<cg.com>: As you know, I generally disapprove of sockpuppets.

Nonetheless, I'd like to know if there'd be any objection to my creating one for a specific purpose.

<Big Pawn> says he would like to debate <objective moral values>, but as it stands, he would use my past agreement with his position to claim "victory."

If, however, I carry on the debate under a pseudonym, that possibility is ruled out, and an actual debate becomes possible.

Are there any objections to this?

<OhioChessFan: Why not let it be a user default option? Click here for desktop view, click there for mobile view.>

Typically, the way it works is that the site identifies the user agent (browser) and renders the correct version for it by means of <conditional declarations>.

This means, among other things, that when it recognizes a user agent as associated with a PC, you see one version of the site, and when it recognizes one as associated with a mobile device, you get the other.

However the decision to drop the ECO from the new Kibitzing table went beyond the mobile concerns; it was just a space-filling column anyhow that we didn't think that many people were using. In the early days of CG we put a lot of "filler" around so that things didn't look so empty.

The problem is, as easy as those questions are, if you don't speak English they aren't easy at all. Chessgames has a large silent group that never posts but figures out how to use the features through common sense. I'd hate to lock such members out.

Or does it in some cases take a few hours or days for the "last seen" info to display?! I'm not sure on one of my older drives from a few years ago (that failed) whether I would've retained any sort of login cookie or whatever on such a device. Google sometimes seems to employ a security question type of device when it sees a mobile login versus the occasional public computer login/logout on some of their pages, making note to employ private browsing and a cache / history flush.

Give me a break, if that standard was applied evenly and effectively, then half the posters here would be sidelined indefinitely.

For example, that condescending poster <keypusher> seems to think he has acquired some measure of "ownership" here at <CG> constantly attacking me over time with multiple expletives, yet I guess that doesn't qualify as "Not Nice"

Explain that one

There are other indications that he might use a bot.

(Note: the above is not a statement to morfishine—I would never speak that way to anybody—that was a paraphrase of the "not nice" post in question.)

Several months ago we were having a discussion about infractions here and I made a metaphor of how one can speed across the highways in Florida and usually get away with it — chessgames.com chessforum (kibitz #25533).

To place it in context, I was responding to the oft-cited complaint (which one member bemoaned with almost pneumatic regularity) "You don't even enforce your own rules!"

I bring this up because morfishine's comment of "uneven and ineffective" somewhat resembles that complaint. I believe some people misinterpreted my highway-metaphor and I never bothered to clarify. I'll clarify now.

My point with the speeding metaphor was this: If you speed on Florida highways, you don't get a ticket each and every time your speedometer goes over 70 mph. However, this doesn't mean that Florida doesn't enforce its speed laws; anybody living here knows it does so quite well.

You might say Florida enforces its laws "UNEVENLY and EFFECTIVELY" — just like it should be. Nearly every driver tends to obey the law, not because a violation is met with certain and swift punishment, but just because it creates a liability which can easily be avoided.

To be "even and effective" we'd have to read every single post and weigh it on the basis of rudeness, whether its on-topic, and multiple other concerns. That's never going to happen. But if we take an occasional post and hold it up to the light, we hope to make all members consider what they are typing when they post.

If you think there is a specific member who is going unpunished feel free to report them.

Specifically, two years ago when we were making the Holiday Present Hunt, I had software that would find words that had specific properties (letters in just the right places). Such words tend to be "exotic" — for example ERSTWHILE, CLABBER, or SPHENOID.

For some reason I was using Search Kibitzing to locate these words in kibitzing. I found that nearly every single legitimate word was found somewhere in CG, but the more exotic the word, the more likely that the only person to ever have used it was Chris Owen.