Also while I've got your attention, your fine post <john barleycorn: 2 earlier games not in this database…> is great, but would be even better if also submitted to PGN Upload Utility. If we all take that approach, one day it will be very difficult to find legitimate games not in our database. Thanks!

<thegoodanarchist: CG.com Could you please add a link at the bottom & top of the page that will take the user to the pun submission page?> Sorry, we just don't see it as a 'core feature'. New users would have no idea what it means, and advanced users should have some idea of where to go.

<Check It Out: CG: I've sent you an email with a screenshot of the problem.> That's definitely a problem but very hard to explain. You've got us scratching our heads over here. Daniel will stay in touch.

<davide2013: Would it be possible to add this game to Guess the Move? J Bruehl vs Philidor, 1783> We should probably run through Philidor games and process nearly everything. Anyhow, if it's good enough for GM Alterman it's good enough for us! Thanks, it will be processed soon.

<davide2013> <Due to the obscurity of the players> Ahhh, that old message. The error is designed to prevent games like sub-2200 vanity games from slipping into GTM but of course there must be a ton of worthy exceptions. It's in the queue now. If you have a number of such games feel free to email us with a list.

This is quite true. MS Word (like much MS software) is bloated with excess code. The safest procedure is to copy from plain text, which is free of formatting data that can confuse the site, but if you do copy from a browser, watch for special characters, such as curly quotes and long dashes, which are apt to appear in your posts as null or default characters.

<Q: Will the recipient know who gave them their premium account?

A: Only if you tell them. By default, the process is anonymous.>

That's a nice way of saying "we offer no features whatsoever so work it out on your own." It clearly could be improved.

I think the best most flexible feature would be if one could attach a note with the membership, so you could say "for your great puzzle of the day posts" or whatever they want; and if course if they choose they could use it to reveal their identity.

<Houston>:

<mangled Wikipedia links that appear in some biographies>

By no means do I wish to dissuade you from working your code magic to solve this problem.

But in the long, long run- ideally our biographers should aim for having <zero> wikipedia links in the bios, for several reasons.

First, despite the rumors we might hear about chess wikis "getting better"- they aren't.

Second, the "sources" for chess wikis invariably contain dozens of weblinks, all too many of which no longer lead to an actual web page.

I see no evidence that anything is being done to solve this problem, and it's a "deep reference problem" and a real problem.

Ideally- and again, in the long, long run- our bios should be sourced to reliable contemporaneous material.

That is the academic standard for history writing, and I submit it should also be the academic standard for chess history writing at cg.com.

Finally, there are far too many "hoary old favorite tales" about our favorite chess masters in the Wiki entries.

These tales may be fun to read but there's no reason to believe any of them is true until actual sources are found that substantiate them.

All that said, I do understand that the number of bios is enormous and that the number of biographers is very limited.

If the warm, kind and affable Mr Goldsby can't take criticism over one of his videos then I suggest he stops violating that "No spamming" guideline (or is it a rule? ) by posting his confusing videos here in the first place.

If I decided to post links to videos and webpages and someone, whether rightly or wrongly, didn't like them and decided to use humour to tell me this then I could have no complaints whatsoever. Or id develop a sense of humour and just take the verbal shots.

We'll see what we can do about that.>

Also not too important, but nonetheless still of some interest I believe.

Can you let us know how long the backlog is?>

I've been waiting for almost exactly as long.

Oh drat—there's a typo in the GOTD master file. We are as always running low on (good) puns but that's not the reason why.

<instant messaging> We've always loved the idea but were surprised to see great apathy for the feature when we asked about it on a questionnaire some years back and also informally discussed it here. I still think we'll have it one day.

<pgn submissions> Just processed another truck full. A few games which would make for good puzzles.

<deleted posts> Some people's posts were deleted from one of the Carlsen-Anand pages when it was decided there were about 20 posts which, on the whole, were off-topic. Some more than others. It's possible that some innocent post got swept away with the others; if so, our apologies. If you insist on further details contact us by email.

<utf-8> Switching is right, it's pretty standard stuff, but unfortunately even standard UTF-8 can make your head spin. We're still on it.

Shouldn't be too hard to convert it to Unicode.

Anything from 0 to 127 is a 1-byte character that can be converted to Unicode very easily:

<Unicode = byte1>

Anything from 128 to 191 continues a character that started earlier.

Anything from 192 to 223 is the start of a 2-byte character that is a little but not much harder to convert:

<Unicode = [(byte1 - 192) * 64] + byte2 - 128>

Anything from 224 to 239 is the start of a 3-byte character...

<Unicode = [(byte1 - 224) * 4096] + [(byte2 - 128) * 64] + byte3 - 128>