by H.G.Muller » 16 Apr 2013, 08:48
This is not so much a WinBoard issue as a FICS issue. You can request an ICS to notify you of all kind of different events, by setting your 'variables', (vars or ivars), and it usually remembers the settings from one session to the next for registered players. With commands like "set seek 1" or "set seek 0" you can control whether you will be notified when someone places a seek ad, for instance. There are similar commands for being notified of all game starts (gin=1), all logins, etc. I don't know enough about FICS to know what they are. But with the command "variables" you can request your current settings, and with "set" you can then change their values.
Apparently Arena is programmed to intercept these messages, (perhaps for display in a dedicated graph or text window), and automatically turns them on. WinBoard only does this for seek adds, when you have the seek graph auto-refresh switched on.