Comments by benr

It's also, I think, miscategorized.

Not Usual Equipment, because you have to differentiate all the pawns.

Not dice: I don't think the use of dice in initial setup randomization counts (precedent?).

Not crossover: blending different chess variants doesn't count (or almost all of them would be in this category); it requires blending with some other, more different, game.

And what does "Price" mean?

@A.M.: The What's New page relies on page contents being updated, not just the index information. You can manually update the Last Modification date from the edit index information page.

This description doesn't fit:

smallish ads appear sneakily from bottom, going upward on my screen

and I've never seen such, and I expect they shouldn't be possible.

Here too I think it's important to at least say something about expected balance. Can ChessCraft provide automated playtesting?

The content of this item's Description should appear in the page content, maybe with some hints as to how such mates are accomplished.

Movement diagrams are fixed, but a separate issue: the 0th rank in the setup diagrams.

@FergusDuniho, I think I mentioned this in another comment (on a different page), but don't remember now where or whether a conclusion was reached.

I approve of the general idea. I think reviewing the votes for approvals will be important to avoid abuse, and IP address might not be sufficient. But sock-puppet control is hard; hopefully the nicheness of our site will make this less of a concern.

On 1, I'd suggest to keep more than just the last revision, but more-aggressive deletion (compared to the general revision deletion policy, whatever that turns out to be) would be fine. Furthermore, I think removing all the revisions upon approval would be reasonable.

Part of me would like a more nuanced notion of "member" and "contributor" for voting, but I don't have good ideas for it. I think about the Stack Exchange system of "reputation", but I don't think anything we track currently would efficiently represent familiarity with the site and/or chess variant expertise. And as long as editors continue to review approvals, we can handle things. (Should there be a sort of negative vote that members can contribute? "This rule is unclear, please revise before publishing"?) If we move forward with this, we might want to consider raising the publication bar if we see a lot of "low-confidence" votes, as an alternative to limiting voting ability.

The roll is obligatory, with three exceptions: if the move ends with a check, the piece reaches the last line as rook, bishop or knight, or if a pawn reaches the last line.

The first exclusion as written includes discovered check; is that intended?

The second exclusion sounds like it's there to prevent rolling a pawn and it being stuck; but maybe it fits better to force a roll, and if it lands pawn then the player immediately promotes (chooses a face)?

I've removed the Incomplete Information category. I don't think we include randomness in that definition, just deterministic information that's hidden (?).

This is an interesting theme.

Have you done any testing for balance?

1. Only one ghost can be in hand: do newly captured pieces disappear, or can you decide whether to replace the ghost in hand?
2. Ghosts are captured as normal?
3. Dropping a ghost from hand use a turn?
4. The five turn wait isn't clear to me. A freshly captured piece has to wait 5 turns before returning, but what do you mean by the last ghost part?

H.G. is an editor, see Who is Behind the Chess Variant Pages?. (The two junior editors aren't active AFAIK.) But again, as he has said in a number of comments, his focus is more programmatical, including the IDs and now Jocly.

There is just one review queue, which can be viewed by anyone. (Glancing now, it looks like the oldest page needing review (not "Uncreated" or having red text suggesting an editor comment without response) is from Oct 1, so just over three months right now.) Work other than reviewing on the other hand is up to editors' discretion, but my last post mostly summarizes that difference in focuses.

Edit: The 'Man and Beast 09' has already been released! Kind of weird.

M&B was released in 2008, and broken by a website change circa 2019. As I alluded in the previous comment, I am fixing a 5-year-old mistake on our part.

@FergusDuniho

This page has a broken diagram designer image; the URL

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/drawdiagram.php?
code=5--------------6-------------
2%7B%253%7D%7B%252%7D%7B%253%7D2------------
2%7B%252%7D%7B%251%7D%7B%251%7D%7B%252%7D2-----------
2%7B4%7D%7B%251%7D%7B1BI%7D%7B%251%7D%7B%253%7D2-----------
2%7B%252%7D%7B%251%7D%7B%251%7D%7B%252%7D2-2%7B%253%7D2------
2%7B%253%7D%7B%252%7D%7B%253%7D2-1%7B%252%7D2%7B%252%7D1------
6-%7B%253%7D2%7B%251%7D2%7B%253%7D------
5-2%7B%251%7D2%7B%251%7D2-----------
1%7B%252%7D2%7B_AS_RO%7D2%7B%252%7D1-----
2%7B%253%7D2-2%7B%251%7D2%7B%251%7D2-----
1%7B%252%7D2%7B%252%7D1-%7B%253%7D2%7B%251%7D2%7B%253%7D-----
%7B%253%7D1%7B%253%7D.%7B%253%7D1%7B%253%7D-1%7B%252%7D2%7B%252%7D1-----
2.2.2-2%7B%253%7D2-----
1%7B%252%7D%7B%253%7D%7B%251%7D%7B_JG_.ROQ%7D%7B%251%7D%7B%253%7D%7B%252%7D1-----------
2.2.2------------
%7B%253%7D1%7B%253%7D.%7B%253%7D1%7B%253%7D-------------
1%7B%252%7D2%7B%252%7D1--------------
2%7B%253%7D2-----
&cols=19&nocoordinates=on&set=alfaerie-many&shape=hhex&board=210.102.021.

(newlines added to prevent a long horizontal scroll) produces the error message

The color number 4 has not been assigned to a color. Make sure you assign color values to every color used.

Presumably this is something like {4}, but then this is another regression in the Designer, and we should seek out other pages that might have the issue. But there are lots of other examples on this page with circled numbers, maybe it's just missing a %? (Have I understood this correctly, that {%4} should produce a circled numeral 4, and that the brackets as well as the percent sign is being URL encoded, leading to the horrendous strings in the source here, like %7B%254%7D?

@FergusDuniho

I thought this was next on my list to fix the diagrams for (from a change in the diagram designer), but I'd already done the movement marker conversion. However, now I see that

1. two of the piece images don't show up, using the combination codes B!R and R!B. In the setup diagram these pieces use B.R and B.R instead, and they show up. Was there yet another change to the diagram designer for which we need to scan the database for broken images, or was this an old mistake?

2. in the setup diagram, the 0th rank displays offset (on my laptop); any idea what's wrong there?

Fergus, please change the font color for last actions being Notification comments to green (or omit them in favor of the last action being the edit itself).

I updated the royal push text to avoid the interpretation I had before. There are still two things left to explain about it:

1. "lower" pieces: can a king push a queen, or does this just mean royals vs non?
2. Can a queen push a piece two squares, if there is a joined territory?

Are you sure you mean the What's New text, and not the Item Description? The former only shows up a few places, most notably the What's New page, while the latter shows up in most index listings, content headers, etc. You can modify What's New text in the index information and while updating the text, but for now updating the Description has to be done by an editor.

I agree with most of this, but should spend some more time looking through the lists.

I don't like "stem" as the theme name, being too jargonic. I think two separate ones is fine, or even put math as a sub-theme of science. (This one will be huge depending on what exact criteria we place; board geometries are geometry, all 3d variants are math, ...)

I tend to think of "wargame" rather differently than "rpg". Wargame to me is more like Joe's variants, with lots of pieces moving in formations, while the descriptions here (esp. hit points, leveling up) sound more distictly like rpgs.

If you were to limit the revision deletion to groups of revisions by a single author within a certain timeframe (a week? a month?), would it lose most of the size savings? It would be nice, IMO, to keep a longer-term history of an article, while squashing a flurry of small changes into one larger one.

But also, saving the diffs instead, why would that break things? The deletion of a revision would just result in the squashing of the two diffs, right?

I had assumed the newly merged territory (d5+d6) would count the three black kings at d4, e5, and d7.

Also, the new territory created at e5 would give the white player even more points.

e5 isn't a territory at all, let alone for white.

There were two recent requests to be added to this page:

• https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=52460
• https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=52461

But this page is a hard-coded html file last updated in 2002. I suggest we add the themes here as Tags instead, as appropriate.

It is, but the link text is "3 to the 5", which is odd since the short description doesn't seem to match either. But I presume Gilman was the one who set these...