[Event "1st World Correspondence Chess Ch"]
[Site "?"]
[Date "1950.??.??"]
[EventDate "?"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "*"]
[White "Watzl, L"]
[Black "Viaud, Adolphe"]
[ECO "B70"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]
[PlyCount "37"]

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 g6 6. g3 Bg7 7. Bg2 O-O 8. O-O a6 9. h3 Qc7 10. Bg5 e6 11. Qd2 Ne8 12. Rfe1 Nc6 13. Nce2 f6 14. Be3 e5 15. Nxc6 bxc6 16. c4 Be6 17. Rac1 Rd8 18. b3 Qb7 19. f4 * {At this point Viaud withdrew from the tournament.}

By designating it as "*" and not "1-0" I am assuming that for purposes of scoring the tournament, Watzl did not gain a point? If the game was adjudicated or forfeited, we should use one of the normal three results.

In particular, you rely much too heavily on <Graham Cree's> website.

1. He is no longer running the site- if you click on your hyperlinks you get either a GIGANTIC AOL ONLINE advertisement or the creaky WAYBACK MACHINE.

2. (more importantly) Many of Mr. Cree's historical anecdotes are suspect, some flatly incorrect, and almost all of them are unsourced.

Why not give your most trusted member biographers power to edit these pages, not just the player bios?

They have access to thousands of actual chess history and tournament books, and access to our wider membership who also have tons of these actual books.

Real books with actual sources so at least we can know where the information came from, and can better evaluate historical claims in your intros to this important feature-History of the World Chess Championship

When you finally do convert the Historical Tournament Games pages to Official CG.com Pages- with crosstable, games listed and kibbutzing feature (a great idea btw)-

I sincerely hope you don't go with this kind of introduction:

Botvinnik-Smyslov World Championship Match (1954)

as opposed to the much, much more substantial kind of introductions written by the actual games collection creators, such as this one, for example- Game Collection: 1940 US Championship

The second is much preferable to the first, for obvious reasons.

I sincerely hope you don't "throw the detailed accurate historical intros out with the bath water" when you make this switch over.

re recreating fen-strings in delete boxes:

<In short, what your asking for could be accommodated but it would require a major revision to our method of posting. Sorry.>

being a computer guy and perl practitioner i have to disagree: what you have stored for a post should be more than enough to "unparse" it back to the naked fen, which is all that would be needed to save people from manually having to do the work. consider this code, which i *assume* is stored, more or less:

javascript: OpenWin ('/perl/fen?fen=8 /1P5p/8/p1Pk1pP1/2p2B2/2Kp4/P3r2P/8')

hms' suggestion -

<Have the <fen-string> appear in the <delete box> instead of having the <fen-diagram> appear.>

- is simply a question of replacing the javascript nugget with the fen-part of it, making the above turn into simply <8 /1P5p/8/p1Pk1pP1/2p2B2/2Kp4/P3r2P/8> alternatively enclosed by space. if there's a problem with how functions are chained in your implementation, so that the transformation from fen to the javascript nugget is hard to "avoid", then it can be worked-around in the same way as i did above, by adding a *space* or some other fixed character in the fen-string, for example in front of the first slash ("/"). for hms and others (me included) this would be a big improvement over having to do all this work manually.

to the best of my understanding this should require <no changes> to what's actually stored in your database, only some minor code fiddling, the amount slightly depending on how your perl code is organized.

<Benzol> yes I remember that reply- thanks for reposting it. However, note that the reply says nothing whatsoever about the point I raised today. What will happen to the actual introductions to the collections?

Will they be left intact (a very good idea) or will they be converted into brief, often inaccurate and badly sourced blurbs (a very bad idea)?

Adequate sources are those as close as possible to primary sources.

There exist a golden handful of truly excellent chess history books *and* websites that not only use primary sources but also properly footnote to those sources.

Among the membership at this website, we have access to many of these golden books.

Along the lines of "if it's not broken don't fix it," why not stick with your existing trusted cadre of members who currently enjoy editing privileges on the player biography pages? I can't think of a better crew to update the <History of the World Championship> introductions.

I'm in close contact with a few of them and not only are they excellent- without doubt- recently, some of them have been doing an extraordinary amount of work to update and improve the player bios, particularly those of the more prominent figures in chess history.

<subheadings> Incidentally we are working on a tiny tweak to allow for classier looking subheadings in biographies. You can see it in the Alekhine biography now.

The new rule is that if something is enclosed in <pointy brackets> and also at the very start of a paragraph (or on a line all by itself) it assumes that the text is intended to be a heading. At that stage the pointies become invisible and the text turns into dark-brown boldface. You can see this on the Alekhine page right now and a few others we were testing on.

We don't want to force people to change their habits, or to learn anything new at all really, so the idea is is that people can keep using the same conventions they have always used and the output will look a little classier. At least, we hope it looks classier.

On the other hand, some people have grown to love the little pointy brackets and may hate to see them go. So regard this change as both minor and potentially temporary. In any case there's no reason to go changing biographies to accommodate this change.

(cf the requests of <hms> and others.)

here goes: i don't know how useful this is, but i whipped together a little prototype that intends to be a smooth work-around until cg.com makes a more proper fix for these convenience issues. <here's how it works>:

by copying the full source code of an existing cg.com page with kibitzing (player pages, game pages, tournament pages, user forums, the kibitizer's cafe, etc - but *not* kibitzing preview page, for instance) into an input text-area on my site and clicking a button, my script will try to "undo" most of the changes that are made to a post by the cg.com post-script. specifically

1) diagrams are remade to show its fen on the right, and if such posts are copied and pasted, only the fen will show up in your text input window

2) chess notation, like xg2 or , is turned into postable notation again (otherwise the copied graphics simply disappear)

3) links are turned into normal text again, fully expanded (not the truncated variation with ... at the end)

4) the kind of links that were "user specific" due to ignore lists are turned into ones that work for everyone, to the extent that's possible (same limitations as with the link converter i made, see my profile for details)

5) all posts on <any> page that is "unparsed" this way are printed with a <universally valid> link at the top of each post, so that if you want to refer anyone to a specific post, you can simply copy that link and it will work, regardless of anyone's ignore lists. note that this method will work for all pages, also the pages where my simple link converter does *not* work.

i.e. if you have posted something that you want to edit (=delete/repost), then just copy the source for the page where your post is into my script, unparse it and copy the post of interest.

a major <disclaimer> for all of the above: i've done some testing, but i would be surprised if there aren't cases i haven't considered. after all the business of heuristically unparsing stuff is just that, heuristic, and i've only done a quick, regexp-based parsing of the pages' html without giving it too much thought.

please try it out if you feel like being a beta-tester; feedback can be posted in my player page. hopefully cg.com will render the need for this hack void in the future, but at least it's a proof of concept prototype.

the totally unflashy input-page where the page source can be posted is here: http://chess.liverating.org/postcon...

to get the page source of a page (like this one) various browsers have similar methods:

a) firefox: right-click in the background, choose "view page source"

b) ie: right-click, choose "view source"

c) chrome: same as the above - but i ran into this awesome tutorial for chrome users: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkWM... :o)

anyway, just mark and copy everything in the html-viewer and post it into the text-area on http://chess.liverating.org/postcon...

this was probably a bit unclear: what happens is that a new temporary page is created ("on my site") which contains all the posts of the original cg.com page, with the significant difference that afterwards the posts essentially look like how they were first input(*) by the kibitzer.

from this new page with "raw/unparsed" comments one copies the post of interest - typically the one you just posted - into a kibitz box on cg.com and makes the intended changes. of course one can copy (parts of) the contents of somebody else's posts too, which can be useful to reuse diagrams, etc.

i probably make it sound more complicated than it is; recreating a post only takes 10-15 seconds when you get the hang of it.

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