Why do you find profanity sufficient cause to delete posts, and off-color humor intolerable enough to lock trusted members' forums until they delete it, but put up with posts that make me ashamed to tell black friends about this site?

Guideline 1 explicitly forbids racist language, but as far as I know it is *never* enforced.

Please address this issue.

We can pretend all is sweetness and light if we like, but I will tell you plainly that *nowhere* else I go, from Facebook to Al Jazeera to Ha'aretz to the Daily Mail, is so persistently disfigured by completely unregulated hate speech and gibbering mania as this site.

Have you noticed I haven't been here nearly as much as I used to be? Have you noticed the same of some other members (some of whom have been here for many years) who are getting sick of seeing lunatics roam the asylum, accosting them at will?

I was about to say this anyway, but your last sentence added impetus to my disgust.

Just how this started I don't know; maybe chessplayers just tend to be more aggressive or more passionate or more articulate in expressing their emotions than most people. But I can definitely tell you how it got this bad: because you let it.

I have been telling you for over a year now, both privately (for the most part) and publicly (when sufficiently annoyed by your non-responses), that you need to take control over your site.

Well, I don't doubt that you will now restore an illusion of such control, and placate the chorus of my detractors who will howl in rage over this post, by silencing me. But make no mistake: This is an illusion. Your site is in crisis, and you're sitting in here talking about coding and classification.

Nero could scarcely be more oblivious.

I would think the Rogoff flame wars would play themselves out soon enough.

The oceans are deep, but even they are not inexhaustible. And if this is so, then how much more easily depleted are the far shallower reserves of human patience?

I understand that Daniel has many demands, but I also know that this site has long ceased to be a place of peace for me and many others.

If you had black friends, Muslim friends, Hispanic friends who played chess, would you advise them to come to this site? Because, in good conscience, I can't.

This isn't about flame wars. Flame wars are weather. Persistent, unrelieved smoldering hate for ethnic or religious minorities is climate. Weather can be outlasted; climate cannot.

But I'm not going to say any more about this just now. Daniel will do as he feels he should; it is his site. And meanwhile, I've plenty of work to do on my own site. I will not be bored. :-)

I agree, until we get the games properly normalized, I couldn't recommend this site to any of my friends using the above classifications - or my Asian or Caucasian friends either! ;^]

(I almost never use emoticons, but here's a rare exception)

In any case, I am glad to hear this.

The general impression is that nothing is done about racist speech, and it's good to hear otherwise in this case.

Instead, they act on the offensive post and leave the fifty or sixty other offensive posts alone.

Would it be possible to allow for:

a) Constraining the opening tree to specific years (with the idea of looking only at relatively recent games to see what people are playing today, rather than what has ever been played)?

b) Selecting only games above certain rating threshold, in order to see what top players play, rather than everybody?

As an example, consider the main line in the closed Ruy Lopez at black's move 9:

Opening Explorer

As of now, there are 3,467 games with 9...Na5, and only 1,852 with 9...Nb8. If we look at the 2015 games with each move, they come out about the same number of times. Yet, if we look at the games, it is clear that top players prefer 9...Nb8. The reason why 9...Na5 appears to be so much popular if we look at stats only is because it is the older move (1902 for its first appearance, versus 1954 for 9...Nb8) and the opening tree does not discriminate by rating, title, or any other criteria.

I'd have no problem with adding some mechanism (if feasible) to show trends in opening preferences among leading players, but I believe constraining the results to show *only* recent games by the elite would be a mistake.

Here's why: Opening preferences don't necessarily reflect objective superiority; often, they are essentially matters of fashion, as different variations go in and out of style. Sometimes a line is under a cloud and is later rehabilitated; other times, it really is just a matter of what's popular at a given time. Either way, such preferences are "subject to change without notice."

In fact, if you look at what some of our top players have done lately, you'll see they've enjoyed success by reviving long-dormant lines, such as the Guioco Pianissimo, the Scotch and even the Bishop's Opening. This was done by looking at old games containing these unfavored lines and seeking ways to improve on what the old players did.

I think some of us here might like to have a similar option available, and it wouldn't be if the game selection were constrained by date and rating.

(But I'm not a fashionable fellow. Maybe it's because I'm an Aspergian, but I frankly take little to no notice of what anyone else is wearing — unless, of course, she's female and wearing very little.

Of that, too, I am always in favor. :-D )