Chess.com Feature Request and Wishlist #4

I disagree, just because it's obvious to you and me, doesn't mean that it doesn't have value for someone else.

This is also not really a feature request and is probably feedback you should have sent Patzer24 directly as opposed to posting it here.

Yes I agree with post #281, for a lot of people are beginners & the annotations actualy do help, when we watch Grand Master games,, in most cases we'ld be completly lost if there was not such commentry!

I've been thinking about the need to get tournaments moving along in a timely manner. I haven't been here too long, but the few tournaments I've played in have dragged on way too long waiting for stragglers that don't even affect final standings (top 3) or subsequent round pairings.

Two mechanisms I see for keeping tourneys on track are 1. adjudicating slow games and 2. proceeding with subsequent rounds before all games are completed.

#1 adjudicating slow games

Refer to my Canadian Chess Federation (CFC) rules below. Their objective is not to decide games but to predict the outcome so that the next round can continue on time. That game can continue at it's leisure later.

I'm not sure we could implement such a system without controversy, but here's some thoughts on processes:

• Players may request adjudication after 40 moves
• Players may only request one adjudication per game
• Players must submit a written justification to the TD outlining their winning plan
• TD's will review requests and approve them (sanity check)
• Approved requests will be made available to a board of adjudicators, a pool of higher rated players similar to the greeters, who will review the request and vote aye or nay.
• If say 5 or 10 unanimous 'aye' votes are cast by this pool, the game will be given an 'adjudicated result' which can be immediately used to decide the next round. Any 'nay' before the quorum is met will reject the request.
• Adjudicators voting 'nay' must include a reasoning which only the TD may see. The players cannot.
• TDs may override rejected requests if there is only one 'nay' vote of the quorum.
• The losing player, the player being adjudicated, shall have one chance, and only one chance, to protest the result. This allows redemption in case of blunders before the next round begins. If the next round has already begun, tough.
• If the game result will not affect the next round pairings or final medal standings of either player no matter what the outcome is, then no protest will be allowed.
• If he/she elects to protest, the game goes directly to the review board, and the adjudicated result is suspended until a decision is made.
• Protests are prroved by the board in the same fashion as the adjudication request with the TD having an override vote in the case on a single 'nay'.
  

#2 proceeding without completing games

In many tournaments the subsequent rounds' pairings are set before the current round is completed. All players with games remaining will be eliminated regardless of the outcome. So why hold things up?

It's not quite that simple. Sometimes an advancing player still has a game on that may affect his placement in the next round. Two optons here are to only advance after the final scores of all advancers is determined or to apply the adjudication method mentioned above.

Thoughts

OTB competition has a system for proceeding in tournaments despite there being active games remaining. Chess.com tournaments suffer from slow play. The majority of players want to get on with their 'suspended' tournaments while other players wish to hang on to lost or losing games to learn as much as they can. To please both camps seems difficult and conuter-productive. The methods I describe above, adjudicating lost games to estimate placements and beginning subsequent rounds before the next rounds, seem like plausible methods of satisfying everybody while keeping controversy and bad feelings to a minimum.

It will take work to build such mechanisms, and it will take willing volunteers to make it work. I believe it would be a step forward. It will be a quality process, advanced players would be more than wiling to participate, and the general player would be very happy with quicker multi-round tournaments. Membership will flourish

I welcome responses ...

REFERENCE:

http://chess.ca/section_6.htm

Unfinished Games

617. A game that is not finished before it is time to pair the next round is temporarily scored as a draw for pairing purposes unless, clearly, one player is a winner. When an unfinished game is completed, the correct results and cumulative scores are entered on the players' cards.

VARIATION 617.1: A game that is not finished before it is time to pair the next round may be temporarily adjudicated for pairing purposes. Written and also, whenever possible, oral announcement must be made in advance of the first round of the exact procedures to be used. In making an adjudication, the director should seek out the best advice that is available and should give proper weight to the degree of objectivity of that advice. The objective of the adjudication is to predict the probable result of the unfinished game. Therefore, the adjudication should give primary consideration to the position existing on the board, though such additional factors as the respective strengths of the players and the times remaining on their clocks may be considered as well, according to the adjudication procedures announced for the tournament. The players themselves may not be required to declare their evaluation of or objectives in the game or be penalized for refusing to do so.

I agree that adjudications could be problematic.  Slow playing a game to try and get a draw against a higer ranked player is one example where there are opportunities for abuse.

An option to flip board in live games. Especially valuable in live games, it would allow us to ponder our opponents next move from their angle.

Could there be subcategories in the forums?  For instance I was just looking in the live chess forum to see if there was a thread about live chess etiquette and I couldn't find anything approximating what I was looking for.  I did notice though that there are many many many individual forum posts about disconnects.  It  got me thinking that there are a lot of repeat forum posts in most of the forums about issues that have already been discussed in depth.  Which is usually primarily due to people not bothering to take some time to see if there's already a post but could also be attributed to a lack of organization in the forums?

    I understand there is a search feature, but if  from the get go I can restrict my search to the most likely sub forum it makes it easier to find the information rather than sift through a hundred pages of many repeated topics.  Or in the very least it gives me a good starting place where all the information on the subject I'm looking up is located, so if there is something similar it would be easy to find.   It's pretty easy to see a lot of repeat themes when navigating through a forum, so it shouldn't be too hard to develop sub categories?

     I know that's a lot of information to organize, but it might help people get the information quicker and save the community from having to listen to yet another drawn out discussion of an issue that has already been hammered into the ground (i.e people who use chess engines to cheat, that subject will NEVER die!).  And further prevent useful informative past forum discussions from being buried  beneath a massive pile of repeated hashed out overly excessively discussed somewhat mostly meaningless hey I can't believe I was disconnected from live chess AGAIN even though there is a massive warning saying that I most likely will get disconnected at some point and I should just chill out till it's not longer beta at which point I will have a perfectly reasonable excuse to start a forum topic about being disconnected though really it's still probably my fault for using the commodore64 web browser which I coded myself because I love commodore64's but commodore is out of business regardless I do what I want this is all chess.com's fault commodore64 web browser is the bomb (incoherent run on sentence was used to illustrate incoherent manicial repeat forum poster).

I apologise in advance if you feel you have wasted part of your life reading this forum post.  Perhaps if the wish list was sub-categorized you could have avoided it?

Cheers, happy holidays, keep up the good work Erik and staff!!

There have been a variety of suggestions to address the issue of recurring topics:

1. new forum categories (specific to rating)
2. tags/keywords for topics (either a fixed set or user-provided)
   
3. personal filters to block out specific topics 
   
4. editable topic titles
5. editable subtitles for topics
   
6. thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating of posts by members
   
7. individually referenceable posts
   
8. better quoting of previous posts
9. 'opening explorer'-like tool for locating forum topics
   
10. tips window (offering snippets from the site Help)
11. dynamic linking common words (like 'cheating') into the site FAQs
    
12. resussitating common threads periodically
    
13. customisable Hot Topics, Unread Posts etc.
    
14. limiting Member Points earned or daily posts anyone can make
    
15. automatic supression of pointless posts
    
16. new forum statistics (for each topic, the number of people who had explicitly tracked it; the monthly popularity of specific topics of discussion)
    
17. better searching before posting
    
18. FAQs for resigning, disconnection, cheating, etc.
    
19. read this before you post (sticky thread)
    

REFERENCES

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/forum-feature-i-would-like

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/what-to-expect-from-chesscom-forums

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-players/posting-the-obvious

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/those-who-refuse-to-resign-when-they-are-completely-lost

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/endgames/is-this-cheating

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/help-support/is-it-possible-to-correct-a-topic-title

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/chesscom-feature-requests-and-wishlist-3

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/daily-puzzle-comments2

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/help-support/group-forums

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/dont-quote-me-on-that

  ARTREF:RECURRENT TOPICS MECHANISMS

Paul211, the tagging mechanism referred to previously (and referenced in ArtFizz's post) would go a long ways towards helping to better organize the info here and, I suspect, would not only help new users find the information without re-hashing old discussions, but would also help the people responding by enabling them to quickly reference previous relevant material.  That way the storage issue goes away (as the older discussions are all being stored anyway).

Can't you just use the "Resign" button?

Curiously, ARTICLES are indexed individually (in the way that it would be fantastic if FORUM POSTS were). However, the material that members write is scattered around the chess.com website (in the general forum area, group forums, articles. blogs, Team/Vote Match discussions, Notes, etc. etc. The site search facilities are neither very powerful - nor are they unified. e.g. FORUMS -> Search... and READ -> Articles -> Search. Fortunately, Google search plugs the gap.

Google ADVANCED Search.

Suppose I want to search chess.com's forums for posts about Ninjas. When I use the Forum Search, nothing is found. If I use Google, I type:

ninjas site:www.chess.com/forum

it returns 116 results. Now suppose I am interested only in MY posts about ninjas ... I type:

ninjas "by artfizz" site:www.chess.com/forum

it returns 4 results. (Google search is FAR from perfect).

If you click on Advanced Search from the Google home page, you will see many options. I am using "search within a site or domain" and I happen to be aware that forum postings are stored at www.chess.com/forum. Articles are stored at www.chess.com/article; visible member information is stored at www.chess.com/members; and so on.

I suspect that the fundamental the problem lies with the renumbering of the posts when one is deleted -- ideally a post's ID should stay with it throughout it's life, and if one is removed the result should simply be a non-contiguous list of post IDs (with the removed post's number missing). 

Based on how this currently works, going through and updating all of the references to a post that has had it's number changed is probably why this is tricky -- plus, what do you do with citations to a post that has been deleted.  You can't simply leave them as the post that followed it now has the deleted post's ID....

These problems also exist for the proposal to hyperlink to a named reference but I think could be more easily managed in the background than citing and keeping up-to-date post numbers.

We should have chess.com player of the month or something and also player of the week?

Quoting the post number manually IS NOT FOOLPROOF; deleted posts will change the numbering. HOWEVER, 99% of the time, it will be accurate. When it's wrong, it will only be out by one or two numbers, so it will still be very effective for tracking previous posts.

For chess.com to change the behaviour of the QUOTE button to make it attach a hyperlink to the cited post would obviously be the ideal solution.

Somewhere in between those two: EVERY POST ALREADY HAS A UNIQUE ID. For instance, TheGrobe's post #300 has unique id. = 1783174. This is not currently made visible. It if were, this could be used as a tag to previous posts. This ID. wouldn't change if posts were deleted. If it referred back to a deleted post, that shouldn't be any bigger problem than having a hyperlink refer to a deleted post. Virtually all email and messaging system use just such an identifier to uniquely identify individual messages. Additionally, it would go some of the way to enabling standard browser (or shared) bookmarks to refer to individual posts.

http://www.chess.com/site_trophy_list.html

People of chess.com run in panic i got another idea:

I meet many new people here and some of them i add as friends . . .so i would like to have option that i can write private notes(like in game private notes that are there for your game ideas) about them so i can (only me) read them so i dont have to memorise what  is his 3rd sister name and other things that i think are relevant anout that person (he hates chuck norris jokes; he is suspecting my true identity etc.)

I hope to hear form you about this soon . . . . OR ELSE

artfizz wrote: Basically, a Contact Database. Outlook and Maximiser are common examples of external programs that provide this functionality. They are handy when you are dealing with many different people at irregular times. Sales people use them a lot to keep track of leads. The smarter applications recognise incoming phone numbers and automatically open the DB at the right entry. Nothing very sinister - but arguably not a core part of chess.com either (though I would find it neat).

Thx  . . .

and what do you think about my  . . .OR ELSE?

Naturally, I didn't wish to incur whatever penalty you had in mind. What did you have in mind? What was you follow-up fearful action?