4PC Opening Explorer - Discussion

Hey, so some of you might know that I am building an Openings Explorer. At present I have installed approximately 400 positions (all of them being within the first moves of Red and Blue so that each of these positions can be discussed whether good or bad). In time I will be adding more lines but this is where I am currently at. I am also going to be extremely busy over the next month whilst I finish my dissertation so thank you for your patience.

Here I ask for your input and suggestions for whilst I'm building the Explorer and also if anyone would like to volunteer with the project, either by way of inputting entries or suggesting openings that may be undocumented.

Current Progress:

As it stands I have made the following choices and decisions:

- Each position within the explorer will follow a set format which will include it's notation in simplified "Algebracket" notation, a PGN4 of the position, the person/s credited with first playing an opening and when it was first played, an image of the position using the colourblind palette as given from the 4pc server, main continuations, main traplines and an indication of possible moves as directed from the Opening Explorer (Although most of these will not lead onto fully written pages due to the volume and likelyhood of weak positions).

Here I lay out a decription of how the openings will be named within the Explorer itself as I know it is going to be of interest to a lot of people who have had objections to the methods I have proposed before. Here I have refined what I have proposed before by making clearer definitions of precisely what it is I have been proposing. I have designed it to be as fair as possible but please do give your feedback, positive or negative and also if you have any suggestions on how we name the approximately 1000+ positions that will be in the Explorer by the time it is released

- Eldar

Naming Conventions:

You can call an opening whatever you want, but the conventions we'll use for naming openings within the Explorer will be to make a concerted effort to contact the person or person's who first played a particular position to hand over to them their naming rights - even if it is arguable that it was another player who made a position playable - the second player in this instance would have to prove with some level of documentation that they did indeed invent a particular Opening if they wish to claim the naming rights. This is done to avoid any arguments that might arise from differing claims to the naming rights.
In the event that an opening is within Red and Blue's first move, or the original player cannot be contacted, or the position is too obvious and nominally played... then we will ask the community to provide suggestions and the admins (of which I am hoping there will be many as I am planning on being rather relaxed about this) will vote on the suggestions made amongst themselves as this will be far easier to organise than attempting to contact everyone for each and every individual position. For really big (commonly played) positions however, votes will be conducted either in the Explorer or here in the University.

There will be rules attached to names that will be considered acceptable within the explorer; namely the following:

1. Nothing offensive.
2. Nothing implicative of any chess website, company or organisation.
3. Nothing that could cause unnecessary confusion. For example by way of unjustified conflation with 2pc concepts or by way of suggesting something that does not happen within the position (e.g calling an opening an "Exchange variation" when nothing is being exchanged OR calling something a Hypermodern Sicilian when the position is not reflective of the 2pc Sicilian game and there is nothing Hypermodern suggestive by the style of play that emerges from it).
4. No new opening should be confusing with another openings name.

These rules are there to prevent unecessary confusion and to prevent newcomers from feeling intimidated by conflated, contradictory or overused meanings. Our goal is to attract and retain new people into our community and provide a means for users to enhance their gameplay experience (not to scare them off with ill-thought out conceptualisations). Like I said, you can call the Openings whatever you want (free world), but the names will only be submitted into the explorer if they follow the aforementioned guidelines. My decision is final on this.

That being said, if you have naming rights and you have a suggestion that follows the 4 rules above, you're name will be accepted without question whether you name it after something cool and interesting like "The Flying Spaghetti Monster", "The Monty Python", "The Che Guevara" or something egocentric and narcistic like after yourself (yes, I'm biased and you will be credited anyway, but for real this is your choice and I won't take this away from you).

Thank you for reading, let me know what you think.

Good.

This is very exciting Just yesterday I was thinking about how cool it would be if there was a 4pc 'Opening Explorer' with all the 4pc games at different ratings, like what Lichess has! OK, this is different but also very cool  

I suppose another logical idea would be to include various opening systems and schemes of development. 

Hey! I did start an opening explorer in fact using forums but I haven't had much of a chance to get to it as for the past couple of months I have either been doing my dissertation or working on developing 8 player chess.

I could certainly do with some assitance managing the explorer and university now that 8pc is taking so much of my time ;-;