People agreed with me - that trying to PUNISH me for my conservative stance on a chess site ........ was, well, simply inane and ludicrous.

The sheer volume of information each day was taking up so much home-page space we decided to limit the list only to the most eminent players, at least temporarily.

I forget the exact rules off hand, but to get birthday greetings you need a decent number of games in the database or a very high rating.

<Blunderdome: With everything going on on this page, you might have missed the request by <notyetagm>, so I'll second it: we could use a forum for the Russian Higher League Championships. The Ukranian Championships>

I don't feel prepared to make some exhaustive statement on the Goldsby situation, but let me just summarize what I feel are a few important points:

• Over the past few months some pages have exploded into a flame war. Not just a "heated argument" -- no sir, this is a full-blown, no-holds-barred, cover-your-children's-ears, flame-war. We are very well aware of this.

• The only reason we haven't gone absolutely ballistic over this affair is that these flame wars are fairly well contained to specific pages that have no great importance. That does NOT mean we sanction them.

• We've often heard it said "If only Chessgames enforced their own rules, there would be no problems." That opinion is well intentioned but naive. While rule #3 exists to discourage flame-wars, and comes in quite handy at times, it's no silver-bullet. Ultimately, members of the site will behave as they choose, and removing a few posts is not going to substantially change anything.

• A few months back we removed a handful of games due to Whistle complaints that they were of very low quality. We are going to stop honoring these requests with regards to Goldsby games, as it is clear to us now that the people issuing these complaints are not really concerned about database quality whatsoever.

Heh - your sense of humor is one of the things I most like about this site. :)

True enough, Annie, but if they are new enough players poor opening choices will be but one of many problems they will face.

Even if we restrict the statistics to GM vs GM games, they still don't tell us <why> game results occurred. Maybe GM X got a nice opening advantage against GM Y only to have it all go sour in the middlegame or the ending.

Maybe there's since been a change of policy regarding this site's management of the ongoing Goldsby Bashers' Affair. But based on CG's history throughout the years of addressing these flamewars - historically here, A J Goldsby (Oct 17 2005) and recently here A J Goldsby vs F Goodenough, 1974 (Jul 2010) - I had concluded that these disputes were a drain on this site's administrative resources.

So I thought it would be a good idea to find a way to make the current truce permanent, since this would be an improvement to the site, and suggestions for improving the site are encouraged to be included in this forum (at the top of the page).

I used the idea of creating leverage for permanence, but the particulars of this idea were rejected. The notion wasn't an attack on AJ or a nefarious aim to censor him, but a means to keep the peace.

I don't think it was right for others to attack me as the trouble-maker, or to question my patriotism, but I understand and forgive them for doing so. Hopefully the conversation in User: hms123 's forum has helped to clear to the air between us.

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<...stop honoring these requests with regards to AJ's games, as...these complaints are not really concerned about database quality...>

But the question of 'skewing' the stats - particularly in Opening Explorer - is not important here. That is, there *are* many cases where statistics are misleading -- but the most likely cause is a preponderance of older games before a later improvement or refutation was found.

Even in the chess365 database, with thousands of very weak games, the more accurate opening lines tend to come out ahead. The same is generally true here, as long as you check the dates when games were played.

<365chess - correction>

365Chess contains a "masters' database" where both players must be 2400 or more, and a "big database" which includes thousands of weak games. People interested in opening tendencies could compare the 365 masters' database to the Opening Explorer.

Thanks for the backup and reminder to cg.com. :-)

UKRAINIAN CHAMPIONSHIP, TWIC PGN -> http://www.chess.co.uk/twic/assets/...

All completely useless, inane babble, and even wildly inappropriate - given the comments of the people who actually run this site. I decided - on my own - only to submit certain games, with the criterion that my opponent be rated at least 2000+ before I submit any more games. (I had my own reasons for doing this - and it had actually had little to do with the backbiting here.) It had more to do with the fact that I HAVE beaten many good players, names like Muhammad, Melvin, Baker, etc. (All 2200+.) I want people to focus on those games more, I am hoping to match these with more additions - in the future. Basically, I would like the next 20 games to be all against masters ... or at the very least, experts.

As the good folks here have already conceded: <<We are going to stop honoring these requests with regards to Goldsby games, as it is clear to us now that the people issuing these complaints are not really concerned about database quality whatsoever.>>

There was no doubt in my mind that my critics could care less about the quality of the database. If I defeated a 2400, they would find a way to malign it. The ONLY thing these people were concerned with was the fact that I was one of the participants - IF my name were NOT there, these same yahoo's would have nothing to say, whatsover.

I hope that this is a pleasing result (development) to everyone.>