The state of online bridge. Is there a recommended site?

[Kenny McCormack]

I used to play a lot on BBO (random pickup only, for various reasons, some
obvious, some not so...) until the system crashed in February.

As far as I can tell, this is the status:

1) BBO. Unusable, since some virus or malware (maybe Russian hackers)
got into the system in Februrary, causing the usable client to stop
working. AFAIK, all they have left is some weird browser version
that a) doesn't run on any of my machines and b) neither me nor
any of my friends understands.

2) OKbridge. Unusable because not free - and weird Lehman ratings
thing. Used it a lot back in the day, but haven't looked at it in
close to 2 decades.

3) All the others. Unusable because not enough critical mass.

Again, this is all AFAICT. Are there any that I've missed or any
recommendations people would like to make? TIA.

[Player]

The old client was retired by bbo. This has nothing to do with hackers. I agree that the new version sucks.

[Ian Zimmerman]

Post by Kenny McCormack
1) BBO.

[...]

Post by Kenny McCormack
2) OKbridge. Unusable because not free

Gratis or Libre?

I am on BBO fairly often, but all I can do gratis is to play with the
lovely house robots.

Before that, I tried bridge4free.com, but as you say there aren't really
enough players, and the client software is Java based.

[s***@gmail.com]

I also found BBO extremely difficult to load. Even when I
was able to load it, I found its interface inferior to that
of PlayOK for several reasons.

Post by Kenny McCormack
3) All the others. Unusable because not enough critical mass.

PlayOK.com is rather active. It has a simple, crisp and elegant
interface. Most of the players are East European, so timezone may
be a problem, and there are rather few players there who use
American-style bidding. If you're interested, Kenny, contact
me if/when you join; we can reveal our usernames and play together!

[b***@gmail.com]

Post by Kenny McCormack
I used to play a lot on BBO (random pickup only, for various reasons, some
obvious, some not so...) until the system crashed in February.
1) BBO. Unusable, since some virus or malware (maybe Russian hackers)
got into the system in Februrary, causing the usable client to stop
working. AFAIK, all they have left is some weird browser version
that a) doesn't run on any of my machines and b) neither me nor
any of my friends understands.
2) OKbridge. Unusable because not free - and weird Lehman ratings
thing. Used it a lot back in the day, but haven't looked at it in
close to 2 decades.
3) All the others. Unusable because not enough critical mass.
Again, this is all AFAICT. Are there any that I've missed or any
recommendations people would like to make? TIA.
--
The plural of "anecdote" is _not_ "data".

Try using the Opera browser. I had had the same frustrations with the BBO web client, but Opera seems to work as it handles Flashplayer, which the BBO client seems to need.

[Player]

The browser makes no difference as IE and Mozilla can use flash. The new client is rubbish though and ugly to boot.

[Kenny McCormack]

Post by Player
The browser makes no difference as IE and Mozilla can use flash. The new
client is rubbish though and ugly to boot.

From your lips to God's ears...

It'd be interesting to speculate on the 'why' of this. Obviously, whatever
explanations we get from BBO PR hacks and flunkies is to be discounted.
Any claims that it is actually 'better' are, clearly, rubbish.

My theory is that it has to do with advertising. They figured out that the
ability to deliver ads in the Windows version is severely limited and,
in fact, easy to disable (as I did years ago). I came to this conclusion
when I saw the version of Solotaire that comes with Windows 10. It is a
very nice program, except for one thing - the advertising is totally
integrated into the program. I'm assuming they are doing something similar
with BBO nowadsys.

The days of the free lunch - both in BBO and in the Internet as a whole -
seem to be disappearing fast. Remember this: Everytime some advertising
jerk exposes you to an ad, they are doing actual harm to you.

[Player]

Post by Kenny McCormack
My theory is that it has to do with advertising. They figured out that the
ability to deliver ads in the Windows version is severely limited and,
in fact, easy to disable (as I did years ago). I came to this conclusion
when I saw the version of Solotaire that comes with Windows 10. It is a
very nice program, except for one thing - the advertising is totally
integrated into the program. I'm assuming they are doing something similar
with BBO nowadsys.
The days of the free lunch - both in BBO and in the Internet as a whole -
seem to be disappearing fast. Remember this: Everytime some advertising
jerk exposes you to an ad, they are doing actual harm to you.
--
A 70 year old man who watches 6 hours of TV a day, plays a lot of golf
and seems to always be in Florida is a retiree, not a president.

Advertising? Maybe. The official reason is that it is too expensive to support to clients. There are still a few people who are allowed to use the old version - me for example. However we had to put in a special request quite a while ago. Anyway we cannot complain; after all it is a free site.

[Pertinax]

Post by Kenny McCormack
It'd be interesting to speculate on the 'why' of this. Obviously, whatever
explanations we get from BBO PR hacks and flunkies is to be discounted.

They aren't lying. The Windows Client downloads the data on every table and every player when you log in. That imposes a high load on their server and when a lot of people were using, it caused the server to overload and dump half the players quite regularly. The Windows Client also supports hacks to do rubber and total point and other specialised tournaments that they would rather not have running.

So it is be much cheaper for them to maintain one browser version for everyone and they developed a Flash version a decade ago and tried to move everyone to it. However, they never got many of their paid services to work in the Flash version, so had to continue allowing the Windows Client then Google, Mozilla and Apple got rid of Flash. So now they have had to rush a HTML5 version.

Their new versions were never as good as the old Windows Client so people didn't move across. They started blocking people new accounts using it 6 or so years ago to reduce the number using it, then started blocking people who didn't buy $BBO from using it about 18 months ago.

There is advertising in the Windows Client (which is buggy and sometimes crashes it) but not in the new version. BBO make their money from people renting robots and the pay tournaments.