Since early January new WatchBot (the bot) version is operating. Almost nothing changed from the user perspective, still I decided to make a note as some old bugs are gone, while some new bugs appeared.

A lot of people complained about bug which caused WatchBot to quote the same whisper (or other game information) twice (or even more times).

The bug is mostly solved.

To resolve the disconnection problems I migrated mekk.waw.pl to another Linode datacenter, now it is operating from London. So far it seems that it helped, not a single disconnection during first day of work (while from Newark there were a few connection breaks an hour).

You could notice that, since December, WatchBot started to have connectivity problems. The most visible effect is that a lot of games are splitted into many separate parts in spite of the fact that no adjournment by players took place.

Two small updates to the WatchBot website:

• whispers made by the people playing the game are marked with different background color,
• new quick search option is present in the sidebar.

A few small, but possibly useful improvements of the WatchBot search. It is now possible to search games by the result, use any rating ranges, and limit search to games commented by at least a few players.

I updated WatchBot website a little bit, adding some new filtering/navigation options which make it possible to reach older games. Also, it is now possible to follow WatchBot on Twitter.

The Watchbot games feed changed it's address and is currently available as http://feeds.mekk.waw.pl/WatchbotInterestingGames. Old address should be properly redirected, but I recommend updating it. New feed should handle less popular or older readers better and be faster (technically: it is filtered through feedburner).

Per-player feeds remain unchanged and work as described previously.

The feed notifies about games which:

New WatchBot feature. It is now possible to publish WatchBot games on external websites. So, for example, you can show the game you played on your blog.

Here is the example (one of my TeamLeague) games:

Have you ever been curious how is WatchBot picking the games to observe and save? Here is the explanation.