This may have been asked and answered, but is there any chance the ChessBookie will come out of hibernation?

Now it can be told: there was a potential cheating scandal last leg, which if true, means that several accounts were being maintained by one person. We have no absolute proof, but the silence of certain members speak volumes.

We've known for years that the popularity of the game has waned, and combined with the possibility that a large number of players were really sockpuppets, this means it may be worse than we imagined.

Furthermore it had become burdensome to run the game for a small number of fans.

We are considering three options:

1. Taking a leg off from the ChessBookie game and resuming it, possibly with some software changes to make the game more appealing.

2. Recruiting a CG member volunteer to help us maintain the game.

3. Discontinuing it indefinitely.

We've always considered ChessBookie! to be one of the most creative and original site features and it would be a shame to discontinue it, so options 1 and 2 are the most appealing. A decision must be made soon.

2. Bookie game, option 3 is definitely not 'good'. It is unfortunate that people would try to cheat.

I don't fully know that is involved with 'maintain the game', I may be interested, but don't know how much time I have (per day) for this.

Option 1 sounds best (for now) without knowing the details of the cheater/cheating method, and what software CG.com is going to implement.

Good morning.

There is some concern about this from other members as well as the reliable <BOOMIE>.

This was posted today by User: Sally Simpson, who is in fact Geoff Chandler from ECF and his own well-known website, http://www.redhotpawn.com/blog/blog...:

Carlsen vs Caruana, 2014

It would be great to get an updated "state of the union address" on the corrections backlog.

I would also like to suggest trusting your biographers to make a greater number of direct changes.

<Boomie> You are right, that a reversed result probably should be a high priority. Unfortuantely it does not at this time. We do have a system of prioritization, and here are a few factors:

• How long it's been waiting
• The category of page (player, game, etc.)
• Our confidence that the correction is true
• Whether or not the submitter is a CG Editor
• Whether or not the game is part of the Tournament Index

Adding more factors to this list would probably be a good idea.

Truth be told, the member who submits the correction has an influence as well, regardless of editor status. Over time the Librarian has learned that some users you must take with a grain of salt, while other users you can take to the bank. That's not to say that any correction is completely ignored.

More than a few users have an awful habit of assuming that anytime they have a source that contradicts CG, their source must be right and CG must be wrong, even if their source is a database rife with errors, or a book by an author of questionable repute. One user in particular has been the cause of many back-and-forth corrections due to this behavior, and I don't mind when the Librarian gives that member's corrections a very low priority. (I won't call anybody out, but let me say it's not anybody who frequents the Bistro.)

Another "bad habit" is posting corrections in the Kibtizer's corner instead of making a slip. This creates two problems: One, it's very unlikely to be read by an admin so you can expect no action to be taken. Two, when action is taken the Librarian has the extra chore of deleting comments that are rendered obsolete and possibly confusing. However if something appears to be wrong on a game but you are uncertain, the Kibitzer's Corner is the appropriate place to expression your skepticism. That way other members can try to get to the truth of the matter and only then submit the slip.

It's worth mentioning: if you submit a correction slip and notice later that it has not been acted upon, making a second correction slip will accomplish nothing. Your second slip will simply be appended to the original one. It doesn't make our work any harder or easier, but it is a waste of your time.

I sometimes hear talk of corrections "slipping through the cracks." If by that, you mean that they are neglected for a long time, you are right. If you mean that somehow they vanished, you are wrong. We have every correction ever submitted: about 14,000 of them, about 2300 of which are now in the queue.

It's also worth noting that a slip that reads simply <The result is 0-1> may intimidate the Librarian from handling it right away, as it appears (at least superficially) speculative. More than once we've received a correction slip based merely on an assessment of a final position that turned out to be incorrect (due to time controls, forfeits, missing or incorrect moves, and other factors.) The Librarian would have to go to another database in an effort to corroborate your claim.

Eventually we do indeed corroborate such claims, but expect the Librarian to pick the low hanging fruit first.

We have recently implemented a behind-the-scenes system to allow admins to place permanent notes on games, players, tournaments, etc. This way, if somebody provides some unexpected information we will not be vulnerable to a speculative correction later that reverses the truth back to the mistake.

<Is the Correction Slip process broken or what?> It may seem that way but we process many hundreds of correction slips per month. In spite of this, the number of corrections hovers around 2000.

About half of these we nickname the "bedrock", which are corrections that are very complicated, difficult to understand, require additional research, or deemed too speculative to take immediate action. Some of them are years old. If a correction will take a long time to accomplish, I'm sure you all agree it would be best to set it aside and handle a slew of more simple (and possibly more crucial) corrections in the same time frame. It's been suggested that some of these "bedrock" corrections could be made public in the Bistro (or perhaps in the Librarian's page). Some of them are very interesting, while others seem to be long speculative rants.

It's also important to realize that often a single correction spawns a slew of further corrections. For instance, suppose a correction states <White in this game is Canadian Fred Derf, not the American who is also named Fred Derf.> She will look up the name Derf in the database, and perhaps realize that there is a record for Frederick Derf, and another one for F Derf, and then realize these pages contains both Canadian and USA games, and suddenly what was a single correction slip explodes into dozens of necessary corrections. Because of this, at the end of the month it's not uncommon to see on the progress report that 400 correction slips were processed, but 600 corrections were made. The poor Librarian never gets credit for those extra 200, because they are being fixed without you realizing it. However, they are just as important as any formally submitted slip.

We have also been contemplating ideas suggested to hand over some of the Librarian's more trivial duties to diligent CG Editors. In fact, I think it's a great idea, and the work remaining is a programming task. That change alone might be the biggest single improvement we can make.

Hiring an additional librarian is also a topic going around the office, the biggest obstacle being that it requires a very special skill set. One must be at least a chess amateur, have at least a passing knowledge of chess history, be proficient in foreign names and their endless transliterations, know their way around Olimpbase, fide.com, and other prominent sources, in addition to having a fastidious eye for detail. Those aren't the kinds of skills we can find with a classified ad.

The CG Librarian forum needs to be resurrected for one purpose or another. She's not much for chatting online and at this point I'm not even sure if she checks the page.

I am very sympathetic to your collective frustrations and we really are working on ways to make the system better. However, the empirical proof that the system is not "broken" is witnessed by the simple fact that the total number of pending correction slips is not growing in number.

<Daniel>

Thank you very much for a largely optimistic, and detailed report.

I wish to take issue with two of your points.

##############################

1.

<Another "bad habit" is posting corrections in the Kibtizer's corner instead of making a slip. This creates two problems: One, it's very unlikely to be read by an admin so you can expect on no action to be taken. Two, when action is taken the Librarian has the extra chore of deleting comments that are rendered obsolete and possibly confusing.>

I couldn't disagree more strongly to this. Correction posts on a game/tournament kibbutzing page should never, ever be deleted.

These kibbutzes form a narrative over time about who has posted what information from what source. This is crucial to understand better what actually may be the state of affairs. In addition, posting on the pages often attracts other people who have sources to help, and who can add to the "narrative" on the game page. This is precisely how the actual facts about a game may best be uncovered.

###########################

2.

<It's worth mentioning: if you submit a correction slip and notice later that it has not been acted upon, making a second correction slip will accomplish nothing. Your second slip will simply be appended to the original one. It doesn't make our work any harder or easier, but it is a waste of your time.>

If this is a waste of my time there is a serious problem with your protocol.

I have recently resubmitted a corrections slips for two games, because the second slips provided new corroborating evidence that I had found from New source(s).

If this evidence isn't "added" to the 1st slip as an accumulation of corroborating evidence, then there is a big problem with the protocol.

Further corroborating evidence accrues from further research. The person who made the initial slip with initial source(s) is often motivated to keep looking into the game further.

This was the case in the two instances I'm speaking of in my case.

####################

Finally- points (1) and (2) are closely related. The protocol should encourage the accumulation of good evidence, not discourage it.

I agree that resubmitting a correction slip without new information is pointless. But are you ignoring "resubmissions" on principle? Because if you are, then you will be ignoring resubmitted slips with new information that provides an accumulation of evidence.

<So I supposed that when the slip is processed, they'll probably glance over the later one(s) to check for additional information.>

I hope you are right.

The game shows up on my screen.

Have you tried using a few different browsers?

Could be a temporary browser issue.

Is this the only game page that comes up blank for you?

There might be some weird code on the page that only affects your current computer settings, although I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.

Is your computer running?

#1 - The "chore of deleting comments that are rendered obsolete and possibly confusing." — I do appreciate the fact that this provides an evidence trail that can help future research. Judgement calls are made in this respect. We don't *always* delete comments relating to corrections, especially if there is a kind of a debate over the issue. Sometimes however it would be silly to retain the comment. Examples:

<The last move should indicate mate with the # symbol>

<Pretty good game for Michael Adams, considering he wasn't even born yet lololololol>

<Did Kasparov really hang his queen, and Karpov not take it?> (In the case of an obviously spurious move which is archived in the alternate-game score area anyhow.)

We would NOT delete a comment like this:

<The result is 1-0 according to page 362 of the December 1924 'Wiener Schachzeitung'>

or even like this:

<I doubt this a game of GM Smith's, it looks amateurish.>

<Daniel> Thank you for spelling it out so clearly, I really appreciate your patience to do that for me.

I feel very relieved.

I agree with your elaboration; it seems we are on the same page on the two points I was worried about.

In conclusion, I'm bullish on the current Onion- especially on the part that it's just a code challenge, as opposed to an procedural objection, to giving the biographers the ability to change directly the site, event, result, and name fields.

After all, we can already change the year- that is easily as "big" a privilege as changing the other fields I just listed.

I hope you can build the appropriate secret codes soon to allow us to make those further edits.

We were rather hoping Carlsen would win today so that his game tomorrow could have more importance in the standings.

Kramnik vs Caruana, 2014 has great significance in the standings because if Kramnik can win he'll catapult from 2nd place to 1st.

Game History Page (long version)