stay down until the Monday if all goes well. API calls sent during that time will return failures. I might allow the read-only calls to still function, but the results they return could be unpredictable depending on which database they're pointing to......."

There was a technical issue with the server, Sunday 21st Oct 2018 causing it to be unavailable for a period of time.  After manual intervention late GMT Sunday Evening, Bridgewebs was returned to normal operation. Further investigations will be undertaken to identify the cause and prevent any similar occurrence in the future.

You may be aware that the EBU has put together information regarding the revised rule required for Data Protection  www.ebu.co.uk/gdpr These can then be applied uniformly across all clubs.

Bridgewebs generally conforms to these rules, but will be reviewed and updated where required. However, the Data Protecion rules, are as much the housekeeping of the club  as any software.

If you have the latest version of PairsScorer and want to show the Live Ranking remotely, have a look at.

www.bridgewebs.com/guide/live_ranking.html

PLEASE NOTE: This is currently Pre-Release. Will update this when generally available.

Changed to using new EBU Membership database and now updated daily.

Duplicate Scorer - Soxoft results can now be automatically uploaded to Bridgewebs in EBU USBIO XML format.

Release 2.19e has a number of significant improvements, especially in the display of Scorecards and Travellers. See "What's New" for details.

Just found out that the Google Mapping Software Release 2 is to be "Retired" Nov 13th 2013. This means that all Bridgewebs Google Map features will need to upgraded to the Release 3 standards.

Provided the changes can be done in time, this generally will not make any difference to any Bridgewebs users. However, it does look like there will be some minor cosmetic differences that you may notice.

Hadn't realised it was so long since the first Bridgewebs Maps were provided via the Google Mapping service.
 

A significant new release of Bridgewebs has been developed.  A beta  is version is available on request, see Bridgewebs 2.19 for details.

Release 2.18x has a number of enhancements including:

• Further Improvements to Membership and Bulk Email
• Masterpoint Scales for non EBU clubs
• Further improvements to USEBIO XML upload:

This has some minor fixes, club search, changes to handle device rotation and changes to better handle the various Apple devices

A new third party specialist Email service is being prototyped for sending Bulk Email.

For various reasons:

• performance
• avoiding emails being flagged as spam
• better bounce email detection
• unsubscribe option
• better email analysis for Bridgewebs
• provide reply option to avoid member replies being bounced themself.

In order to check it out initially, a few clubs will be switched to use this service. This will not affect the way it works as far as the club is concerned, except member emails will arrive from a different address team@bridgewebs.net to avoid any problems with setting the email service up. This may be transferred back to bridgewebs.com in the future.

The next phase is to integrate some of the reporting, especially bounced emails, into your Membership Tab.

Release 2.18t has a number of enhancements:

• Dynamically Built Hand PDF on Results
• Revised Recent Results page renames as Personal Scores
• Stats Counter:
• Improvements to Membership and Bulk Email
• More Competition Options

Access to all of www.bridgewebs.com (web sites, email, forum) went down on 12th August at 8:15 GMT approx and restored at 11:20 GMT approx. This was caused by a general network problem and not the bridgewebs web site itself.

There is a problem using Adobe Reader in IE8. On occasions it hangs and eventually finishes with a message "there has been a problem...."

Having searched the net for answers, this has been experienced before. There are plenty of workarounds (but see below).

1. Use Google Chrome or Firefox
2. Use a different PDF Reader Foxit, see below.
3. Set the PDF preferences to open in Adobe proper rather than in IE8, see below.

2. I have found a different PDF reader that can be used:-
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

3. Open Adobe Reader directly.

• In preferences,
• Choose "Internet"
• Untick "Display PDF in Browser"

UPDATE (18th Feb 2010)

This appears to have been fixed with an update dated 16th Feb 2010.

Open Adobe Reader directly as a program, not in Browser.

• Click "Help"
• Click "Check for Updates"

Maintenance is scheduled for the bridgewebs server on Sunday 10th January 2010. At the end of this, about 20:30 GMT, the server will be rebooted and will, therefore, be unavailable for a short period of around 20 minutes.

I have just been informed, Dec 10th 2009, that the Web Hosting part of Xcalibre's business will in future be run by WebFusion. The WebFusion group currently own Webfusion, 123-reg, Supanames and Donhos.

In the short term there should be no noticeable difference, more details will follow in the New Year.

There have been a small number of problems to do with changing the IP address.

• Moving Mailboxes, in some cases, it was necessary to delete an account and add it back and/or reenter the password.
• Users of Firefox/AVG needed to reinstall (not sure which was the problem).
• Possibly users with VirginMedia may have had to wait for the new IP address to get registered.

As far as I know, these have now all been cleared.

A very small number of people using Firefox are having problems connecting to www.bridgewebs.com on the new computer. Providing access is via www.bridgewebs.com this should normally be OK.

By way of explanation, the way it works is that the each web site/domain is hosted on a particular computer, each computer has its own address, e.g. bridgewebs is now on 80.90.200.162, it was 217.8.240.59. The reason for the big difference is that it is now hosted at a different Data Centre, somewhere in the London area.

Generally this actual computer address is found by a DNS (Domain Name Server) of your internet provider and everything should be automatic. These DNS servers are updated regularly generally every 24 hours. In anticipation of the change the TTL settings for bridgewebs was reduced to 2 hours a week ago, so they should have been refreshed within 2 hours.

If, somehow, your PC, Firewall or Internet Provider is using the direct address or has some kind of computer mapping security protection, it may be necessary to reset this.

In FireFox, you may need to check some settings.

• In security, check that you are not using "Check that the site is not a forgery", this may be checking that the computer is not the same as yesterday.
• You will need "Javascript" enabled.

This is just a simple explanation regarding the problems you might be experiencing and I am looking to see if I can provide further information.

The upgrade to a new computer for the bridgewebs web site took place the morning of December 2nd. The actual data transfer took place between 09:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT (around 6Gb of data) and www.bridgewebs.com switched over at 10:00.

Due to the delays involved in updating domain addresses on DNS servers (the computers around the world holding a directory of names and actual IP addresses), you may have still continued visiting the web site on the old computer for up to 2 hours (possibly longer) after this switch over. In reality, the web site would have appeared to be available during this period. IF YOU UPDATED anything after around 9:00 GMT, you may suddenly have found that it is no longer updated as your link switches over to the new computer, you will need to update it again on the new computer. I will analyse the old and new web sites and identify any discrepencies and individually let people know.

Although a notice had been posted to let the Web Administrators know that a change was imminent, it was impossible to let all the scorers and the thousands of bridge players using bridgewebs around the world know that a change was taking place. In reality most users will not have noticed any loss in service or change.

Everything, web site and email, should now be running off the new computer. If you notice any problems please email team@bridgewebs.net.

It has been noticed that on a number of occasions during Monday 26th October 2009, the web sites have not been available, from a few seconds to several minutes. This was due to an error in the development release of bridgewebs. This has now been resolved.

A problem has been reported recently with no spaces between %s in the "Best Of" competions. This has found to occur on certain competitions where users have upgraded to IE8 or are using Google Chrome. There must have been a change in specification of "Borders" in HTML.

This has been corrected in Release 2.17a. However, for performance reason, competitions are calculated and saved (including the format) when the results are upload or the competition changed.

This means for old competitions, to clear the problem it is necessary to go to the Competition in question and [Save] it to create a new format.

A most bizarre problem occurred Friday Aug 21 sometime between between 09:00 and 12:30 GMT.

The symptom was that when you typed www.bridgewebs.com into the Internet Browser Address Bar or accessed from any other favourite link, a message came up in various formats basically asking you to enter a login and password for your router.

This affected many users, but certainly not all, possibly you, depending on what operating system and router you have and what ISP you are using.

Access was returned to normal around 12:30 GMT.

The official reason from BridgeWebs Host:-

"Sorry for the delay in replying, this issue got escalated to myself as it's a strange one - as you surmised. To give you a bit of background, our shared web hosting servers run a number of pieces of software that help to defend against denial of service attacks, these are commonly just huge numbers of attempted connections to a single site with the object of taking it offline. One such system identified a potential attack on your 'bridgewebs' server this morning and began to redirect some incoming requests automatically to reduce the impact on the server which would have been causing the behaviour seen. We toned the settings down and removed the block later on this morning so it was all resolved then and shouldn't happen again, sorry for any inconvenience......."

A problem with using the Web Administration BridgeWebs News Editor with Google Chrome has been overcome. Those who are using Chrome could try it again with caution. This fix may also overcome a similar problem with Safari.

A program was uploaded to the wrong release this morning, Friday 20th Feb. This correct one has now been put back, but was incorrect for about an hour which may have prevented results being uploaded or for a short while access to the web site.

A side effect of this was that you may have lost the backgrounds, if you notice this problem prior to my correcting them, you can go to "Web Admin" - Settings - "Site Style" to put it back. Otherwise, I will be correcting them later.

An extra feature has been provided in the web admin login page to send a message to bridgewebs instead of having to use the contact page on www.bridgewebs.com

Bridgewebs originally started as www.club_bridge.co.uk etc, but was switched over a couple of years ago. It is expected that the vast majority of people will now be using www.bridgewebs.com. There are some technical implications in having 2 or 3 domain names all pointing to the same place, the same entries appear on Google/Yahoo etc under 2 or 3 domain names. Therefore, www.club_bridge.co.uk and www.club_bridge.org.uk have now been set to automatically redirect to www.bridgewebs.com. There will be a short period where these do not work until the new redirection takes effect and it may take Google/Yahoo etc. a week or two to update their indexes. There are probably still some references to club_bridge out there on non bridgewebs bridge club web sites. If you notice any, it would be worth informing the webmaster of the site to change the address to www.bridgewebs.com/....

NOTE The club_bridge domain names referenced should have been with a hyphen not underscore, but bridgewebs automatically detects and changes any references as such and then this news item would not have made sense.

There were problems with the web site for users using club specific domains during the morning of Friday 13th June. The actual website, www.bridgewebs.com, was actually working fine. This was fixed in around an hour and I have now received an explanation that there was a problem with the computer holding the club domain names which has now been fixed. Apologies to anyone trying to access the web site. For your future reference, if you do get a problem using a club domain, you could try www.bridgewebs.com and access the club web site via the index of clubs.

The hosting company does have routine maintenance, especially around midnight GMT when they expect most be people to be asleep, unlike bridge players, when this is one of the busiest times for bridgewebs. Their engineers are on standby 365 days 24 hours, so in many cases they quite often notice and fix problems at other times before I see them.

I requested that the EBU provide a link to the latest version of Club Focus Document as well as month by month, so if you have added a link to the the EBU Club Focus on your web site, you can change it to

www.ebu.co.uk/cf/documents/Currentedition.pdf

and this will in future point to the latest PDF version.

otherwise use www.ebu.co.uk/cf/ClubFocus.htm and this will go to the EBU page with a list of editions.

Thank you. Mind you, the notice did not seem to put many people off accessing the web site during the upgrade.

It was possible to do the upgrade with only a minimum of downtime and everything is now back to normal.

IMPORTANT ADVANCE NOTICE

The WEB HOSTING company will be undertaking an upgrade of their computers.

Wednesday 20th February 21:00 GMT
to
Thursday 21st February 01:00 GMT

It is estimated that this will result in the BridgeWebs web site being unavailable for up to 2 hours during this period. IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you DO NOT undertake any updates to your web site during that period even if you find it is working.

If you normally upload results during this period, it is also HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you let your scorers know and they DO NOT upload the results until the next morning and let the Wednesday evening players know that the site will be down when they get home and not to expect the results until the next morning.

A suitable message will automatically be included on the results pages prior to this.

The Release notes for the software upgrade is almost 200 pages, mainly concerned with security and performance, but, if any problems occur, these will be addressed Thursday morning.

A Happy New Year to all and many thanks for everyone who supported BridgeWebs during 2007.

The latest release 2.15a is now in use across all the clubs and I have been working on the next release 2.16 for some time now. This has a number of features specifically for County Associations, and some of these have a knock-on advantage for the club web sites. The "What's New" will be updated later in January.

At the same time, I have been working on a complete replacement for the Help pages, incorporating the present help and information relating to all the new features brought out during 2007, various support articles and those features planned for 2008. To avoid you looking for things that do not exist in 2.15a, the new features will be clearly marked. It is being updated daily at present! However, as it already contains considerably more information and is easier to use than the present "Help" pages, it should be of use to you as it stands, so, is being made available today, the beginning of January 2008. You can find it at www.bridgewebs.com/guide and, when complete, probably the end of January, it will replace the help pages, together with the new release.

On occasions the site statistics have been lost and I have had to rebuild them from the backup files. I have not been able to find any particular reason for this, except that the files are getting quite large.

I have, therefore redesigned the way it works to make it more stable. As a result of looking at this, I did find that access to some pages on the web sites had not been logged against each club. As a result, the revised statistics show in the region of 5% -10% more and the whole of the statistics for 2007 have been rebuilt to show this.

The new program is considerably more efficient and can now show 12 months statistics below the charts without any significant impact on performance.

An enhancement to show Merged Sections correctly showed the merged section pairs, but in certain instances did not show correctly for other results. This has been now been corrected and all identified instances corrected. If you think that you are still having problems with a particular set of results, please reupload and if still a problem send an email to team@bridgewebs.net

By now I expect that you are all aware of the "EBU Strategy" document released in June 2007. This strategy has many far-reaching proposals affecting clubs and members including a move from a subscription to a Pay2Play scheme. It is early days in this proposal and I am sure there will be a variety of views.

However, in particular, the aspect of an "EBU Free Web Site" and the impact on BridgeWebs needs carefully consideration. If any of you have any points regarding this, please email team@bridgewebs.net.

Release 2.15 has a number of new features. These include:

• Calendar Options
• Facility to "Quick Update" second and third events
• Facility to specify start of club year
• Reorganization of Administration Buttons
• Change to the "Options" for a News Page
• Extended Colour and font "Themes" for News Pages.
• Additional "Left Message Box" on Home page
• Bridgewebs now has an internal "Player" file updated from ScoreBridge
• Members Only Page
• Paging of Results Page instead of one long page

You can find the the details in "What's New"

As an aid to improving the chances of people finding clubs when doing using a "web search", two extra pages have been added to the main bridgewebs site. The first page is a list of clubs by "domain name" and the second is a "Learn Bridge" page listing clubs who specifically provide "Bridge Courses".

If you think the information is wrong or your club runs "Bridge Courses", please go to "Web Administration" - "Site Options" and adjust as necessary. The information for the index pages:- Club Name, Location, Domain Name and "Bridge Classes" is taken from here. If you update this the Index pages will include the correct information the NEXT time that the indexes are updated, usually weekly. If you think the words at the top of the page coud be improved, please let me know.

There has been an intermittent problem with updating the web sites this morning, Thursday 5th April, which meant that if any of you tried to update the web site, you may have seen a "System Error" page.

The extra checking introduced in Release 2.12f, necessary since the problems the last time this occurred, have worked very successfully, let you know not to continue and, as far as I can make out, no web site has been corrupted and members have been able to continue Browsing the web sites. It only affects Web Administration. If you think you may have a problem please email team@bridgewebs.net

The Auto ScoreBridge aspect of ScoreBridge links to Release 2.12e to upload. This also updates the results boxes on the Home page and, thus, writes the home and index pages as 2.12e. This has been happening since this feature was introduced at the beginning of the year (nothing to do with bridgewebs), but had not been recognized as a problem because of the variety of releases and, in time, the self correcting nature of the problem.

This may take a few days to correct to make sure that the Auto-Upload always uses the correct version for the site. (NOW Correct 22nd March)

Meanwhile, go to "Web Administration" and update the "Home" page and this will write the home and site index pages out at the correct release.

Release 2.14 completes the switch to BridgeWebs with all references swapped and one or two tidy ups found during checking it out. Clubs will be progressively upgraded during week commencing March 19th