Some sites, notably www.youtube.com, have set up their discussion forum so that if a post is disliked by the majority of readers it either vanishes entirely or it at least "collapses" so that the average user doesn't have to look at it unless they really want to. This is sort of like a democratized "Whistle" that operates on sheer statistics rather than subjective administrative decisions.

We see all of these techniques (reddit, youtube, and others) as plausible ways to self-police otherwise chaotic message forums, each with their own particular pros and cons.

No solution is perfect, and there will always be an argument made for some alternate type of answer to the same problem. However it's worth mentioning that most of these sites don't offer the Ignore List nor the Favorites List.

Tpstar's suggestion is very clever, but in some ways radical. If I read his idea correctly, he wants us to make a copy of the game and then also make a copy of the kibitzing. Interesting but we would have to tread carefully, as never before have we allowed kibitzing to be duplicated. It brings up 100 side-effect issues.

However, the notion of using the upcoming Sandbox to address this sort of problem is very clever. Copying famous games for Sandbox play will be fully allowed, so somebody always can have a blank slate for a famous game and then start to insert whatever you want.

(For those worried about duplicates popping up in the real database: these cloned Sandbox games will be marked as "not for database insertion" from their very inception.)

The intention is that the link makes the scoreboard go away and reverts the page to the old styled "big table with tiny text" list of the players, in rating order. As you know, that feature is currently quite broken.

On the subject of ongoing tournaments, I'm not sure what to say other than that we apologize for any delays and we are trying to keep things current.

Also understand that occasionally the delays are intentional: you see, many tournaments provide PGN, but it's very sloppy PGN that requires hand modification before the database can use it. We're happy to cover these games--eventually--but we can't always promise to cover them daily. It's so much easier to fix a file of PGN from a tournament in one fell swoop than it is to fix it on a game-by-game basis.

There are other cases though where we have no excuse other than being distracted by other Chessgames related matters--we apologize and will do our best to avoid delays like that in the future.

On the subject of live games, we have wonderful news, especially for people like yourself who live in those time zones (like India and Japan) that rarely get to see live chess at a convenient hour.

That particular spot for www.pogonina.com is really an in-house ad. You see, Pogonina has agreed to team-up with Chessgames for at least the next month, and that ad is one small example of this affiliation. The collaboration between Chessgames and Natalia Pogonina will be more and more obvious between now and the end of the Pearl Nanjing tournament.

I just did a test and disabled my sidebar ads. After loading the homepage now I only see banners for in-site promotions: The perennial "Be Treated Like a King" ad, the "Can you Play Like Tal?" ad, the Chessbookie ad, and the new ad for Pogonina's website/blog.

Even with ads disabled I do in fact see a section that says "Chess Links" which links to Google ads. It's hard to see, way down on the bottom of the right hand side. That's actually a technical oversight.

This is Anatoly Vasilievich Alexeev