<I agree that there seems to be sitewise peace, at least for now. > Peace is just the short period in between two wars.

<However, I am concerned that keeping your games off limits for kibitzing may be a cornerstone of that peace.> Ever heard of Pandora's box?

<You know what is written on those pages. There is very little constructive. Bringing it back to life just invites people to rekindle extinguished flames.> I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

<But I'm never 100% sure about these things. Maybe it would be a fine idea, and people might be polite. I would like to see nothing more.> Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

No matter what the future might hold, I have to congratulate <AJ>, <TheFocus>, and <Colonel Mortimer> in particular for their recent peacekeeping accomplishment.

It is a joy to sign in to this site at the moment, in large part due to these three gentlemen currently treating each other with respect and kindness.

Thanks for uploading the games!

The game Kondor-Kopriva is missing - is the reason the game itself or the missing result. I just saw that I forgot to supply it. White won.

Black did not resign and the game was ended after 7.5 hours. Then a committee of two Brno and two Viennese players, plus an arbiter judged the game and in unison declared White the winner. So Vienna beat Brno 6:4.

Well, from what I've seen, these were not just repeated; many were copied word-for-word.

* the exact time when the prize banner got clicked

* identify runners-up -- anyone who clicked a premium banner and saw this: http://i.imgur.com/XEYCW.jpg and also implement <Al Wazir>'s idea from Kibitzer's Café regarding the winner recognition.

Also, consider differentiating between banners used for premium prizes and the 4-month extensions; this would help some to keep under the 5-prize limit and keep hunting for the premium one. Of course one might end up with 4 prizes, but this would have a beneficial impact of leaving more prizes for the others (consider that last year, 30 of the 64 prizes were grabbed by 6 people, and there were only 32 distinct winners while the first 3 years saw 40/43/41 distinct names on the winners' list).

All of the above should be trivial to implement.

Premise: premium prizes should go to the most difficult puzzles.

Observation: the most difficult puzzles are those which take the longest time to solve.

Proposal: defer the allocation of the premium prizes until the end of the contest.

This could get interesting in the combination with the knowledge of the time each already-solved clue lasted. I could imagine several people waiting out the 64th clue, each with one eye on the winning banner and another on a stopwach, waiting to click at the exact time the puzzle's duration would bring it into the premium pool.

We are open to ideas to change the rules of the Present Hunt. We were even toying with ideas of almost exactly that nature before the 2013 Present Hunt, but pressed for time and low on clues we decided the easiest course of action would be to leave everything exactly the same.

One concern is that sometimes a puzzle stays up for a very long time, not because it's a very good puzzle, but because it's too vague, or possibly even flawed.

For instance, our grand prize puzzle this year ("Sightseeing") wasn't insanely difficult, but it took a good bit of effort, it was perfectly fair, had no glaring mistakes, and was certainly not American-centric. So we can say for sure the winner deserved it. But back in 2011 the grand prize would have gone to tpstar for finally deciphering our ridiculous <8 = 93m> clue after multiple hints. I would rather see one of our best clues carry the prize than a weird/vague/wrong clue.

<COMMENT: The NN in this case is Niels Nielsen, playing the Polish Defense (1.e4 b5).>>

I thought that was called the "Oops."

(The kingside equivalent, 1. d4, g5?, is sometimes mistakenly called the Borg (Grob reversed) Gambit, but initiates of the system prefer to call it the Refuted Variation.)