I believe that unless its your opponent's move in all of your games you can't turn vacation on.
One of my two timeouts is for this very reason. I don't recall getting an overt error message, although I may have just missed it in the hectic pre-vacation flurry.
This may be what happened with your situation.
This is correct, as a free member, you must make sure it is not your move in ANY game. Then, go to this screen, click on the box next to "Pause my games". Then, and many many people miss this part, click the save button on the bottom of the page. After that, there will be a confirmation box that pops up, confirm in the box, and you should be all set.
Baseballfan: thanks for the info. i tested it yesterday... it works. But how do i get to "setting" without doing it through your message?
Home->Account->Online Chess Settings
Incidentally, if many people are missing the "Save" step (and I may well have been one of them) then it's probably indicative of a place where the interface could be improved.
Perhaps something as simple as putting a dedicated save button next to the vacation settings would help by ensuring that it's right in front of the user when they're trying to turn their vacation on instead of down off the bottom of the page.
Perhaps even better would be triggering the save directly from the checkbox (still triggering the confirmation dialog, of course), bypassing the need to explicitly click the save button altogether....
TheGrobe, you are probably right. We'll consider some of those changes for future updates to the site.
Baseballfan: thanks for the info. i tested it yesterday... it works. But how do i get to "setting" without doing it through your message?
A faster way is within a game board, at the bottom below Submit Move, Offer Draw or Resign button is a link for changing your vacation settings.
Um... I want to know how to put my status to vacation because a few weeks ago I tried to put on vacation so I can do some reviewing for the exam, not studying, reviewing. So I went to setting and placed vacation for about 2 weeks.
I didn't trust myself or the system so I log in and took a peek after 2 days just to make sure... I saw all my games are going to run out of time in... less than 10 hours... I used my intense speed to finish the moves... about 30 games that is... and some people are online so they keep moving making me breathless...
I don't want something like that to happen ever again... so can someone tell me how to set vacations? (I limited my games now just to make sure I will have enought time, lolz)