To me these are player pages filled with tons of childish crap. But with a few golden corns in between. Also, a new player page gets ruined every day. Do you really love this? - considering your "NOTE: Keep all discussion on the topic of this page. This forum is for this specific player and nothing else."

Example of ruined player page (there are now hundreds of them, if not thousands): R G Smellie, with kibitzing starting with: "This guy stinks." And later on: "Not anymore. He's been dead for decades." And with most of the rest off-topic, such as "a provincial election is taking place in New Brunswick in September", or vain attempts to show interest in the guy after all.

I can imagine there's an economic advantage (even if you lose some members) in keeping the "rich children". But can you have the best of both, serious player pages AND free kibitzing?

I suppose not? Here's my suggestion: to divert attention (from the player pages), create a CG Chat! That would be popular among the childish, and it's contents could be deleted regularly.

Or is it possible to have TWO kibitzing areas for each player? If so, one of them could be (designed for crap talk and) autodeleted with regular intervals.

The only time there is really a problem is when a player of note is used. Ken Rogoff is a grandmaster worthy of discussion, not to mention his career afterward. Louis Stumpers was one of the great old masters. It's somewhat upsetting that it's nigh impossible to discuss these players on our site.

The solution however is not to invoke a mass extinction event, deleting hundreds of pages of kibitzing. Not only would that come across as hamfisted and insensitive, it wouldn't even address the problem. What's to stop the entire process from starting up again?

nn - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nn_%28...

rn - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rn_%28... (written by Perl's creator)

They were great because they organized discussions into threads. And it was really easy to skip over the tit-for-tat exchanges that sometimes otherwise occupy a lot of real-estate in a forum.

C Holt vs Y Yu, 2014

has an illegal move 60.Kg2 etc.

I just thought I'd mention it in passing, the real reason for this post is the fact that I can't locate the game using the <Advanced Search> on the names <Colt + Yu>:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

Give some credit to the tournament organizers for the <Millionaire Chess Open, Las Vegas (2014)>

They fixed the <Holt--Yu> game. It ends after 59...h5

The corrected (for at least this game) PGN is still available here:

<zanzibar: Does anybody remember the old usenet news readers - like nn or rn> Oh of course, that was my first exposure to the internet. The topic of threading the discussion has come up before. I am admittedly vehemently anti-threading for pragmatic reasons. I don't feel like repeating the discussion today but you can read one of my rants on the topic here from many years ago: chessgames.com chessforum (kibitz #1859).

Since that post, a new animal has been invented: semi-threaded discussions. You see that on Facebook: you can reply to somebody's comment, but replies-to-replies are forbidden. I find that a clever compromise.

<I know <CG> has mentioned some problems with Chinese names before, but shouldn't this search work - one way or another?> Switchy is right, it has to do with the 3-character search limit that defaults with MySQL. But there is a way to find the game, because "Yu" is in the player pulldown. So for one player you type "Holt" and for the other player you manually select "Yu" and then you'll find the game.

<It would be highly cool if <cg> made it possible to search for two-letter names> No argument there; I can think a practical way to do that.

* * * * *

<RE: Three letter search minimum>

OK, I don't like using the drop-down box. I admit that I prefer just typing in the data directly. The drop-down only works for "big-name" players, anyways.

Of course I could convert to CG pids using my software, but that's "cheating".

I think that <CG> should at least put up a warning saying that it dropped all the data from an input field in these kinds of cases.

A suggestion to include the full name for the search and retry might be helpful.

That surprises me.

Some of the most brilliant combinations I've seen have been made purely to escape into a drawn ending. (And I don't mean mundane "wild rook" scenarios.)

Even if it is technically possible, is it right?

One man's "crap" is another's wit, and sometimes for even the most impartial of "crap deleters" it will become an existential dilemma to find the line of demarcation to enforce.

Slippery slope, I'd say.

And if you're the player whose posts are classified "crap" and deleted, how do you think you'll respond? Will any number of well-meaning explanations convince you that your contributions (as you see them) are so much rubbish?

I wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot blue pencil.

User: Sargon

I've have a look at a few of your games in your <Notation Errors> collection. But looking at just one, the first game:

A Diamant vs J Kraai, 2008

I see your comment:

A Diamant vs J Kraai, 2008 (kibitz #1)

Just notes the problem, without a source for a corrected movelist. There's no obvious correction in those cases, correct?

A Lein vs Y Shulman, 2006

Where you state that 2...b5 should be 2...b6:

A Lein vs Y Shulman, 2006 (kibitz #1)

Yet, <MillBase> also has the move 2...b5.

I'm not saying your assessment is wrong, but the game could be played with the pawn on b5 - even if the engine wants to play cxb5 for 50% of the moves. It's only a pawn, and wouldn't decide the game.

So, do you expect <CG> to change the score here without further evidence, or additional player consensus?

I won't feel comfortable without vetting this in the biographer bistro, at this level of material - and even then it's a dangerous game.

Yes. In many cases the penumbra of a topic is poorly defined.

For example, many of <Once>'s popular puzzle solution posts could be deemed at most tangential to the game in question. He talks of bishops and mating nets, of Caro-Kanns and kings, of why the Traxler is searing hot, and whether whigs have flings.

"Vainly expressed," some censors might deem them; at random from the main line. But any censor who deleted them would court electronic lynching.

<Off-topic posts are quite easy to identify>

You'd think so. Such a question does appear simple. But you know what they say about appearances.

Say someone posts about the player whose page it is, talking about a certain game in the context of opening theory. Then someone replies to that post, looking more closely into the opening line in question. A third poster then observes that the line can transpose into another variation found in a game between two other players. And a fourth offers a personal anecdote of what happened to him once in a tournament when he ventured that variation against an IM.

This is only one very common sort of scenario; there are numerous others. Where do you, as censor, draw the line? And if you draw it at comment <n> this time, does that mean you draw it at <n> again in a subtly but not insignificantly different sequence of kibitzes, or do you draw it at <n+1>? If the latter, how do you explain to the user who posted <n+1> in the first example why his post was deleted, while post <n+1> in the other remains on the forum?

<and could be deleted IMO after say 3 or more years.>

Possibly just in time to become enormously relevant or even prescient.

(Besides, why delete old posts? Are they in the way? Are you unable to avoid reading them?

An old post is a sleeping dog. Just let it snooze.)

<I'm sure the kibitzer of the deleted post would not protest, if he/she ever noticed.>

Which makes it all the more insidious.

Suppose that a discussion comes up in which you want to check what someone said in a long-ago conversation, on which your entire dispute may turn. You go confidently to Search Kibitzing, type in a username and a keyword or two, click the search button, and find ... nothing.

---

What you are proposing to do is create an amateur verbal vice squad, expected not only to enforce the on-topic "law," but also to make and interpret the law on the fly. Each separate forum purge will require a set of agonized decisions about what is and isn't relevant, and what that isn't quite relevant is worth keeping anyway, and what that is absolutely relevant is also rubbish.

That's at best, and already I don't envy you.

Then you also create a magnet for the kinds of people who *like* deleting other users' posts (or at least those of some other users). You end up in charge of a group that's more than half vigilante squad because you never know in advance which volunteer has what ulterior motives.

The great thing about dubious posts sitting in obscure corners collecting dust is that your eyes can slide right over them. They are "seen" but not observed.

So let it be with "off-topic" posting, the asbestos of the player page. Undisturbed, it hurts no one; it is attempts to "abate" it that fill the air with poison.