Comments by benr

Why the weird "modern" naming (alternatives)? A few specifics:

Modern piece created by me, but there isn’t its full movement, so here it can look as existing one.

This doesn't seem to add much? What full movement, and what existing piece?

Modern piece independently created by several people, i. e. by me.

I think you're misusing "i.e." here; you mean "including"?

Fairy piece, there with Shogi & Chu Shogi origins, so all names are useful there. It moves only one space in any direction.

But it's also the restriction of the wazir and the man and ... to 1D. Again I don't think the comparison to higher dimensions helps here, just say "moves one square" and get to the king-swapping ability.

I would transpose the diagram, so that it fits better on a screen, except that I worry about mobile screens. Hmm.

I'm not very familiar with the other 1D games we have here, I think it would be worth contrasting them a bit.

Your setup image needs to be uploaded here and then included in the page. Go to the Edit menu to upload, then copy the resulting URL into the page.

Thanks for the reminder, this has long been on a list of things to do when I have the time.

The diagram designer changed behavior around movement markers after Charles had made all of these, breaking them. I need to go through with a regex replacement. Doing that through the site's forms would take a while; doing it through the database would be faster, but then revision history wouldn't be updated, so I'd want to more carefully check that the changes worked and didn't break something else.

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=42393
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=37824

I appear to have the movement diagrams here (and earlier M&B entries) fixed now. There was a further complication to my process on this one: some of the piece names had periods not at the beginning.

The diagram for the Fearless looks out of place, but in a way that I can't imagine was my mistake. Anybody with more patience than I: care to explain why it has the retreating two orthogonal squares?

I imagine that the database and scripts using a deleted flag--rather than actually deleting the information--was a purposeful decision. I think it's a reasonably good idea to keep data around in case an author (or someone posting as the author, not that I expect us to be a large target for hackers) mistakenly or brashly deletes or vandalizes their pages. We've in the past varied on how serious we are about our rights to maintain content posted here. That probably needs agreement first.

I don't think it entirely too onerous to require asking an editor to purge the last remnants of a page, but I think we don't surface clearly enough what "delete" means here (mostly fine, except for confusion in cases like these).

I don't think GDPR applies except to the connection between author and content. But also I am not a lawyer.

(Can we please keep these two discussions on their relevant threads: Favorites and proposals for new/additional systems here, and the Featured variants on that page?)

Since the "127 favorites" from my 2018 comment on this thread came up, let me point out the reporting page that generates the table on demand. That user, right now, is up to 147 favorites, but has been overtaken by two users, with 187 and 389 favorites. Another thing to note is there are ~170 users who have favorited something. I'd be interested in seeing something broken down by self-favorites.

I'm pretty sure we used to have a cap on favorites, differentiated into three or so tiers (editors, contributors, members?). I'm in favor of doing something like that again, whether instituted as a points system to further distinguish "how much" someone favors a game or not. Simplicity in the UI is important though. Let's keep discussing.

Another thing I'd like to address: this list is now too long, IMO. I'd suggest dropping the one-favorite games, adding instead a link to a separate page for that list. Also note that there's a bug with favorited pages with no name or description provided here...

Movement diagrams would be helpful for visitors less familiar with adjectives like "half" and "narrow".

You had this marked with three "Usual Equipment" (sub)categories, which it certainly isn't?

Interesting! This will be somewhat unusual in the "Dice" category for not also being non-deterministic.

I wonder about the enforcement of orientation after the move. It enforces that a piece moving from one square in a particular direction will always turn into the same piece (OK, knight choice aside); is that convenience worth the additional rule? Maybe.

I doubt the setup diagram would be helpful, since the tops of the dice will just be the standard layout. But a few movement examples would be nice.

Neat! I have no idea what these well-positioned but not much better than FIDE setups might look like. I wonder if over enough plays certain themes of setups would emerge.

You mean the ItemID, used e.g. in the URL of the page? That's rather harder to change, since it is used to connect the page content, Comments, Favorites, Links, Tags. I have done it before, manually. @Fergus, would utilizing the RelocatedPages table instead work for this?

@H.G., the EGT (linked in the Notes) is acting funny, producing a starting array that is horizontally symmetric.

Remarkable that the notice boxes on this page say both

This author has 5 open submissions and 8 accepted submissions.

and

This author has not previously published anything on the Chess Variant Pages.

Is there really a distinction between an "accepted submission" and being published?

I think the second alert is based on the Contributor checkbox for the user, which used to be set when a user's first submission was approved (or manually by an editor), but I think Fergus turned that off and has mostly deprecated the use of it; we just need to turn off this message in favor of the first one.

The ratings are averaged together (I believe only using the last rating per user), and that "average rating" can be used to sort in the database query. The average rating is also visible at the bottom of the comments section on each page, e.g. right now on this page it says:

Number of ratings: 3, Average rating: Average, Number of comments: 84

The ratings used to have an "Average" option; not sure when that got lost in the dropdown menu. But then Poor=1, Average=3?, Good=4, Excellent=5...was there another one for the remaining number of stars?

I think ratings (and the attached comments as a "Review") are a great more-granular-than-"favorite" scoring system, but aren't used enough (and apparently not clear enough). I would actually prefer more granularity, maybe a score out of 10; for one thing, there are more than 500 game pages with the Excellent average, so the database query doesn't show them all:
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php?type=Game&language=English&orderby=AvgRating&sortdescending=on

EDIT: there's a more recent rendition of the average ratings listing at
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/avgratings.php
and its comments mention the other missing rating, "BelowAverage"=2 stars.

There is a character limit in the database software of 65,535. Your Pieces section (each section is saved as a separate field in the database) is currently 65,371 characters. (@Fergus, probably a useful error message getting printed by ms3 would be nice.)

This character count is of the source code, so shortening that may help. In particular, all of your images use the full path, and you'll save some characters by using a relative link instead (https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/... to just /membergraphics/...). Not enough to get you total freedom, but probably enough to squeeze in a few more?

Oh, and it looks like we could potentially change the column type to a longer text type. @Fergus?

The faces of these two cubes do not count as faces of the tesseract, but the quadrilateral shapes that extend between the larger and smaller cubes are the faces of the tesseract

I think this is incorrect. The faces of the two cubes are 2d faces of the tesseract. E.g. the faces numbered 1 and 2 in the first diagram (the slant of the font helps identify where the numbers are supposed to be.)

Numbering the cube like a die, the faces of the tesseract are 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, 2-1, 2-3, 2-4, 2-6, 3-1, 3-2, 3-5, 3-6, 4-1, 4-2, 4-5, 4-6, 5-1, 5-3, 5-4, 5-6, 6-2, 6-3, 6-4, and 6-5.

I'm not positive I understand what you're describing here, but I think 1-4 and 4-1 are the same face. And the ones you're missing are two copies (one from the large and one from the small cube) of say "1" (1-1? 1-0?) through "6". (While 1-6 indeed doesn't exist.)