That's a very interesting idea.

About the name "Favorites", boy, we've invested too much into that word to abandon it, even though from your description it obviously could be used for people who are far from favored. (Should "black" be a permissible background color? You'd have to select the person's text to be able to read it.)

Maybe the tool would simply be called the "User Color" feature. The idea is that anybody on your Favorites List can be given a special color of your choosing. It's important that people who don't care about this can just not bother, and see everybody in their default color, just like they do now. But for those fastidious souls who want to organize people into color-coded groups, this is exactly the tool they need. We would even let these people sort their list by color, so they can see the groupings clearly.

We'd also include these colors in the My Favorites Page page, making it even more powerful.

We hardly need to change a thing to implement this. The hardest part is to make the interface that lets you paint users the color you want. I suppose to keep it simple we would offer a list of colors to choose from, and it would be fun for us to deciding what colors to include. (Don't worry, we'll give you "black".)

We understand that issue. We've tried to present tabular data ourselves and know what it feels like trying to fight against the weird formatting rules that we don't even fully understand.

<Is there a way to achieve this, for example by enclosing the posted text in some special tags>

Sadly, no. We've experimented in the past with ways to do this, in fact somewhere in this chessforum there was a special post I made which attempted to break into fixed-width bare bones layout. It looked great on my monitor but failed on several others, some users thought "Wow, they fixed it!" while others saw a garbled mess of characters. That's basically the reason why we don't go in this direction: compatibility.

One other little idea: Perhaps a color choice could be "invisible", which would make posts from the associated users disappear completely. In otherwords, the 'favorites' feature would be married to the 'ignore' feature.

If you don't like this idea, I wouldn't be surprised, given that the ignore feature has been around for a long time and changing things always opens a can of worms -- but there it is.

This one: chessgames.com chessforum

It is possible to approximate the table layout with normal text, though. Here's my try. Looks OK-ish in Safari on my Mac, with Verdana font, but I won't be surprised if it turns out to be garbage in other browsers or with font overrides.

Rank    Name                       Country   Rating

   ---    ----------------            -------     ------

    1     Anand, Viswanathan       IND    2792

    2     Topalov, Veselin            BUL    2769

    3     Kramnik, Vladimir          RUS   2769

    4     Ivanchuk, Vassily           UKR   2762

    5     Morozevich, Alexander    RUS   2758

    6     Mamedyarov, Shakhriyar AZE   2757

    7     Leko, Peter                   HUN   2751

    8     Aronian, Levon              ARM   2750

    9     Radjabov, Teimour         AZE   2746

    10   Jakovenko, Dmitry         RUS   2735

Anyhow, the real point is that these kibitzing elements are going to be stretched and stuffed into all sorts of shapes. We are already working on a very Blackberry-Friendly view of Chessgames and the iPhone is in our crosshairs as well. As narrow as these kibitzing columns are, we have to be prepared for them to get still more narrow.

We will always have to have enough horizontal space to accommodate one of these:

click for larger view

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
   wholly to be a fool
   while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
                        than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers.   Don't cry
  —the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
   for life's not a paragraph

     And death i think is no parenthesis

Please upload the (1) Timman-van Kampen games, and fix the "van Kampen issue" in the directory (see last page in my forum).

Besides that I think the top games of the (2) A-group are wort uploading.

T-vK: http://www.schaakstadgroningen.nl/i...

"Baby New Year"

Now, back on a proper computer, I tried out Guess-the-move for the first time. Superb feature, much more sophisticated than I'd anticipated. (Meaning: I got a fairly good score...)

As you say, the daily puzzle is a key part of the new user interface, and there's no point in expecting it to do party tricks. But Guess-the-move satisfies the very needs that some people are looking for.

The multi-colour idea sounds great too.

<CG> I read the rules again and spotted a minor typo at Guess-the-Move Help Page

Thank you very much for running the Holiday Present Hunt. You obviously spent a great deal of time inventing clues and hints, and it was fun to play the game. I noticed a distinct trend toward more math questions and fewer computer programming scenarios, yet the off-topic ones (Inverted Jenny, royal flush, Pigpen cipher) were very cute. From previous editions, my favorites were the direct quotes from classic books, although nowadays those might be too easily Googled to work in a contest. That was also very nice how you awarded so many Santa prizes.

Thanks