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2019 Community Moderator Election
The 2019 Community Moderator Election is now underway!
Community moderator elections have three phases:

Nomination phase
Primary phase
Election phase

Most elections take between two and three weeks, but this depends on how many candidates there are.
Please visit the official election page at
https://chess.stackexchange.com/election
for more detail, and to participate!
If you have general questions about the election process, or questions for moderator candidates, feel free to ask them here on meta -- just make sure your questions are tagged election.

Less than 24 hours! Good luck, everyone!

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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What is the intended audience for this site?
Most of the questions so far seem specifically geared towards players in the class A - class C range (1400-1900).  Is this by design, or more just due to the random sampling of the first 20 questions?

The original proposal talks about  serious players and enthusiasts of chess, however, I don't think we are bound by this definition.
Just like StackOverflow, I think it's better to leave the target as broad as possible, from newbie players to Pros. What should be "regulated" are the questions.

Personally, I would like to see, at a minimum, the level of discussion that occurs at other sites, such as ChessPub.

Yes, the idea as that once it becomes popular we can have GMs, IMs and FMs to join the site and help out on the expert level questions. (I have stated that in the original proposal Announcements/Comments)
Yes we need to start ranking such questions which are tough as expert-level or something similar, but again newbies may mark simple questions as expert-level to gain attention, so moderation will be required, any ideas??

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Questions from the Area 51 site?
Is there any plan to post the questions from the Area 51 site to the private-beta?

I think questions should come organically, no need to force questions just because they were asked in the proposal.

+1 @Soufiane Hassou: Thank you for sharing your take! Guess I just assumed that the existing questions would be automatically imported under a user's profile when the private-beta started; not that I asked any questions for the chess proposal, just in general how I thought they'd be used. Thanks for posting an answer, going wait to select an answer, since neither of us have done a private-beta before.

yeah, grow organically!

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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"Invite Fellow Experts" -- what does it do?
On the home page for the main site there's an ad labeled "Invite Fellow Experts" -- what does it do?
Meaning if the user gets the invite, do they get access to the private beta?

Yes, they get an invitation to the private beta.

Hello,
$YOUR_NAME told us you're just the right kind of expert a Chess -
  Stack Exchange Q&A site needs.
This new Stack Exchange Q&A site is currently in private beta, but
  since you've been recommended by a peer, we're giving you super secret
  access to get in early and help shape the community.

Thanks, and 'super secret access' made me laugh... :-)


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Exit strategy: where would people go without Chess.SE?
Just discovered that a good SE got shutdown recently due to "poor business": http://productivity.stackexchange.com
I expect it is only a matter of time before Chess.SE suffers the same fate. So, this is the place for remaining users to share their thoughts on this matter.

IIRC, the OP started projecting the doom of chess.SE at least 5 years ago. Is chess as well-suited to the SE format as, say, coding? I'd say obviously not, given the evidence. But chess.SE has grown over time, and clearly serves some purpose to some group; maybe that will be enough for SE to keep it going, maybe not. But I fail to see the point of this post, especially from one who's made a total of 16 posts on the main site in the span of almost 6 years. Chess.SE has never been what OP wants it to be; but the OP also doesn't seem to be a party genuinely interested in the success of the site.

success of what exactly? I fulfilled my commitment wrt to the SE as proposed, but it has nothing to do with the celebration of mediocrity or experts of trivia.

The lack of activity (in the form of questions and answers) wasn't the only reason Productivity (and another recent case, Startups) Stack Exchange were shut down. It also was because of the lack of moderation; Productivity had only one active ♦ moderator and Startups had none. A repeated call for help on the site's respective child metas didn't get a response.
A lack of ♦ moderator activity can be compensated by active regular users who perform moderation tasks like closing questions and deleting non-answers. (In fact, that's the preferred way of moderation; Stack Exchange is moderated by you !) The regulars here are doing (in my opinion, which should be taken with a grain of salt because I'm one of them) a decent job of keeping the site clean. But perhaps one of our moderators wants to chime in on this?

You cite numbers, but having good/adequate moderators to moderate bad/inconsequential content is a bad sign. Chess.SE does not meet the usual standards of expert participation, unless the site gets rescoped into NoviceChess.SE

Not every Stack Exchange needs experts, sites like [cooking.se] and [astronomy.se] are mostly hobbyists.

"But perhaps one of our moderators wants to chime in on this?" I'll just second Glorfindel's point that the ideal is for the community to moderate itself. A few years back, I (and the other mods as well) was much more active on the site than I am now; I'd say I haven't needed to be, because there is indeed a current crop of seasoned regulars who keep things going the way an SE site generally should.

As a side point: it might indeed be time for some new blood in the mods, especially since there are at this point plenty of folks who would handle the role well and who are much more active than the 3 of us at present. If someone were to advocate for such, I'd certainly support the notion.


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Possible bug in profile - consecutive days
When I look at my profile, the "# of consecutive visits" value seems to be off.  I hit this site every day, and a few times my consecutive visits has been reset to one.  Happened again today, and I am as sure as I can be that I visited yesterday.

Jeff Atwood posted on MSO that merely hitting the site front page isn't enough. I don't know whether that's your situation, but it is something to consider.

Also, consecutive days start and end at midnight UTC, which for a lot of us is 8 PM during daylight savings time.  Hence, if you check in at 4 PM one day, then 9 PM the next, you miss a day.

I don't see that much activity from your user in the past few days (e.g. only a couple of days in March).
Is it possible that you are visiting from a different device, and that is maybe logged in to a different user?

Nope. I use this computer, and hit all my web sites every day before work, and generally after work too.  There was one day maybe a month ago where I'm pretty sure I missed (I didn't check in the morning, and then arrived home well after 9 EST) but otherwise, I'm at least checking the front page of the chess site every day.

To be more clear, there are no hits from your user or IP on those days. I am not really sure why, but you don't seem to be there.

@TonyEnnis do you clear your cookies and forget to login again?


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Editing others' posts
Gang, a comment.  Every now and them we get a new member who wants to perform edits on others' posts.  This is generally encouraged.
However, I'd like to opine that the edits should not be preferential.  That is, if someone says, "In this game..."  and editor should probably not edit it to say, "In this position..." since there's really not a material difference in the sentences.  The same thing applies to punctuation edits.
Replacing notation with the snazzy new board, absolutely. That edit adds something.
I bring this up for the following reasons:

If an author writes something a certain way, perhaps that's how they
want it.  We should respect this.
Edits force posts back to the top.  This dredges up inactive posts that probably don't warrant a re-reading.  It's extra annoying when you determine that the reason the post is back to the top isn't because there was new content but that an editor removed an extraneous space after period.  (I'd surely like to see a "Don't BTTT this thread" option on the edit page.)

Shall we agree that we'll limit our edits to those making clear improvements and when in doubt, leave the post as-is?

I think I partly disagree. While you surely take only extreme cases on which I'm bound to agree (edits for no more but spacing are too tiny¹), typos and misspellings should be fixed, and only edit suggestions are meant to have a threshold on length.
While certainly “truly minor edits that do nothing important should be discouraged”, “it's up to [SE] to decide if a post should be bumped because of a minor edit, but I see no reason to leave a post wrong specifically because you're trying to avoid bumping it”. (Gotta love how MSO already asked about it all.)

¹ but I will change a space² to make it unbreakable if it fixes some display.
² Did I mention I sowed spaces ?

I agree that there should be a cut back on mass edits. Additionally, I've seen a lot of tags added to posts lately, that are redundant, duplicates of other tags or otherwise unneeded.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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feature request for editing - suppress BTTT
Can we get an option added to the edit page that will allow an editor to suppress "back to the top" behavior?
This will allow an editor to make a perhaps trivial change without wasting the time of daily chess.SO readers.

You can filter out activity when sorting questions, if you don't want to see what's new. If you want to see what's been added, search for the most recent activity's originator in the answer list, if that's an edit, you probably lost <10s. <3s if the answers are sorted by activity and you just have to check the first one. I would call flooding the home page more of a problem (when pushing more valuable new content down the page).

Some people agree with you, by the way. I'm surprised not to find this feature-request on MSO, actually (I'd support it there). If I really want to find it, I guess I could post it.


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How do I make the viewer 'flip' the board?
Using the viewer... It's Black's move but I still want White on the bottom.  How can I do this?

Add the following line: [StartFlipped "0"], just don't forget to indent it 4 times ( as same as you would when posting FEN ).

Indent it by four spaces, that is.


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Intended use of the 'variations' tag
In a few articles, I see there is a tag of 'variations' on them.
There are 2 possible meanings that I can see for this tag:

Variations of a particular opening or even middlegame and endgame positions.
Chess variants, such as Suicide, Bughous etc.

'Variations' currently does not have a definition, so it's currently being used for both cases above.
My question would be, which definition should 'variations' be?  perhaps a new tag for chess variations be created? i.e. 'variants' or 'chess-variants'?

When a consensus is reached, please remember to add tag wiki excerpts (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/improved-tagging/) to clarify the purpose of those tags and to clean up the tagging of the questions themselves.

Using a variations tag to mean 'variations of a particular opening, middlegame, or endgame position' seems to add little additional information to the question.  Like a tag of 'code' on stack overflow.  Don't think we need such a generic tag, though something like 'calculation' or 'analysis' is appropriate if that's what the question is about.
Having a variants or chess-variants tag makes a lot of sense though, along with tags for specific chess variants like bughouse, atomic, etc. like you said.

To expand on Bort's answer:
As of this writing, there are 3 questions tagged variations.  On all of them, the variations tag could (and probably should) be replaced with opening without really losing any meaning.
There was one question referring to chess variants (specifically mentioned Chess 960).  I retagged that as chess-variants just so that it is separate from the variations questions.  Daniel δ had written a fairly exhaustive tag-wiki for variations, but the information was referring to chess-variants.  I moved the tag-wiki to the correct tag and embellished some as well.
Feel free to re-tag or suggest better wording for anything as well.

I like the idea of 'variations' to denote opening variations and 'chess-variants' for just that.


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Add player tags to questions?
Similar to adding ECO tags to questions, should we be able to add player tags to questions.  Not every player should be allowed, but for example, if I only want to see questions that may pertain to Fischer or Kasparov, I can click on the player tag.

Maybe, though guessing there should be a limit, say GMs only.

Yes, I would not want to allow anyone.

Okay, makes sense to me, I mean otherwise you might not find get to watch a robot "attack" Kramnik, and him almost loses his hand.


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Penalty for down-voting?
I have noticed some down-voting on my questions that haven't been asked recently, but a while back and they seem to be in succession. Just as there is a penalty with too much up-voting, what about suspicious down-voting?

There is an automated system that is on the lookout for suspicious voting, whether up or down. My understanding is that the exact workings of the system are kept private, so as to prevent deliberate workarounds. Regarding your specific situation, note that the votes you received on 2012-08-12 as indicated on your user reputation page are grouped by type of vote rather than by timestamp. So you have 7 upvotes listed in succession, and then 5 downvotes listed in succession. But if you look at the times on these votes, you'll notice that you received votes in this order:
10:04 - up
10:05 - down
10:09 - up
10:10 - up
10:13 - down
10:14 - up
10:15 - up
10:17 - down
10:18 - up
10:19 - down
10:21 - 1 up, 1 down

If we assume for the sake of argument that all of this voting is by one user (which isn't a given, but also isn't too unreasonable since these votes occurred close together in time and all on different posts), then that user voted up 7 posts and voted down 5 posts, netting you +2 in votes received and also +25 reputation. So I don't think there's too much to worry about there.

Noticed the same thing on my account just now (had four downs in span of 30-mins), though don't make anything of it other than someone likes to downvote... :-) ...sort of funny to think about them reading content and really trying to decide if the content is of use or not.


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Is it just me or has there not been a question in over 2 days?
The last question I see is the question I asked about the Scotch Game.  Is it just me or is that in fact the last question that was asked?  What are we to make of this?

We need to attract more people to the site rather than rely on more questions from the existing community.
Sometimes you just don't have questions. I've been a member of stackoverflow for a long time and have only ever asked 2 questions.


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Questions about books?
I have a lot of chess books, mostly used that I got for free or dirt cheap. I am not looking for recommendations on books to buy, but more on which books I should read in order if I preset a list and if someone has read the book on here, even better.  Can we ask those types of questions?

I'd see nothing wrong with a question about a specific book, but compiling a list out of the particular books you own sounds a bit too localized to me.  Now, you could ask "what kind of chess book in general should I be reading first, and what kind should I be saving for later?"  That way, not only can you can glean some pointers for your own library, but the question becomes more valuable to other users.

I see what you are saying, but I think one time someone asked a question on books and it was immediately closed because it was mentioned that stackexchange is not a recommendation engine.  I probably will ask the type of questions you asked in your post though.

I don't think asking for reading recommendations is necessarily a deprecated topic here.  The user may not have clearly stated his mind or may have been mistaken in his disapproval of the question you refer to.  I'm not familiar with that thread, though, so I can't look up the details.  If your recommendation question is well-formed and clearly defined, you should still be on-topic.  See this well-received recommendation question by Ed Dean.  More pertinently, see this question regarding a specific book.

Ok, I see what you are saying. The second question link is mine lol :)

Ha, didn't notice!  :)

Just wanted to add one thought to this - if you want a few books to be used as a specific curriculum for learning a specific skill, I think that's alright too.  But in general, product recommendations are frowned upon.  See Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for more details.

Yes, there are certainly questions asking for recommendations that are far too open-ended.  But in general, if you are careful to narrow the field of interest and criteria as far as possible, your question (and its answer) is much more helpful to all concerned.


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Are questions about online chess and Internet chess clients on topic?
Internet chess clients and servers/sites can be fairly complicated (see BabasChess). Is this site an appropriate place to look for help on using such things?
Example potential question: "Which FICS clients support Linux and can automatically create PGNs of games?"

Yes, those questions are absolutely on topic here.

What about a question like, "How to delete a chessbase.com account"?


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How to include diagrams in posts on stack exchange
Where is this documented? I have been including FENs which have mostly turned into diagrams, but I suspect someone may be helping.

See balpha's answer to this earlier meta post.

The link in @ETD's comment above doesn't work for me (I get an SSL version mismatch error using latest supported version of Chrome on Windows 8.1 -- I know, I should upgrade, but this is an old laptop...), but rearranging the parts of the domain name to this does work.

If I give an example of how to do it then you will just see the diagram!
The best way is for you to edit a post which has such a diagram so that you can see exactly how it is done. Copy the part that is displaying the diagram, paste it into your text editor, change it with the data for your game and then try posting it. Of course you should just cancel out of the edit of the original post.
That's how I did it the first time and even now if I want to include a diagram I edit one of my old posts to copy and paste a working example.

You could have included it here so people don't have to search through all the questions to find one holding diagram - it would be possible then to open edit here and see how it looks - in this format answer is not useful


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Can you restore Abhinav Atul's second reply to Rid Of Addiction question?
In response to a question about how to deal with chess addiction (Rid of Addiction), two sensible and quite original replies by newcomer Abhinav Atul were successively deleted by moderators. The second time, the first half of the answer was randomly posted as a comment, losing the second half of the answer. Apart from the fact that the deletion of the answer was completely inappropriate, the casual truncating of half the answer was thoughtless and insulting.
I would like the longer answer by Abhinav Atul to be restored please and an apology issued for the posting of a truncated comment. The comment could easily have been rendered articulate by editing out the first part of the answer. This mentioned politely the deletion of the first comment, but which was not necessary to comprehend the sense of Abhinav Atul's idea.
The second question is why be so heavy-handed as to delete these replies rather than simply hiding or voting for their dismissal? One reason why these exist is to minimize the impact of moderatorial error, as unfortunately happened here.
Thank you for your time.

This is not so much a "letter of the law" thing as a "spirit of the law" thing from the SE point of view.
The answers were basically suggesting intentional sandbagging (artificial rating loss) on chess sites and/or real life. This is behaviour that is explicitly against the Terms and Conditions of said chess sites and organisations.
While the answers do not violate the Chess Stack Exchange rules, they were essentially promoting illegal behaviour on other sites. I think deletion is perfectly justified here.

But what you say is not what the moderators said. One of them said vaguely it’s not useful. The other just moved the reply to a comment randomly truncating it. Even if the suggested behaviour is not constructive, there are other mechanisms, including downvoting. Your reply here could have been a useful criticism of the deleted reply, instead of receiving a much more limited audience here

Useful comment or not, accurate reason or not, I prefer to see the answer deleted than to see it left up even with a (dis)qualifying comment.

I can understand your position, Remellion. But random deletion with insufficient explanation creates additional confusion and possible rancour on top of what is already an issue. Why would moderators behave like this?

Violating T&C is not ordinarily illegal.


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how do I create a position with the chess board?
How do I create a chess position to show it on the site, without attaching an actual image?


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Ask about other games like Go?
Go is similar to chess in many respects and is played by over a billion people.
Would it make sense to include "igo" as it known in Japan (baduk in Korean) as a question subject?
I realize that chess experts may not be able to answer go questions and vice versa, but this is no different than any other SE site. For example, when somebody asks about Ruby or XML on Stack Overflow I cannot answer, but if they ask about Java or C, I can.


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Tag synonym request
I've noticed that new gm tag has been created. I'd like to propose it be marked as a synonym of grandmaster.
I do not have the rep to make the change myself.

The [gm] tag now appears to have been deleted.

I agree!
And it looks like the gm tag has only been used for just one question.


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Vote to reopen "Carlsen reaching 2900 in classical format?"
I've nominated the above question for reopening. Since it asks "Can" instead of "Will", I don't see it being primarily opinion-based.
I believe an acceptable answer would be a matter of calculating the score he would need over his next few tournaments.

My opinion is that the question right now will not get a good answer.  If there were already an answer with mathematical models and probabilities of Carlsen achieving 2900 that might be an acceptable question and answer to leave on the site.
If the question can be edited so that it's based on facts and not on opinion then it might be on topic.

Maybe I'm making too much of the semantics, "can", which I read as is it possible, vs. "will", or is he going to, which I believe most others are reading it as. It appears I am alone in that opinion. I thought about editing it, but I didn't want to make significant changes to how it reads, asking for the math, tournament results needed, etc.

@HerbWolfe When I read "can" my reaction is "Of course it's theoretically possible" which is different than "What is the likelihood..." or something along those lines.  FWIW, I read on one chess news site that Carlsen could get over 2900 with something like 8.5/9 at the Norway Open, so a question that elicits that response is closer to the mark.

I interpret the question differently, but the interpretation is, in the end, irrelevant. Even if he is asking if it is mathematically possible for Carlsen to reach 2900 (as you suggest, probably correctly), this becomes a fairly self-evident and (IMHO) pointless question. I do not see how it contributes to the Chess.SE site or model in any significant way, regardless of interpretation.


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Is it okay to refer a chess product?
I know that in stackoverflow, it's forbidden to share link to commercial products, because it's considered as advertising.
I would like to know if it's okay(not considered as advertising) to refer a chess product in chess.stackexchange.
I see some questions/answers are referring some books already, without penalization. But because of the policy of stackoverflow, I wanted to sure.
Thanks in advance.

It is allowed, as long as you disclose your affiliation with the product (if any):

The community here tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it
  as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen
  to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must
  disclose your affiliation in your answers.

From https://chess.stackexchange.com/help/promotion


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Copy-Position yields incomplete FEN
I'm surprised this does not seem to have been asked, but why is it that the "Copy Position" function of the chess replayer does not include important information like whose turn it is and the castling rights and the number of moves left for the 50-move-rule to apply? Can this poor design be fixed?


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What are our PGN widget's limitations?
I have recently tried to post an answer containing the code for a PGN widget for a very long chess game (183 full-moves). Every attempt locks up the current tab in the browser. What limit is there, if any, to the number of moves that the widget can handle? Or possibly there's a limit to the collective number of moves in all the widgets displayed on a web page at the same time?

I think it depends on your browser, operating system and system resources. There's  no built-in limit or something similar.
Below is the longest chess game I could find, and it works correctly (tested here) on my machine. Note that the replayer is not enabled on this Meta site.
[FEN ""]

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Nf3 O-O 6.Be2 Nbd7 7.O-O
e5 8.Re1 Re8 9.Bf1 h6 10.d5 Nh7 11.Rb1 f5 12.Nd2 f4 13.b4 g5
14.Nb3 Bf8 15.Be2 Ndf6 16.c5 g4 17.cxd6 cxd6 18.a3 Ng5 19.Bf1
Re7 20.Qd3 Rg7 21.Kh1 Qe8 22.Nd2 g3 23.fxg3 fxg3 24.Qxg3 Nh3
25.Qf3 Qg6 26.Nc4 Bd7 27.Bd3 Ng5 28.Bxg5 Qxg5 29.Ne3 Re8
30.Ne2 Be7 31.Rbd1 Rf8 32.Nf5 Ng4 33.Neg3 h5 34.Kg1 h4 35.Qxg4
Qxg4 36.Nh6+ Kh7 37.Nxg4 hxg3 38.Ne3 gxh2+ 39.Kxh2 Rh8 40.Rh1
Kg6+ 41.Kg1 Rc8 42.Be2 Rc3 43.Rd3 Rc1+ 44.Nf1 Bd8 45.Rh8 Bb6+
46.Kh2 Rh7+ 47.Rxh7 Kxh7 48.Nd2 Bg1+ 49.Kh1 Bd4+ 50.Nf1 Bg4
51.Bxg4 Rxf1+ 52.Kh2 Bg1+ 53.Kh3 Re1 54.Bf5+ Kh6 55.Kg4 Re3
56.Rd1 Bh2 57.Rh1 Rg3+ 58.Kh4 Rxg2 59.Kh3 Rg3+ 60.Kxh2 Rxa3
61.Rg1 Ra6 62.Rg6+ Kh5 63.Kg3 Rb6 64.Rg7 Rxb4 65.Bc8 a5
66.Bxb7 a4 67.Bc6 a3 68.Ra7 Rb3+ 69.Kf2 Kg5 70.Ke2 Kf4 71.Ra4
Rh3 72.Kd2 a2 73.Bb5 Rh1 74.Rxa2 Rh2+ 75.Be2 Kxe4 76.Ra5 Kd4
77.Ke1 Rh1+ 78.Kf2 Rc1 79.Bg4 Rc2+ 80.Ke1 e4 81.Be6 Ke5 82.Bg8
Rc8 83.Bf7 Rc7 84.Be6 Rc2 85.Ra8 Rb2 86.Ra6 Rg2 87.Kd1 Rb2
88.Ra5 Rg2 89.Bd7 Rh2 90.Bc6 Kf4 91.Ra8 e3 92.Re8 Kf3 93.Rf8+
Ke4 94.Rf6 Kd3 95.Bb5+ Kd4 96.Rf5 Rh1+ 97.Ke2 Rh2+ 98.Kd1 Rh1+
99.Kc2 Rh2+ 100.Kc1 Rh1+ 101.Kc2 Rh2+ 102.Kd1 Rh1+ 103.Ke2
Rh2+ 104.Kf1 Rb2 105.Be2 Ke4 106.Rh5 Rb1+ 107.Kg2 Rb2 108.Rh4+
Kxd5 109.Kf3 Kc5 110.Kxe3 Rb3+ 111.Bd3 d5 112.Rh8 Ra3 113.Re8
Kd6 114.Kd4 Ra4+ 115.Kc3 Ra3+ 116.Kd4 Ra4+ 117.Ke3 Ra3 118.Rh8
Ke5 119.Rh5+ Kd6 120.Rg5 Rb3 121.Kd2 Rb8 122.Bf1 Re8 123.Kd3
Re5 124.Rg8 Rh5 125.Bg2 Kc5 126.Rf8 Rh6 127.Bf3 Rd6 128.Re8
Rc6 129.Ra8 Rb6 130.Rd8 Rd6 131.Rf8 Ra6 132.Rf5 Rd6 133.Kc3
Rd8 134.Rg5 Rd6 135.Rh5 Rd8 136.Rf5 Rd6 137.Rf8 Ra6 138.Re8
Rc6 139.Ra8 Rb6 140.Ra5+ Rb5 141.Ra1 Rb8 142.Rd1 Rd8 143.Rd2
Rd7 144.Bg2 Rd8 145.Kd3 Ra8 146.Ke3 Re8+ 147.Kd3 Ra8 148.Kc3
Rd8 149.Bf3 Rd7 150.Kd3 Ra7 151.Bg2 Ra8 152.Rc2+ Kd6 153.Rc3
Ra2 154.Bf3 Ra8 155.Rb3 Ra5 156.Ke3 Ke5 157.Rd3 Rb5 158.Kd2
Rc5 159.Bg2 Ra5 160.Bf3 Rc5 161.Bd1 Rc8 162.Bb3 Rc5 163.Rh3
Kf4 164.Kd3 Ke5 165.Rh5+ Kf4 166.Kd4 Rb5 167.Bxd5 Rb4+ 168.Bc4
Ra4 169.Rh7 Kg5 170.Rf7 Kg6 171.Rf1 Kg5 172.Kc5 Ra5+ 173.Kc6
Ra4 174.Bd5 Rf4 175.Re1 Rf6+ 176.Kc5 Rf5 177.Kd4 Kf6 178.Re6+
Kg5 179.Be4 Rf6 180.Re8 Kf4 181.Rh8 Rd6+ 182.Bd5 Rf6 183.Rh1
Kf5 184.Be4+ Ke6 185.Ra1 Kd6 186.Ra5 Re6 187.Bf5 Re1 188.Ra6+
Ke7 189.Be4 Rc1 190.Ke5 Rc5+ 191.Bd5 Rc7 192.Rg6 Rd7 193.Rh6
Kd8 194.Be6 Rd2 195.Rh7 Ke8 196.Kf6 Kd8 197.Ke5 Rd1 198.Bd5
Ke8 199.Kd6 Kf8 200.Rf7+ Ke8 201.Rg7 Rf1 202.Rg8+ Rf8 203.Rg7
Rf6+ 204.Be6 Rf2 205.Bd5 Rf6+ 206.Ke5 Rf1 207.Kd6 Rf6+ 208.Be6
Rf2 209.Ra7 Kf8 210.Rc7 Rd2+ 211.Ke5 Ke8 212.Kf6 Rf2+ 213.Bf5
Rd2 214.Rc1 Rd6+ 215.Be6 Rd2 216.Rh1 Kd8 217.Rh7 Rd1 218.Rg7
Rd2 219.Rg8+ Kc7 220.Rc8+ Kb6 221.Ke5 Kb7 222.Rc3 Kb6 223.Bd5
Rh2 224.Kd6 Rh6+ 225.Be6 Rh5 226.Ra3 Ra5 227.Rg3 Rh5 228.Rg2
Ka5 229.Rg3 Kb6 230.Rg4 Rb5 231.Bd5 Rc5 232.Rg8 Rc2 233.Rb8+
Ka5 234.Bb3 Rc3 235.Kd5 Rc7 236.Kd4 Rd7+ 237.Bd5 Re7 238.Rb2
Re8 239.Rb7 Ka6 240.Rb1 Ka5 241.Bc4 Rd8+ 242.Kc3 Rh8 243.Rb5+
Ka4 244.Rb6 Rh3+ 245.Bd3 Rh5 246.Re6 Rg5 247.Rh6 Rc5+ 248.Bc4
Rg5 249.Ra6+ Ra5 250.Rh6 Rg5 251.Rh4 Ka5 252.Rh2 Rg3+ 253.Kd4
Rg5 254.Bd5 Ka4 255.Kc5 Rg3 256.Ra2+ Ra3 257.Rb2 Rg3 258.Rh2
Rc3+ 259.Bc4 Rg3 260.Rb2 Rg5+ 261.Bd5 Rg3 262.Rh2 Rc3+ 263.Bc4
Rg3 264.Rh8 Ka3 265.Ra8+ Kb2 266.Ra2+ Kb1 267.Rf2 Kc1 268.Kd4
Kd1 269.Bd3 Rg7 1/2-1/2

Another long 'game' which I already used is here (185 moves), which might be useful as another test case.

Aha. FEN "" for game starting position WTM. Useful shortcut.


text:
Why is there a separate stack exchange for chess?
I was just wondering why this isn't part of the sports stack exchange site.


text:
We don't need no [education]
At the moment we have the following tags from the topic field "education":

teaching: 0 followers, 10 questions

Questions about teaching chess, chess strategies etc.

learning: 23 followers, 241 questions, synonym: improvement

Questions related to learning how to play chess and improving your chess skills

education: 0 followers, 8 questions

There is no usage guidance for this tag … yet!

I think education is a tag to much, all topics about education should be sufficiently described using teaching or learning.
Therefore I think we should retag all questions tagged with education using one (or two) of the other "education" topic field tags and delete education.

[teaching] and [learning] should come under the broader tag [education] in my opinion. They're both just another brick in the wall...

Yes, that would be another good idea I haven't really thought of yet.

learning can have a different meaning in the context of computer chess. edcuation and teaching can be made synonyms

Based on the comments, I would propose the following idea (edits to existing tags are emphasized)

teaching

Questions about teaching chess, chess strategies etc.

learning

Questions related to learning how to play chess and improving your chess skills. This can also be used for questions concerning "learning" chess engines.

education gets deleted

I will retag questions tagged with education using teaching or learning and extend the tag excerpt of learning, both under reference to this answer.


text:
No cookie for you!
Since a week or so, all SE sites repeatedly ask for accepting cookies. And regardless how often I click "accept all", the next subsite or call after a browser restart asks again. (I checked, my NoScript is set on accepting all SE scripts? Hmm, is it? Nevermind, this never happened before even with scripts blocked.)
Someone an idea what is wrong here? Could be as well on my side. (I have a standard Firefox running.) Anybody experience this too?

There are several other users with similar problems; you could check the [cookies] tag on Meta Stack Exchange for possible solutions.

For the first time I'm answering my own question (even if this is kind of silly), because I think I found the reason and it might help others:
Clicking on "OK to all scripts" in the NoScript plugin (and maybe any similar) does NOT OK all scripts! Because these are just the SE scripts, which postload even more scripts, and "cookielaw.org" was NOT OK'ed, and it handles the SE cookies. After I accepted that one, the problem was gone...on chess SE, that is.
It seems that the site sets a cookie for any SE subsite and I must also repeat OK'ing for any subsite, but then, it's only a handful I visit...

Maybe. Maybe not. I had the same problem on one device where as well as an adblocker I use something which I think is called MuMatrix which aggressively blocks a lot more stuff in a customizable way (you can look at what it is doing and change it). Everything was OK for me, then my MuMatrix device started played up - every refresh a request to OK cookies - the a couple of days ago back to normal again. I didn't change anything (apart from using that device much less for SE access) so I assume StackExchange changed something.


text:
Board surplus feature
It would be extremely helpful if the CSE default FEN board would be accompanied with something like this: as you see, a little arrow indicates the side to move as well as the orientation of the board, both which can only be inferred from context now.


text:
Opinions vs statistics: Polls?
So, yesterday someone from my chess club claimed that he had problem with keeping the
overview of the real board - he was accustomed to online chess with "printed" boards.
Naturally, playing OTB since more than half a century I was surprised.
Can that be turned into a question?
"Are printed boards easier to overview than real ones?" Clearly opinionated.
"Are printed boards easier to overview than real ones for the majority of chess players?" That's a yes-or-no question, but you probably had to run a poll. Whoopsie, we don't do polls on SE. For reasons.
Any suggestions for the curious SE user?

Why don't you specify in the question that you are seeking credible statistics reporting? If someone was foolish enough to think their personal opinion is responsive to a request for independent facts, downvote and flag it. Or ask for a comparison of accessibility issues between real boards/pieces and flat/printed/screen displays, UX is reasonably well-founded in most areas.


text:
Handling of wrong URLs
Being a very intelligent idiot :-), I more than once entered
"meta.chess.stackexchange.com" instead of the correct order. Firefox prompty panics with a "security risk". I tested a bit, the "standard" response on a site to an URL botched this way is a straight 404 error. Is there a technical reason (e.g. all the sites that could exist on SE in future) for the different handling? I tag it as "bug" now for lack of a better wording.
(To add lulz to injury, I tried to open the wrong URL with Lynx. Oh yes, Lynx. This will get me a kaput cookie and ultimatively redirect me to the correct page if I accept, as it seems. Thus it might be only due to Firefox.)

You're not stupid, meta.chess.stackexchange.com used to be the domain of the Chess Meta site. Therefore, this link: http://meta.chess.stackexchange.com still works and redirects to the current one, chess.meta.stackexchange.com.
However, I think Firefox interpreted your request as https://meta.chess.stackexchange.com (note the 's' in 'https'), and the Stack Exchange SSL certificate isn't valid for that domain. Therefore, Firefox displays a warning. If you choose to ignore the warning, you again get redirected to the right domain, chess.meta.stackexchange.com.
Details about the migration to HTTPS (quite technical though) can be found here: Network-wide HTTPS: It's time on Meta Stack Exchange.


text:
Should we have a chess board feature implemented here at http://chess.stackexchange.com?
Should we have a chess board feature implemented here at http://chess.stackexchange.com?

This question is better suited for Meta, but as @user1583209 mentions it's a duplicate.


text:
How to change PGN Viewer board orientation to perspective of side not-to-move?
How can I change the PGN Viewer's board orientation to the perspective of the side that is not to move?
Is the orientation determined only by the active color field of the FEN notation? If so, then is the board's orientation always from the perspective of the side that is to move? If so, and given the board is unlabeled, would that make it impossible to determine if the board is from White's perspective with White-to-move or Black's perspective with Black-to-move in a move-less diagram (or even the replayer without copying the move text or visual cues like pawn movement), unless it can be inferred from relative locations of the pieces alone? If so, then is the only way to show the board from the perspective of the side-not-to-move to change the active color? That is a bad hack because anyone trying to copy the position text would copy it incorrectly; and if there were any moves, they would be mismatched to the position by a half-move. I'd like as new features rank and file labels and the ability to change the board orientation.

If you want to view the game from black's perspective, you can add the tag [StartFlipped "1"] to the pgn headers.  Similarly, if you want to force white to be on the bottom even though black is moving first, you can add [StartFlipped "0"] to the headers and it will override the default of the side to move on the bottom.


text:
Tooltip appears under chess pieces
Bug: tooltips' z-index values are too low, so they show up under the chess pieces:

Do you have a link to a question or answer where this happened? That would make it possible to do some code inspection on such a case.


text:
Follow questions in RSS
Is it possible to follow newly added questions in RSS format? I didn't find a way. Couple of users could enjoy this possibility.

There seems to be no direct link to it on the homepage or the questions page, but https://chess.stackexchange.com/feeds seems to be what you're looking for; it's an RSS version of the Newest Questions page.


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Is it best practice to update one's own question or to ask a new one?
I'd like to know more about unknown old FIDE players. I wanted to update my question by adding few players but the question has been edited for a very reasonable reason:

Please do not change the question after is has been asked; if you want to know something new, ask a new question.

I fully understand this reason, but is it reasonable to ask a second question that will be very similar to the first? I mean, the big difference will be that I will be asking about new names for which I cannot find information. The alternative would be to update my question by adding some few names. What is best practice?

If you are asking about different players then please ask a new question, particularly since the previous question is almost 2 years old and it would make existing answers look incomplete.


text:
Why is this question too opinion-based?
What are the general principles for playing hypermodern against hypermodern? (Or should I not?)
Why would answers to a question like this be more opinion-based than, say, a question about opening principles in general?  It's not like they're asking what the best line is.
A question about general opening principles would presumably be on-topic, yet even there, opinions differ - the hypermodern strategy itself violates the traditional principles in some ways.
As I mentioned in a reply to a comment on the question, if there are truly no special principles that apply when facing a hypermodern with a hypermodern, that would be an answer to the question.

Playing chess openings requires judgement. And for an individual faced with finite time available for study there is a second level of judgement required. To call this “opinion”, and then block it, is to deny the nature of chess as a pursuit.
The question about how to play a hypermodern against another is a particularly intriguing one which had never occurred to me, and I am really looking forward to reading the answer.
In determining whether a question is “opinion-based”, I recommend the following thought experiment, which is in the spirit of the Q&A nature of stackexchange. Can one imagine that a teacher like Silman would be able to respond coherently and informatively? In this case, I think the answer is definitely “yes”

I don't think the question is too opinion-based.
The closing note says

Many good questions generate some degree of opinion based on expert
  experience, but answers to this question will tend to be almost
  entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific
  expertise.

There are clearly facts that could be brought to bear on this question; for example, the frequency with which 1...g6 is used in response to 1.g3 in master play. References can be given, such as what authors of opening books say about these lines. There's room for disagreement, of course, but we are talking about informed opinion, not just random people saying "I like it/don't like it".
I sometimes feel that people are too afraid of "opinion" on this site. Taken too far, pretty much everything in chess other than rules, definitions, and tactical or endgame puzzles is opinion-based to some extent. :-)


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Should the PGN viewer board show rank/file on the squares?
I recently edited a question to convert the person's text description of where each piece was to an FEN diagram. Apparently this caused a little confusion as to which way the pawns were moving, as Black was on the move, which causes the replayer to show the board from Black's perspective.
I am aware that it is possible to flip the board when making a diagram, but even so, when someone else views the board there is no visual indication of which way the board is oriented. The only way to tell, as far as I know, is to directly view the PGN. Obviously that's not an ideal solution.
Many boards (both virtual and physical) have a small 1-8 and a-h in the corners of some of the squares. Would it be possible to implement this in the replayer, to avoid confusion?

+1 I am having this exact problem with If player A is in check but has a move which will checkmate player B without exiting check, is that move legal?. Clearly, it is Black’s turn (since Black is in check), but that says nothing about which way the board is oriented.

In fact, the position is currently displayed as an image that includes rank and file labels. So I am tempted to just leave it as it is. But this is no good for those who can’t access the image; I might post a follow-up question when I have time.

Done: How should we serve users who cannot access images?

I support this addition. It should be not too much complexity and will greatly aid beginners like me who don't know every square on the board by heart. And beginners make up most of the people asking questions, anyway.


text:
Should the [handicap], [handicapping], and [odds] tags be merged?
The handicapping tag says:

Questions related to handicapping a player in chess

The handicap tag says:

Games with handicap to compensate for difference in playing strength. For instance "pawn and move" odds means the stronger player is black (move) and has f7 pawn removed (pawn) before the start of the game. "Rook" odds usually means the stronger player is white and has his a1 rook removed before the start of the game.These used to be common 100 years ago usually combined with gambling on the result but are much rarer today.

The odds tag says:

For questions about games where odds have been given or about giving odds usually to handicap the stronger player. e.g. "pawn and move odds" means the stronger player is black and has the f7 pawn removed before play starts, "knight odds" means the stronger player is white and has the b1 knight removed before play starts.

Should these be merged, perhaps making the ones that are removed synonyms instead? I don't see any difference between them.

No.
Handicapping can also involve giving different amounts of time to the two players.

And "odds" does not? I know I've at least heard the phrase "time odds".

But on reflection, I think you are correct. Odds may be given even if the intent is not to handicap; for example, an Armageddon game may give time odds and draw odds, but the intent is to have a fair game, not to handicap the stronger player.

In that case we should create tags names "time-handicap" and "material-handicap" rather than having two overlapping ones


text:
Uploading .pgn files to chess.SE
I have a .pgn file I would like to upload, but I don't see an option for that.
Another option is to convert it to a .txt file and upload it, but could the above be implemented for mobile users?

Possible duplicate of Can we implement a replayer for chess analysis on the site?

@Andrew T. Nop. First of all we tried that (see my last question). Second of all we can't upload .pgns.

A PGN is a text file. You can just open it in any text file viewer and copy the content to the site.
A practical problem is that uploads are currently only possible for images: they go to imgur.com, which allows image files only.


text:
Why is this answer downvoted?
https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/24372/13147
It answers the question.

To quote Tim Post,
The answer was down voted because I lost my keys.
Seriously, people's voting habits on Stack Exchange can be very random. In this case, I suspect that people downvoted because the image was very large, perhaps obtrusive, and definitely contained much more than just the game.
Also, posts with downvotes usually tend to only attract more donwvotes. Psychologically, people appear to shy away from challenging the established majority of - gasp - one person!
Don't take it personally. If there is feedback given, consider implementing it. If there isn't, then A. You are knowingly spamming the site and no one needs to tell you that (You aren't - that comment was for future users with similar questions) or B. The downvoting was likely random stuff. Consider the amount of effort you put into the post. If you put it together carelessly, I suggest editing the post and/or give more effort in the future. If, however, you put the post together thoughtfully and received no feedback, then...
Don't worry about it.
Stuff (like random downvotes) happen.

By the way, I edited your answer to improve the formatting. I also upvoted your answer (after the edit).

But FOUR downvotes?

It even got deleted. My answer that actually answers the question got deleted.

Ok, I posted it afresh with your edits. Let's see what happens.

I downvoted your answer because it comes across as braggadocio.  You speak of your "brilliant" play and give a double exclam to Kc4 (it should be Kf6, but that's another story) as if it is some incredibly difficult move to find when it is actually pretty easy.
For what it's worth, I saw Kf6 after looking at the position for a few seconds and I am sure others who have studied king and pawn endgames and have experience with them would as well.

OK. It sounded to me like he was bragging on the GMs. To each his own! Have a good day.

@Brandon_J Judging by his comments in the other answers here, it seems unlikely.

Reuben Fine gave it two exclamation marks - not me. Read the book. Are you questioning that a GM gave it two exclamation marks?

I didn't vote either way, but perhaps some voters were rubbed the wrong way by your immodesty.

Kosteniuk talks like this. Also, your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

Usain Bolt talks like that, too. The difference is they are world champions and you are not. :-) But don't tell me, I don't care; like I said, I didn't vote.

Actually, all winners talk like that.

@JossieCalderon in hindsight, it does appear that immodesty was the reason for the downvotes. I would request that you change the accepted answer to Qudit or itub's answer, since mine doesn't exactly answer the question.


text:
Which PGN tags are supported on Chess SE?
When I paste such a PGN from a site, it does not show as a chess PGN viewer. This is an example PGN:
[Event "Daily HyperBullet Arena"]
[Site "https://lichess.org/kuvnBssO"]
[Date "2018.07.20"]
[Round "-"]
[White "Kulkid"]
[Black "WaisKamal"]
[Result "0-1"]
[UTCDate "2018.07.20"]
[UTCTime "18:41:55"]
[WhiteElo "2016"]
[BlackElo "2107"]
[WhiteRatingDiff "-9"]
[BlackRatingDiff "+8"]
[Variant "Standard"]
[TimeControl "30+0"]
[ECO "D44"]
[Opening "Queen's Gambit Declined: Vienna Variation, Quiet Variation"]
[Termination "Normal"]
[Annotator "lichess.org"]

1. d4 d5 2. c4 Nf6 3. Nc3 e6 4. Nf3 dxc4 5. e3 { D44 Queen's Gambit Declined: Vienna Variation, Quiet Variation } Be7 6. Bxc4 O-O 7. Bd3 Nbd7 8. O-O b6 9. Re1 Bb7 10. a3 Bxf3 11. b4 Bxd1 12. Rxd1 c5 13. Bb2 cxd4 14. exd4 Qc7 15. Ne2 Rac8 16. Rac1 Qb7 17. Rb1 Rc7 18. f3 Rfc8 19. Ng3 h6 20. Ne4 Nxe4 21. Bxe4 Qb8 22. Bd3 Bf6 23. Ba6 Rd8 24. Be2 b5 25. Kf2 a6 26. Bc1 Nf8 27. Be3 Rdd7 28. Rdc1 Rxc1 29. Rxc1 Qd8 30. Rd1 Bxd4 31. Bxd4 Rxd4 32. Rc1 Rd2 33. Re1 Ng6 34. Ke3 f5 35. Kf2 Nf4 36. Kg3 Nxe2+ 37. Kf2 Qd4+ 38. Kf1 Qg1# { Black wins by checkmate. } 0-1

I thought some tags are not supported by the PGN viewer. What tags are supported, or, is it an issue with my PGN?

For the PGN viewer to appear, you first need to indent the PGN four spaces (which can be done using the "preformatted text" option in the editor). Did you do that, and it still didn't appear?

It is indented but still does not appear.

To get the PGN viewer to appear, you need to include

[fen ""]

in the PGN header. I just tested the following on the main site (the viewer isn't active on meta), and it worked:
[Event "Daily HyperBullet Arena"]
[Site "https://lichess.org/kuvnBssO"]
[Date "2018.07.20"]
[Round "-"]
[White "Kulkid"]
[Black "WaisKamal"]
[Result "0-1"]
[UTCDate "2018.07.20"]
[UTCTime "18:41:55"]
[WhiteElo "2016"]
[BlackElo "2107"]
[WhiteRatingDiff "-9"]
[BlackRatingDiff "+8"]
[Variant "Standard"]
[TimeControl "30+0"]
[ECO "D44"]
[Opening "Queen's Gambit Declined: Vienna Variation, Quiet Variation"]
[Termination "Normal"]
[Annotator "lichess.org"]
[fen ""]

1. d4 d5 2. c4 Nf6 3. Nc3 e6 4. Nf3 dxc4 5. e3 { D44 Queen's Gambit Declined: Vienna Variation, Quiet Variation } Be7 6. Bxc4 O-O 7. Bd3 Nbd7 8. O-O b6 9. Re1 Bb7 10. a3 Bxf3 11. b4 Bxd1 12. Rxd1 c5 13. Bb2 cxd4 14. exd4 Qc7 15. Ne2 Rac8 16. Rac1 Qb7 17. Rb1 Rc7 18. f3 Rfc8 19. Ng3 h6 20. Ne4 Nxe4 21. Bxe4 Qb8 22. Bd3 Bf6 23. Ba6 Rd8 24. Be2 b5 25. Kf2 a6 26. Bc1 Nf8 27. Be3 Rdd7 28. Rdc1 Rxc1 29. Rxc1 Qd8 30. Rd1 Bxd4 31. Bxd4 Rxd4 32. Rc1 Rd2 33. Re1 Ng6 34. Ke3 f5 35. Kf2 Nf4 36. Kg3 Nxe2+ 37. Kf2 Qd4+ 38. Kf1 Qg1# { Black wins by checkmate. } 0-1

That's usually just used for inputting an initial position (in FEN notation) that differs from the chess start position, and otherwise PGN readers will default to using the start position; in the case of the site's PGN viewer, it's needed explicitly even when starting at the beginning of the game because that particular part of the header is what triggers the viewer to display on the site.


text:
How are we handling Harry's questions?
I'm under the impression Harry is generally prohibited from asking questions because of repeated low-quality contributions, but he/she is getting around the ban by creating new accounts (hence all the accounts have 1 rep). Presumably that would mean their questions are automatically deleted.
However this question has a comment from a mod and isn't deleted or closed, which is surprising. How are we handling them?

The question has been deleted. That said, mods may not realize about socks unless they are familiar with them, or someone else informing the mods (e.g. through flag).


text:
Should the [training] tag be nixed in favor of simply [improvement]?
Basically what the title says. Both tags mentioned are currently in use, with 3 questions having the [training] tag and 8 having the [improvement] tag. I think the [training] tag is pretty much superfluous, since any question along the lines of "How should I train for __ aspect of chess?" could rightfully/just-as-usefully be tagged as an [improvement] question. Agree? Disagree?
Out of curiosity: If I were to remove the [training] tag from all questions to which it currently applies, would it disappear from the tag list?

Unless/until there are specific questions related to chess training, I think you are correct that the training tag is superfluous.
However, I do think that chess trainers asking about how to teach kids various elementary mates might use the training tag.  Or, for example, questions about how to train kids to use more time during games, etc.
Similarly, questions about what to eat before a chess game, or how to relax in between two games in a two-a-day tournament might get a training tag.
But general questions about chess improvement should probably only get the improvement tag.
If the training tag were removed, then it would not disappear.  See for-white as an example (I removed the tag from the two questions, but it is still in the list)


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Is the Story Chess a bad fit for the site? If not, how can it be improved?
As I type this, my question about Story Time Chess has 3 close votes and 2 down votes.  I realize this question is different than many questions on Chess SE, but it's not clear to me that it is a misfit - there are questions about ChessBase, AimChess, etc. So, is the Story Time Chess question wrong for the site?
Also, a moderator commented that it should be made less opinion based. As I replied, I asked for studies (hoping someone might find one or more that I couldn't) or first hand experience with the aim of avoiding opinion based answers. I haven't thought of a way to re-word the question to conform with the request. What are ways to do this?
Disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with Story Time Chess. As stated in the OP, I am trying to evaluate whether to buy it for a young relative - for the money involved, I could also get a set & board and also a couple books.

there are questions about ChessBase, AimChess, etc

There are indeed and they are usually "product help desk" type questions to which I mildly object, because we are not the Chessbase help desk etc., but no longer vote to close now that I'm a mod.
However your question wasn't a "help desk" question. It was a "Is this product any good?" question. That is opinion based, whereas "How do I do this in X?" is fact based.

The wording in the question was "Is Story Time Chess effective?" which invites fact based answers.


text:
Make it easier to enter Unicode chess symbols in questions/answers
The following chess symbols are available in Unicode:
white chess king    ♔   U+2654
white chess queen   ♕   U+2655
white chess rook    ♖   U+2656
white chess bishop  ♗   U+2657
white chess knight  ♘   U+2658
white chess pawn    ♙   U+2659
black chess king    ♚   U+265A
black chess queen   ♛   U+265B
black chess rook    ♜   U+265C
black chess bishop  ♝   U+265D
black chess knight  ♞   U+265E
black chess pawn    ♟   U+265F

It would be useful to have an easy way of entering these on chess.stackexchange.com.

Interesting suggestion, though at this point the real challenge the community faces is growing. Has the lack of an easy way to use the unicode chess symbols stopped you from answering or asking questions on the main site?

@blunders I never said it did.

I would be against the use of Unicode chess symbols for the following reasons:

Human Readability: In my opinion, the unicode chess symbols are hard to read.
Search Engine Readability: Google does not appear to index Unicode chess symbols, and Google is a huge source of traffic for SE websites


text:
What should be done about outdated accepted answers?
Here is my answer from a while back: https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/1059/307, the answer no longer has value, since the youtube content it is pointing to has been removed. I tried deleting the answer, but I couldn't since it is an accepted answer.
I don't see a way to salvage this answer, what should be done about it?

Thank you for wanting to keep the site up to date!
♦ moderators can delete accepted answers (I just did) so all you need to do is to raise a moderator flag on your post. Opening a meta question, like you did, works too.
Sometimes, an answer heavily depending on a now-broken link can be salvaged by the Wayback Machine or Archive Today, but not this one.


text:
Is my question unclear?
Psychology (including confidence) is an important part of any competitive activity, especially chess, where nearly the whole competition is in the minds of the opponents. Preparation and practice help improve confidence, as well as get ready for the situation one is studying.
Recently my child played in a tournament and performed poorly. This is after several tournaments in which success was had. In one lost game in particular, the opposing player played a very unusual - and generally considered inferior - opening. However, my kid had never played against such an opening, was confused by it, and played poorly. While I don't by any means want to teach poor principles, in order to help prepare for future games in which an opponent pulls out a strange opening, I seek to find such openings for me to play at home, when we are relaxed, and when a "teaching moment" might occur.
Alas I will be the first to admit that I am not a very strong or knowledgeable chess player. Thus I asked the question (For training purposes) Are there any openings with rook pawns that are more effective than others (and if so, what are they)?. It has gotten several answers, and a couple of them have  been helpful. However some of the answers don't address what I am asking. Instead, they just state that I should teach good principles in spite of the fact I already said I want to do this in the original post. I have made comments trying to elicit more helpful suggestions; unfortunately, these seem to lead to testy exchanges instead of improved answers.
I just added to the post in an attempt to better explain myself.
So, am I clear enough here? Is the reason I'm not getting helpful responses just due to a lack of openings that fit my question and yet some people think they should answer anyway (and yet not with something like "Sorry, there aren't any.")? Or do I need to improve the question somehow?

Don't worry about it.
I don't think the question is unclear, but people sometimes try to be helpful by answering what they think you should have asked instead. :-)
People sometimes disagree with the premises of the question, too. In this case it could be that people think that studying the opening at the beginner level (beyond general principles) is not useful.
One piece of information which could have helped give more context to your question is your kid's rating. You say scholastic, but that could mean anything from 100 to 2000+. If it's closer to the low end of the range, the opening definitely doesn't matter much because there were probably multiple blunders on both sides. If it's at the higher end, the importance of openings is much greater.

People are just trying to explain you that your question is of no importance at all. Since, seen the context you're given, most answerers assume your kid's intentions is to become a better chess player, not knowing if 1.a3 is better than 1.a4 just for the sake of knowing it, it is logical to give you advice in that direction.
You would have made a better question by asking something like "How to get an edge against that kind of opening", as the most upvoted answer suggests rather than something like "Which of these four bad moves is better than the rest?"
Finally, as @itub says, people wanted to point out some assumptions you make in your question are wrong

What assumptions are wrong?

"Ultimately, the other kid won the game because my kid didn't know how to respond and got rattled." That was not the reason

If you want to say that poor moves lost the game, I can't argue that and don't? However, why did my kid make bad moves? Because of lack of understanding? No, but because of getting nervous. Or do you presume to know my kid better than I do?

@GreenMatt If you don't want to listen to the people that know more than you do, don't even bother to ask them! If he made those bad moves because he was nervous, then he has to work on the psychological aspects. Knowing that 1.a3 is better than 1.a4 won't help him in that regard either. By the way, I don't know your particular child, but I've worked with dozens of them, so I know a couple of things about how to teach this game

"If he made those bad moves because he was nervous, then he has to work on the psychological aspects." What more do I have to say to show that that is exactly what I'm trying to do?

No. It is not. You are asked some unrelated question about 1,a4 as an opening

So what you're saying is that I wasn't clear enough about the purpose of the question. I've edited it (extensively) to make it clearer.


text:
To encourage answers in terms of FIDE ratings
Summary: should, and can, answerers and commenters be encoraged to speak in terms of approximate FIDE ratings rather than of "ratings" of unspecified types?
Details follow.
Answers and comments often group players by approximate rating. For example, "If your rating is up to 1400 at least, you probably need to develop planning skills."
Such grouping is helpful. It can make answers more useful and informative, but a vague impression is forming to me that, when many answerers say "1400," they mean "1400 on the website at which I play."
If the website is Lichess, for instance, then maybe 1400 is like FIDE 1050.
On the other hand, if the answerer meant FIDE 1400, then he would roughly be saying that the average adult amateur tournament player needs to develop planning skills—and maybe he is indeed saying that, but I cannot tell it by his answer. Can you?
I am not, of course, asking you today whether the average amateur tournament player needs to develop planning skills!  That was just an example. Rather, I am asking the following.
Would it substantially improve the site's content if answerers and commenters consistently spoke in terms of approximate FIDE ratings?  (Precision would not be required. If they say "about FIDE 1050," then we get the general idea.) If it would indeed substantially improve the site's content, then can you think of a practical way to encourage answerers and commenters to speak of ratings in some approximately consistent way?
Or are answerers and commenters already implicitly speaking in terms of FIDE ratings, only I have not understood this?
Because if not, then something a bit weird is going on here where a player whose FIDE rating is 1400 is likely to be offered experienced advice (as it were) by a player whose online rating is 1600, whereas the advice should probably be flowing in the opposite direction.

If someone says rating they should say whether FIDE,USCF, specific country, or specific web site.  It is too hard to correlate them to try to change them all to one rating such as FIDE.  And like prusswan says below,  the time control makes a bigger difference.   I know  high masters who are virtual patzers at blitz.   Some GMs are very high rated in both.  So time control for a rating makes a big difference as does the skill of the player at that time control.

There is no way to do it since the ratings can come from FIDE or any of the online playing sites with different time controls. The nature of this site means that regardless of the rating (proven or claimed), the content and user reputation may have very little to do with actual playing strength. On some playing sites they do check for and verify titled players, but I doubt there are enough titled players here for that to be worthwhile.

Well, yes, sure, granted, but I was not seeking an enforceable method, but rather a meaningful standard for purpose of communication. If you ask what my income is, and I reply, "30,000.00," then I have probably not given useful information. However, if I reply, "U.S. $30,000.00 annually," that is different. As you note, I could still be lying—and, moreover, there might remain details to discuss such as employment benefits packages, local costs of living, and so on—but these are not what I meant.

It brings to mind an anecdote. An American, I happened to be riding a train in Germany one day about 1988. Seated across was a Canadian couple. We should have shown better public manners by speaking German, I suppose, but the man's wife could not speak German and anyway English was easier for all of us, so we soon fell into small talk. The man's wife marveled how much happier it was to shop in Germany, since one could get two or three Deutsche Mark for a dollar. What could one politely say in the face of such innumeracy? Attention soon shifted silently to the window and its passing scene.

I don't see any single meaningful standard apart from FIDE, and quite many people are into online chess only. Then there is the issue of playing strength not necessarily translating into content quality for chess-related Q&A, it is possible for a person of average playing strength, to know a great deal about computer chess or trivia.


text:
PGN Viewer choices are showing up in the wrong place on the page
When the PGN viewer offers a choice, the choice dialog is appearing in the top left of the page, which doesn't seem correct.
No matter where I scroll or the window size, it's fixed just a few pixels below the top of the page and a consistent distance from the left. I'm guessing it's supposed to be offset from the top left of the chess board, but instead it's offset on the page globally.
Maybe a position: relative; is missing on the chessboard?
Reproduction
You should be able to see the bug on this chessboard copied from David's answer to {Landa vs Zhu Chen, Bad Wiessee, 2006} Lichess giving a +4.7 to white. Why?. Hit Next a couple of times until the choice comes up:
[Event "Chess Calculation: Chapter 1"]
[Site "https://lichess.org/study/VFtoodiL/uG0A42Q9"]
[Date "2021.09.12"]
[Round ""]
[White ""]
[Black ""]
[Result "*"]
[UTCDate "2021.09.12"]
[UTCTime "13:24:02"]
[Variant "From Position"]
[Opening "?"]
[Annotator "https://lichess.org/@/sohamdas"]
[SetUp "1"]
[FEN "r4rk1/pp2bppp/1np1p3/3q4/3Pb3/1QP3P1/P3PPBP/R1BRN1K1 w - - 0 1"]

1.c4 Qf5
    ( 1...Nxc4 2.Bxe4 Qxe4 3.Qxc4 )
2.f3 *

Chrome

Firefox


text:
invalid FEN in PGN viewer crashes your browser
I was modifying a FEN inside my question, as soon as I made a change (which made the FEN invalid), my web browser went in not-responding mode and after 30 secs it asked me "a heavy script is running, bla bla, Do you want to stop it from running?".
After stopping the script, I think it made me wait another 30 sec, then the page suffered irreversible damage and did not work properly until I performed a refresh.
I believe it is possible to make some changes to the code so that it doesn't crash like this, important drafts might get lost in the process.
Details:

I was modifying a FEN [FEN "rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq - 0 1"]
Using FireFox 17.0.1

Also happening with chromium, ask some chat of mine with Andrews for more details, iirc.

This seems to be resolved?


text:
State Association questions?
We're discussing ways to handle questions from our members about the state chess association, and it occurred to me if we could have a tag for our association here, we could direct our members here, and would have a place for the question to be asked and for someone from the association to answer. I have no idea if that would fall within the purview of the site as it sits, so I figured I should ask.
We don't want to detract from anything you're trying to do here, so feel free to tell me the idea is all wet.


text:
Can you vote to leave a question open?
Say your question is getting votes for closing, and you're concerned about it. Can you somehow vote to leave it open?

No, that is not possible.  You can close-vote an open question, or vote to reopen a closed question.  That said, you shouldn't be concerned about your question getting closed. If it is really close-worthy, then it's fine that it's getting closed, and if you disagree with the grounds for closing which the close-voters have given, you may ask on Meta to clarify why your particular question was closed, or whether it's close-worthy.  Then a moderator or informed user will explain. If a moderator determines at that point that a mistake was made, and that your question does fit the intent of the site, s/he can reopen the question at his/her discretion.
The FAQ has a section on what kind of questions not to ask, and if you want to see the list of various reasons to close a question, try clicking the close link on any question just to read the contents of the popup; you can exit the popup when you're done reading without actually voting to close.


text:
“Best response” questions and answers from database analysis
I’ve noticed that when there’s a question about “the best response” to some move in an opening, answerers will often cite a database of master-level games and respond with the top scoring responses in the database. While I don’t have a problem with that, these answers will often only contain that information with no explanation or analysis. This doesn’t seem like a very helpful way to answer.
Is there any policy for what an answer to these “best response questions” should contain? Or is it just something that gets sorted by voting?

There's no policy at the moment, and IMHO there shouldn't be one. You can always downvote the answer if you think it is not useful:

or, if you do think it's useful, upvote it. Personally, I always try to add an explanation about the quality/popularity of certain moves, but sometimes it's hard to tell why a move is good/popular.

@Dennis Dear Dennis, please consider accepting if you've found this answer satisfactory. Thank you


text:
Topic Clarity - Asking for the name of an opening?
Often while playing I'm forced to make certain moves in an opening in order to defend against certain obvious attacks. I would like to ask a question to identify an opening that either my opponent is playing, or I'm defending/attacking against. Sometimes plugging the moves into google yields the results, sometimes it doesn't. For example:

Can anyone tell me the name of the opening white used in this game?

[fen ""]
1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 b6 4.Nc3 Bb7 5.d5 Nd4 6.Nxd4 cxd4 7.Qxd4 f6 8.Be2 e5 9.dxe6 dxe6  10.Qxd8+ Rxd8 11.O-O Bd6 12.Be3

Would a question of this type be on topic? It has a definitive answer, even if that answer is 'White started with [chess opening], but transposed into something else' or something similar.

Yes, this is almost certainly on topic.  For example, see a similar question asking about the Scotch Game.
The only reason this might be off topic would be if it were something silly like 1. f3 e5 2. g3 d5 etc.

1. f3 e5 2. g3 d5 is known as "Gedult's Opening" on lichess.org (1 master game) and "Barnes' Opening" on chess.com (3 master games), though it is clearly a dubious opening at best.


text:
Is it possible to make little changes to the FEN diagram
Consider the following games:

This game was played on chess.com
This game was played on Shredder engine software.

The chess.com game will perfectly work if you just use
[FEN ""]
and past it here, it will work

But Shredder won't work, because the FEN is formatted differently, on separate lines. So in order to past that on this site you have to manually remove all the lines.
So is it possible to do like preformatted text editor option which auto indent. Could we make the [FEN ""] accept all kind of FENs as long as they are indented or something.
So that this would be valid
[FEN ""]
1. d4 {0s} Nf6 {+0.06/5 0s} 2. Nf3 {28s} d5 {+0.12/13 0s}
3. Bf4 {24s} Bf5 {+0.18/12 0s} 4. e3 {31s} e6 {+0.18/12 1s}
5. Bd3 {34s} Bxd3 {+0.10/12 0s} 6. Qxd3 {12s} Bd6 {+0.11/12
0s} 7. Nbd2 {37s (O-O)} O-O {+0.04/9 1s} 8. O-O {24:11m}
Bxf4 {0.00/17 1s} 9. exf4 {22s} Qd6 {+0.08/12 0s} 10. f5
{28s} exf5 {0.00/13 0s} 11. Qxf5 {13s} Nc6 {+0.04/13 0s}
12. Rfe1 {33s} Rfe8 {0.00/13 0s} 13. c3 {21s} Ne7 {+0.07/12
0s} 14. Qe5 {44s (Qh3)} Qb6 {-0.04/10 1s} 15. Rab1 {1:15m
(b3)} Ng6 {-0.11/10 2s} 16. Qg3 {27s} Rac8 {-0.08/12 0s}
17. Ne5 {36s (Qh3)} Re6 {-0.07/9 1s} 18. Nxg6 {18s} hxg6
{-0.06/14 0s} 19. Re5 {16s} Rce8 {-0.17/14 0s} 20. Rxe6
{31s} Rxe6 {-0.21/15 0s} 21. Qd3 {16s} Qd6 {-0.11/14 0s}
22. Nf3 {1:04m} Qf4 {-0.06/14 0s} 23. Re1 {45s} Rxe1+
{-0.14/14 0s} 24. Nxe1 {12s} Qc1 {-0.04/14 0s} 25. Qe2
{32s} g5 {0.00/14 0s} 26. h3 {16s} Ne4 {+0.02/14 0s} 27. g4
{28s} c5 {+0.05/15 0s} 28. dxc5 {1:00m} Nxc5 {+0.09/12 1s}
29. Qe8+ {17s} Kh7 {+0.01/16 0s} 30. Kg2 {44s} Qb1
{+0.01/16 0s} 31. Nf3 {37s} f6 {+0.01/16 0s} 32. b4 {21s}
Nd3 {0.00/17 0s} 33. Qh5+ {1:01m} Kg8 {0.00/20 0s} 34. Qe8+
{23s} Kh7 {0.00/19 0s} 35. Qh5+ {52s} Kg8 {0.00/20 0s}
36. Qe8+ {6s} Kh7 {0.00/99 0s} 1/2-1/2

I used the [FEN ""] and the preformatted text option
Each engine/website has a different method to export the game, that way all the FENs from any engine will be accepted without reformatting.

I'm not sure I understand the issue. I just tried inputting the block you have above (after "So that this would be valid"), and it seemed to render just fine. Line breaks aren't generally a problem for the site's PGN viewer.

@EdDean when i asked this question  i had to remove all the line breaks in order for the shredder game to be shown on the viewer

Hmm, I had tested out an edit on that post (without saving the edit) where I just dropped in the above text without removing line breaks, and it was working. I just tried again and saved the edit, so you can see whether that's what you wanted or not.

@EdDean i can't create diagrams here, please see my question again, and see what happens if i just past the FN without editing it http://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/2584/is-it-possible-to-expect-different-results-from-computer-vs-same-computer-on-the

please delete my edit to that question after you see it, i had to post it there, i can't post FEN here for some reason

Yeah, the viewer is only active on the main site, not on meta.

I just rolled back your latest edit, and I now know what the issue you were having is, as well as the solution. If you paste in the game as you did in your last edit, all you'd need to do to make it display correctly is to highlight the whole text of the game, and then click the pre-formatted text button in the post editor. That will automatically indent all of the text, and the viewer will display it correctly. Try that out and see if it solves your problem.


text:
How likely it is for this site to pass the beta stage?
I know that it is an extremely hard question to answer, but I'd like to know what are the odds. This site is my favorite on SE network because I love chess more than anything, I saw many betas gone with the wind and I see the volume of questions low so I'm concerned.
Also I don't like other Q&A/forums so if this site is gone, I don't see me being a member anywhere else. Although I'm not helping much here, asking more than answering but still I like it here.
What can we do to make it better? And isn't it better if we merge this site with this site http://boardgames.stackexchange.com
I mean java which is a tag on stackoverflow gets more questions per day than both sites combined. Besides Chess is the only sport that has a dedicated site on SE, look at http://sports.stackexchange.com it combines NFL, NHL, NBA, Soccer..
I think with the appropriate tagging this site and boardgames could be combined and will have a better chance, sacrificing a site for the greater good of both sites. What do you think?
The thing is, regardless of the stats, this site doesn't deserve to die, when you search for a question about chess on google, you see chess.se, it has better ranking than chess.com or any other chess forum.

I'm Grace Note, a Community Manager at Stack Exchange.
I recently did a review of this site for graduation, much like one I did for Code Review. I figured since you guys are asking this, I can drop by with some of the thoughts I had.
This site is... actually pretty strong. I was really impressed with the content I saw when doing the review, and the userbase itself is very strong and you have a nice distribution among the reputation levels that can support an election pretty well. Your traffic was also doing very nicely throughout the end of last year, though it's been oddly flat for the past month.
The main falling point of the site is the question income. It's... not that good. For a site with over 600 days of age, there's only 882 open questions on the site, and the incoming volume rarely hits 2 a day. This really needs to be improved in some fashion - but whether or not the subject can actually produce enough content to satisfy graduation (this is separate a concept from enough content to stay alive), that's an unknown. This site is working independently in every other department while sticking to just the subject - it may be wise to figure if the question volume is something that can be fixed. If it is, then it's quite possible to hit graduation.

You aren't the only "split" topic on the network - even in the realm of gaming, there's also a Poker site we have, though their performance isn't quite at your level. Then you have cases like how Super User, Unix & Linux, and Ask Ubuntu all coexist - sometimes a community works when it breaks out. Breaking Java out of Stack Overflow isn't likely to work very functionally, and we have seen actual attempts to split off topics fail in the private and public betas resulting in shut downs.
But sometimes they do work, and so far Chess looks like one of them.
I don't know how I feel about a merge, but right now I'm leaning on no. This is in spite of the fact that in college, I used to be in the Games club, which was about Chess, Go, Dominion, tons of physical games I'd never heard of, and also a bunch of games that the people in the club had created themselves. They were all pretty fun and we had a sort of gaming culture that was embodied in this club - everything intersected. Logically, the grouping makes sense to me, but we don't really seem to have attracted that same sort of unity here to Stack Exchange. On Stack Exchange, it feels like the gamer cultures don't actually intersect all that much - you have the strong M:tG contingent, then you've got of course the Chess group here, and then a hodgepodge of different tribes that don't mingle as much as we might expect. It may be that as a medium, the internet isn't as conducive to the mixing - in the physical world, you can just move your seat and join a random table with a new game you'd never heard of pretty easily. On the net, there isn't that same drive, since the measures of proximity or time matching aren't present - most people operate on their own agenda and scheduled meetups are easier between associates rather than random folks you don't know. This encourages people on the net to specialize, which isn't to say that it's impossible for the same collectives to happen but it is to say that we aren't getting that kind of collective to happen here.
I feel that a merge, thus, has the potential to threaten the growth of both sites. The most obvious potential outcomes are that Chess's power either becomes completely overshadowed in the umbrella site, destroying its success, or that it overwhelms what is left of B&CG's non-M:tG contingent and the site becomes "Magic and Chess". The communities could fracture pretty easily and overall I can see a lot of ways this can go wrong. The main thing being that Chess has a good thing going for it - I feel that we should see how well that continues before we contemplate merging further.

earlier today I asked the same question on boardgames just to see what they think, you might want to take a look

Nice to talk to some real SE people other than this stupid bot who does the statistics :) I dont mind if both sites stay independent as long as they stay alive, its hard to see one or both sites die. I do agree that this might not be a good thing to do, but also on superuser, you see users only answering linux questions, others answering windows. If you spend some time there you can feel that they are two different sites combined into one.On SO users dont .NET answer python, its working so far.

It's no surprise that it works -- the Internet is perfect for chess, tens of thousands play online and follow live video feeds of tournaments, there are very busy forums on other websites. This is the only dedicated chess Q&A site, and our answers are quite good. We probably just need to promote it more in the chess world.

I perhaps agree about this specific case, but from what I've seen, our eagerness to split out subtopic sites does a lot of harm, too. Having somewhat disjoint communities within a site isn't great, but on the other hand, having multiple sites never get large enough to get past beta is awful for everyone involved, and having people favor a stagnant area51 proposal over an existing site is even worse. I just really hope chess (and B&CG) can make it.

We have way too few questions (1.8 per day while the goal for beta sites is to average 15 per day).
I also feel that chess as a subject isn't quite big enough for a full Stack Exchange site. There's only so many things that can get asked in a short question format and have a definite answer.
I think a merger with Board and Card Games would be quite a good idea. They also have a good site that's struggling with too few questions, although they still get twice as many as we do. I'm not sure what that would do to our findability on Google though.

I don't think there will be a problem with search engines because on superuser linux and windows questions and users coexist and it's doing well on google, besides google doesn't use keywords anymore, that's from the past, it's simple: the more users you get, the higher the site will be on google, mergine the two sites will double the traffic to say the least


text:
How did my question reach 1000 views on a beta site in 9 hours?
I asked this question 9 hours ago and it has more than 1000 views, and this is a beta site.
I've earned the popular badge too many times, never in one day as far as I remember, I might be wrong, it takes time even on Stack Overflow.
Was it shared by some popular Youtuber or social media person? The number of views makes no sense. If this site gets that many views regularly, why is it still beta?

I asked more meaningful questions in my life that are still unanswered....

Your question has entered Hot Network Questions (HNQ) that is available on the right sidebar of all* SE sites (except Area 51 and MathOverflow)

Questions that enter HNQ tend to have inflated view (and usually upvotes) from visitors from other SE sites.

If this site gets that many views regularly, why is it still beta?

It's not as simple as achieving many site visits regularly. Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites explains a bit more on site graduation.

I totally forgot and underestimated HNQ

I clicked on it precisely because it was on the HNQ. I've got little interest in Chess but I was mildly intrigued to see what the answer was.


text:
Policy on accepting own answer as best
As I'm new to Chess.SE, I was curious as to the community opinion on asking a question and then accepting your own answer when others exist. I understand that it's encouraged by SE to answer your own questions, but what about accepting the best answer? If others people answer your question and get a number of votes, it seems a bit odd to me to answer your own question a few days later and then accept that one.
A user has been going around asking questions, waiting for other people to answer it, posting his own reply in the answers section and then accepting that reply as the best answer. Is this type of behavior common in SE sites?

This is the only instance of this particular behavior that I can recall at this young site, and I've never noticed much of it elsewhere in the network. I'm sure it gets discouraged on most every site (and I think it did here as well, as you'll note the answers in question are no longer marked as accepted). As Andrew's answer below points out, the system is at least built to make it relatively fruitless behavior in terms of, say, greed for reputation or attention. And we should keep in mind that the user involved is himself new to the site, its format and its customs.

Side note: I hope none of this dissuades you from continuing to contribute. :)

Of course it wouldn't :) thanks for all of your replies!

In fact, I see people asking a question and also answering it themselves within seconds. Sometimes, it is possible that they got some info in the short time. But, more probably, they had an answer before they asked the question here. I don't know what the community think about this (at least some of those questions are intriguing).

It is ok to accept your own answer, but there are several things that the system does to balance out self-acceptance.

First, accepting your own answer doesn't give you any reputation points.
Second, a self-accepted answer is not automatically moved to the top - it stays where it otherwise would be based on sort order.  So if another answer has more votes, that answer will stay at the top.
Third, self-acceptance is not available for the first 48 hours instead of the usual ability to accept an answer almost immediately.
Finally, the same rules regarding plagiarism apply to self-answers - flag anything that is just copy pasta from another answer or site and the moderators will delete it.


text:
Announcing a Pro Tempore election
Summary: Chess Stack Exchange will begin the nomination stage for a special election on June 3 to bring in two more moderators.
For full details of the process, see the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The timeline:

Starting on June 3, users can nominate themselves. Users can also ask questions on meta for potential moderators to answer. (Use the discussion and election tags.)
On June 10, if there are three or more candidates, we'll run an election. If not, I'll simply appoint the candidates. (There's a small chance we'll need to remove a nomination, but I doubt that will come up.)
If there is an election, I'll announce the results on meta on June 18.

(Note for current moderators: there's no need to nominate yourself even though you'll likely get an email saying you should. The system assumes the first election is a graduation election, which would mean moderators would need to be re-elected. This isn't that sort of election.)
If you have any questions about the process, please stick them in an answer here.

So, I don't have a ton of rep on this site, but I have some good answers (IMO), and I have 3000+ rep on Puzzling.SE, so I'm familiar with moderation tools. Would I be a reasonably good candidate? I've heard that mods need to spend at least 30 mins/day working on the site; could I do 4-5 hrs across 3 days, or would I need to be active every day?
Just weighing the pros and cons of self-nominating before the nomination starts.

On this site, I don't imagine there's so much work you'd need to spend anything like 30 minutes a day. The more critical thing from my perspective is that there are moderators checking in (and handling any flags that might be around) a few times a week. If you already visit regularly, it won't be very different to be a moderator most of the time.

@JonEricson I appreciate the feedback. I might just give this a shot.

Yes, I believe you would make a fine candidate. You've got a fair amount of rep now, and seem to have quite a bit of moderation experience and familiarity with this community. If you feel comfortable being a mod, then you should absolutely nominate yourself.


text:
2019 Community Moderator Election Results
Chess's first moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied and the two new moderators are:

They'll be joining the existing crew shortly—please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
Also, please join me in thanking ETD and Daniel who will be stepping down as moderator.
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.

Congratulations @BrianTowers! I'm looking forward to work with you and the rest of the team (read: Andrew).
Thank you @ETD and @Daniel for all the work you've done so far.
Thanks to @Phonon, @fuxia and @Brandon_J for participating, and good luck next time.
And above all thanks to all the voters who made this election possible.

Thanks @Glorfindel. It looks to me that you have been carrying most of the load for some time. Good that you are now a full time mod. Thanks to all who took part whether standing for election or voting. Democracy is important. Those who have been carrying out mod duties by virtue of having relatively high reputation, please don't stop! Your efforts are still useful and much appreciated.

Congratulation! But ... this community is quite small, why do we need so many moderators?

The election was triggered because two of the three previous moderators were standing down. This just restores the number of moderators to three.

Congratulations @BrianTowers and @Glorfindel: thanks for all your work to come.


text:
Why do we allow anonimous users to edit posts?
So many times I have faced a review of the question/answer that contained spam. Editor was always unknown.
On others sites this is not allowed, so why are we the exception?
Can this problem be fixed by simply allowing registered users to edit answers/questions?

I assume you mean anonymous edits aren't allowed on other chess sites, as opposed to other SE network sites? If I'm not mistaken, anonymous edits are allowed throughout the SE network (and I doubt chess.SE would become an exception to that). At least such edits get caught in the review queue instead of going into effect on the site.

Anonymous users are allowed to suggest edits on all other stack exchange sites.  This is exceedingly unlikely to change.  The fact that you see it in the review queue is intended behavior—in fact, it's the purpose of the review queue to catch spam and other low-quality edits before they make it onto the actual site.  That's why we have the review queue in the first place.  If you object to having to review spam, no-one's forcing you to be a reviewer.


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Help to review my game
I currently play at chess.com (free account) and I review some games after that I played but I don't know whether my thoughts are good about some decision. Would be here the right place to post some game to review it?

Yes, such questions are certainly welcome at the main site.


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How a new player like me, can upload a game?
Yesterday I played a game and I did some mistakes that I see now, but I want to know If I right, but how I can upload the png file to here?

possible duplicate of Can we implement a replayer for chess analysis on the site?

Instructions for including your game's pgn in a post on the main site can be found in answer's to this meta question.

Thanks a lot, I was using the beta :/


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How to use pgn viewer
This seems elementary enough, but how do I use the pgn viewer? I mean how to embed it in a question I want to ask. I searched the help center for "pgn" or "embed chess player" but none of those returned any results. This seems like it should be in the FAQ. Maybe it is and I missed it. What do I do? Is it some link I have to click? HTML code copy pasted from somewhere else? Some special LaTeX like syntax?

Check out this post: http://meta.chess.stackexchange.com/q/179/12

This question might help yo as well. I know there are a lot of comments but go through them as well since they describe how to add titles, names of the players and so on. If you have further questions leave a comment and I will reply. Best regards and good luck!

@AlwaysLearningNewStuff thanks. checking it.


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Removing minimum character count for edits
Like other SE sites, edits to posts here on Chess must be at least six characters. However, if somebody makes a one-character typo in the moves of a game, the PGN parser gets stuck and the whole game might as well not be there. The six-character requirement means that this typo can't be corrected without also making some other probably spurious change. In practice, one can add an HTML comment to the post, which adds characters without affecting the appearance. (I just did this in an edit; in fact, there were three one-character errors in the scoresheet.)
I think it would be useful if the 6-character limit were removed.

I support your suggestion, but this can be done only if we give edit privilege to REGISTERED users.
After all, the edit shall be reviewed with equal quality and responsibility, by moderators, regardless if edit contains "one-letter-modification" or insertion of a proper diagram/notation fix.

One way would be to allow registered users to make one-character edits but keep the six-character minimum for non-registered users.


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Are there any Grandmasters on this website?
I'm just curious about the number of Grandmaster available on this site
Just asking, answer if you are one

I don't think we have GMS, nor IMs at this site. I know we have few FIDE masters, but that is all we can offer for now... Again, this is what I know so far, so maybe I am wrong. This site is still in Beta stage, and has low traffic, so we need more time to "get" GMs to join. Also, it is hard to attract them because I don't see what kind of benefit they could get from answering questions for free, when they usually do this for the money :(

The only instance of a GM using the site that I am aware of is András Adorján's post, appropriately enough, about books specializing in play from Black's point of view.


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Can Cyvasse be considered a chess variant?
Cyvasse is a game played in G. R. R. Martin's ASOFAI, link here. Martin stated that the game is a little bit like chess (He's USFC 1950 btw), but the question remains, if I ask a question on Cyvasse, does it go to scifi.se or chess.se?

To add something to this, questions on 3d chess have been asked : http://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/5397/about-the-3d-chess-they-play-on-star-trek

In short, I'd say no.
I haven't looked at the rules in any particular detail, but it seems to be created as a chess-like game rather than as a modification of chess itself.
I think the problem with allowing it on chess.se would be that:
 - Conversation is likely to turn to its use in the fictional setting
 - It would make many more chess-like games open for discussion here. This could lead to a situation (admittedly an extreme case) where actual chess discussion is less common than other games.
I would suggest that Cyvasse be talked about on boardgames.se instead


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Is Shatranj a chess variant?
While Shatranj is considered by most the mother of chess, would it be considered a chess variant? Or is it another board game?

Fairy chess or hexagonal chess are both considered to be chess variants, and are maybe further away from chess than Shatranj.
If anything, it's chess itself which should be called a shatranj variant!
Now, I'm not sure whether to consider a variant is relevant (is this a tag issue question?), but yes, I think shatranj would be considered a chess variant, since the main rule (the checkmate idea) was already in place.
There may be similarities (8x8 board, similar starting position) and differences (no castling, no draw with stalemate, different moves for several pieces), but the main spirit of chess remains the same and I think that's why chess variants are all about.


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Policies towards "Find checkmate in x" type of posts
I am curious as to where our policies stand for posts that plainly ask for "Find me checkmate in x".
To draw some analogy, e.g., on physics SE it's prohibited to simply paste exercises to be solved, specially if the OP has shown no effort/attempt in trying to solve it themselves.

Do we allow for plain tactics (checkmate, etc) posts no matter what? Here's a recent example of such a post.
Or do we encourage the OP to explain where in their calculation they're stuck and try to rather encourage "How to solve" type of posts instead of "What is the solution here"? The latter entails no real discussions other than people posting one-liners with a variation, and consequently, the post will have no-longterm relevance specially because these posts will all have similar titles (they can easily be asked on chess SE chatroom). Whereas the former, will render the question into one about reasoning and methodology in approaching chess puzzles, with a concrete problem provided by the OP, and chess SE would be a far more natural home for those kinds of discussions.

I must say it is really surprising that these posts still keep appearing when basically nowadays on any website cloud-based engines are freely provided, the OP can set up the position in less than a minute (on lichess for example) and analyse it.
On another note, if we do allow for these posts, we need to consider actively "protecting" the posts once they've been answered, because these are the kinds of posts that will draw a lot of views and in turn many new users posting 1-line answers either saying something wrong or repeating the same variation.

Personally, I don't mind seeing a mate-in-N or tactics problem now and then, especially if they're "good" ones. Somehow, these questions are likely to end up as Hot Network Questions, which inflates their scores. Protecting questions is only possible if they're older than a day and have at least one answer by a new user.

I don't think we should do anything as we don't have enough questions...