<chessgames.com Silly me. If there is any moral to be gleaned from this it's probably to keep discussions with lunatics to a bare minimum.>

Silly you? cant be u are a cat owner:)

Btw furriners speaking strange languages like english dutch german etc( God knows what kind of chimps that was their teachers hehe).... sometimes comes up with good chess moves. Besides they can be entertaining, though not always intentional hehe.

Purrecisely. Fifty points to Gryffindor!

And thanks.

<The pgn submission tool could be changed in a way to show these mistakes, couldn't it?> It could and it should -- but here's the issue, we are working on a revolutionary idea which is still in the coming: the "Sandbox". Without rehashing old discussions too much (you probably remember the original discussions) the Sandbox introduces "PGN purgatory" where games can be ascended to the heavenly main collection or banished to the abyss.

One of the many side-effects of the Sandbox will be to revolutionize the method of game submission. For that reason, we're not interesting in spending time on tiny incremental improvements to the current upload system.

<I think that the pgn upload utility page shoud display more information on how to make the pgns look like. To avoid problems like 1/2 instead of 1/2-1/2, etc. and more exotic ones to avoid many pitfalls...>

We have to agree, that the current system has many problems but it's at least temporarily adequate for the job. The ultimate way to see if PGN is able to be inserted into the database is to actually try to insert it into the database--and that's what the Sandbox will do.

That being said, some of your questions are still very valid so let's run through them:

<To me, everything looks perfectly fine but apparently not to you.> Actually it looks perfectly fine to us too, and that's the problem! The admin sees a huge file of games that look perfectly normal, those em—dashes blend right in (did you notice I used used one?) and we don't see any problem at all. Only *after* the admin presses "ACCEPT" do the errors start to get identified. This is because our post-processing includes some very persnickety programs like the Opening Explorer, which demands to know answers to those picky questions like "*which* rook moved to e1?". It wouldn't be so sad if you got a courtesy email, but you're left to intuit that something went wrong. Sorry.

<What about a page showing new submissions to browse through?> We have such a page--for the ADMINS ONLY (!) and for good reason -- we want to go over this information first before it starts to become scrutinized by the masses. It can takes hours even with two people working on it to pour over a very large upload and get all of the details correct.

Of course, clever users can know roughly where our "max game ID" value is and keep their eyes peeled out for those games. We don't care if you are curious; just please don't use it to bombard us with premature corrections.

All of this is a temporary measure anyhow--the Sandbox will change everything.

<What happens to rejected games apart from being stored. Do you ever have a look at them even if no one asks you about them? Could't you allow volunteers to repair those pgns with simple mistakes like that (mistakes not concerning the moves themselves or date, result and players)?> They get dumped into a directory archived since the site began, called "/submitted". The format of the files in this directory looks like "Zebra.1146808493" where 1146808493 is the "Unix epoch-time" for when the uploads were processed (whether successful or unsuccessful.)

You piqued my curiosity so I just scribbled a Linux trick <grep '\[Black "' * | wc> which tells me how many games have been archived this way. It returns 55,030. The directory holds 45 megabytes of text data. The fate of these files is uncertain. Of course we'd never just delete them, but we aren't sure what to do with them. It sort of like the CG dead-letter office.

Anyhow, in summary we see lots of room for improvement, but the idea of a temporary "Sandbox" database that leads into the main database with admin approval (or user voting or whatever) we think is the way of the future. So your ideas for improvement are very important and we thank you for them, but the final implementation may not resemble the current upload system at all.

Something I try to do every working day with only limited success.

<I find that the best way to format a game for uploading is to run it through an engine like Fritz and then use the 'copy game' feature. No typing needed. Some judicious editing will remove unnecessary fields such as [plycount].>

We found the FIDE page: http://www.fide.com/component/conte... and you provided the chess-results page http://chess-results.com/tnr57319.a... but I still can't find any PGN.

Why? Trying to set Jasper up with your avatar?>>

Nope. Collecting evidence.

;p

<Could you give us your personal Top 10 list of site lunatics?>

Magnificent. Thank you, DF & CG & all.

Of course, I'm with <Hugin> when it comes to clemency for the *other* kind of lunatic -- but I reckon most of us have learned the difference by now.

And I'm very, very glad that you're up to speed on the Finan sockpuppets. It's hard to explain just how horrible it feels to be stalked by the guy. I tend to err on the naughty side where banter is concerned, but this guy gives me a sickening lurch every time. Please try to keep him far away.

When in doubt, press the green button (on that page):

http://live.chinaqiyuan.com/chess.h...

True, but I *like* to tidy them up a little. If the game is coming from one of my own Chessbase databases, I may want to snip out annotations (which may be somebody else's, and copyright, or mine, and rubbish). So I give games a once-over, removing extraneous fields in the process.

Annotations can then be posted as a kibitz, so people can debate them. I'm not a strong enough player to write the kind of annotations that deserve to be stuck to a game forever, and I think a bunch of exclams and/or Fritz eval is just pointless.

<Is it possible to have an Opening search function for team events like the European Club Cup? Personally, this is useful for me as I want to see what openings are being played in big events like this (the World Cup also comes to mind). Surely I can click on each player's name to see his/her games, but it would be awesome if I can see the games classified by openings. Thanks, <CG>!>

When ready, it will be easy to say "show me Carlsen games from last year's Linares" or "show me all of Svidler's world cup games"; not that those searches are impossible, but with a handy pulldown it will be 10 times easier.

Thank you very much for your extensive answer!

Maybe the "dead-letter office" could be accesible to user's via the sandbox feature for repair measures.

Just one last question on the old system:

What's the best way to proceed if a game you submitted doesn't show up (let's say for several weeks)?

a) Assuming there was a hidden mistake and resubmitting it differently (e. g. using a chessprogram to create the pgn)

b) Ask you (though posting questions regarding every single pgn would be quite impractical and cause you too much work)

c) Just wait

I think that all of those options have some drawback. What do you suggest?

<chessgames> What <Annie> said :)

Preferably one where he isn't hiding behind anything particularly bulky :)

The games are supposed to be broadcast live - http://2seeitlive.co.uk/icu/tfd.htm - but (uh, typically, I'm afraid) they seem to have technical problems. Which is why I'm here telling you about it instead of following the action.

But maybe you'll scoop up the games later? If not from TWIC, the ICU site should have them.