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Question about ChessBase closed because flagged as "chessbase help center question"
I posted this question: Strange behaviour of ctg books produced with ChessBase/Fritz and used in DroidFish
It is not my first question of this kind. Indeed, I could ask it to the ChessBase help center, but as many people knows, this isn't the best way to get information about ChessBase. ChessBase is the most used software in the chess community and I don't think that Chess Stack Exchange should treat question regarding ChessBase like that. That's my opinion, but the Help Center also clearly stipulates that

*These gray-area questions include topics of etiquette, psychology, software, books/articles/media, as well as other subjects. Chess-specific questions about programming a chess engine or other chess software are welcome.

Clearly my question is on topic. It is also on par with
https://chess.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask
Why was the question closed?
(Plus : I (and others) made some comments about the questions that were moved to a chat by Brian Towers with a clear intent to hide the discussion when nothing against CSE rules was in it.)
I perfectly understand the moderation principle, but I am not sure, for highly technical subjects like mathematics, hard sciences, computing or chess, that the pertinence of moderation is only correlated to a high reputation.
Last : the OP is not my life. I like the SE principle as well as chess, hence CSE, and I don't think that a serious SE site about chess should avoid subjects like ChessBase, for obvious reasons. (Look a the stockfish questions. One could also say: stockfish has a GitHub, go ask your stockfish questions there.) If the problem is that ChessBase is a commercial software, then I have solid arguments as well, but I don't want to be tl;dr. If it is not and if the CSE community can provide help for people to use any chess software better, we should be proud of it.

I suppose I can say is that questions about a chess site itself are offtopic to a degree and that there is a fine line between general software questions that can be answered and ones that are so specific that they are impossible to answer and thus "off-topic" in the sense that they are useless questions for the site.

Actually the question led to the identification in a bug in DroidChess (android app that LOT of people in the chess community use also) and its resolution. "Seeming impossible" is always relative.

That's why I said "seemingly" to show that it's possibly relative.


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Is there any expectation to provide your own research when asking a question?
Reading this question, it is simply a chess puzzle with no further context, and the answer is simply a solution to the chess puzzle.
In the Stack Overflow site, it is expected that users research the question before asking, providing their own research along with the question. Is there any similar concept on Chess Stack Exchange - e.g. providing which ideas or lines you have considered? I couldn't find anything when browsing through the help section.
My two cents would be that without such a requirement, the asker might as well plug a question such as the above into a chess engine if they just want to solve the puzzle and win a free lunch.

This is not StackOverflow and StackOverflow logic has no reason to apply here.

@David I asked a binary question and I find that your comment does not contribute to the discussion to resolve said question.

That's why it's a comment and not an answer. I'm just pointing out that yout analogy with StackOverflow does not apply

IMHO this puzzle illustrates a nice endgame technique (similar to the famous Réti endgame study) and is therefore a valuable read for the average Chess Stack Exchange reader. There's nothing wrong with posting a question in this format; some research (which lines the author has tried) would slightly improve the question, but they're not required.

the asker might as well plug a question such as the above into a chess engine if they just want to solve the puzzle

That will tell them the optimal moves, but not necessarily the best practical lines, because the engine might prefer sacrificing a queen to getting mated in 15. It also won't tell you the beauty/clue of the solution.

and win a free lunch.

I'm not sure if ongoing contests are a thing in the chess world, but in any case, it's good to provide attribution if you found a puzzle/study elsewhere and post it here. Our sister site Puzzling Stack Exchange even has a standard off-topic reason for puzzles without attribution. The attribution in the example you mentioned is minimal, but as far as I can tell the question author does not know the original source. (If you do happen to know e.g. the composer, or where/when it was published, please edit it in.)

It’s rather hard for it to be similar to the Reti study when it is by Reti himself. ;)

Heh, to my defense, I only read half of the answer.

Also, regarding giving attribution, perhaps we should set up a community question that gives a mini-guide on how to use the YACPBD and Schwalbe PBD databases.

Sounds like a plan!

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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FEN diagram reader breaking on an answer
This is in regard to the only answer for this question.
Upon scrolling back on the FEN reader and then clicking on a specific move in the reader leads to this weird interaction where some pieces just break in terms of positioning.

Is this a known issue?

Some obvious s/w engineering questions. 1) Is it repeatable? 2) Is there an exact sequence of operations which consistently gives the problem? If so please give the exact sequence. 3) Is this device independent?

yes, 2) scroll upwards on the move order and select a specific move. 3) it's not browser independant but I can't test on another device. Any fast series of moves changing combined with a selection caused the issue

@BrianTowers In my experience with posting extremely long answers, this is something that only really happens, the pieces flying all across the screen, when you click far too rapidly for the diagram to properly processes the moves. I've used Chrome for some years now. It might technically be a bug, but might not necessarily to fix so much as a PSA could work.

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


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Why has the PGN viewer (replayer) stopped working?
It seems that the chess diagrams have stopped working throughout the site. For example, when viewing this question, now I see the following instead of the diagrams:

It seems that the issue affects all questions and answers with diagrams. I also tried on a different browser as well as on my phone, and I see the same issue.
Is this a known issue, and when will it be fixed?

If anyone is interested in looking at the code for the replayer, it is here: https://github.com/andrewphoy/chess-replayer

MacBook, Google Chrome, doesn't work for me either.

I see some errors in the browser console; I'm pretty sure this is related to the JavaScript migration.

@Glorfindel I posted a question on Meta SE regarding this issue:  The PGN Viewer (replayer) stopped working on Chess Stack Exchange

Almost 24  hours later, it appears to be working just fine. I suspect a blip somewhere in the system. However, until a higher-up pinpoints the true answer, we do not know.
Update: Per @hb20007's comment, I quote
moderator #Benjamin Hodgson's comment on SE Meta page:  "I think it was a Webpack bug. The chess code is set up to be loaded dynamically by the Webpack runtime system, but it had also been configured as an (unused) entry point in the Webpack config. As far as I know that's meant to be supported, and I couldn't reproduce it when I ran the build on my machine, but removing the entry point for the chess code does seem to have fixed the issue."

Check this comment for a (technical) explanation of how the bug was fixed: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/375815/the-pgn-viewer-replayer-stopped-working-on-chess-stack-exchange?noredirect=1#comment1252636_375815


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How do I insert a PGN?
I'm new to stack exchange, and I was wondering: how do I insert a PGN? I want to use them to show different openings, review moves, etc.

The basic mechanism is described in the links in this post.  I wish there was a way to put this in the "Help" section for Chess.SE, but I'm not sure if it's possible to add site-specific help information to individual sites.
(I know this is basically a link-only answer, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to me to recapitulate in this answer a bunch of info that's well described elsewhere.  I'm also not sure if the question itself is considered a duplicate question, because the question and answer I've linked is on Meta...)


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For us really old folks, how do you put those diagrams with moves in a question or answer
I think it vaguely has something vaguely to do with something called PGN but not sure what, nor exactly what else we would need to do.
Any youngster out there who can answer then please speak up.
Please with enough details so some really old person can do it.


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Can we be kinder to newcomers?
This is, I hope, a "constructive subjective question", within the spirit of stackexchange.
I am sometimes shocked in Chess Beta how apparently unwelcoming can be the responses to newcomers' questions. The question usually comes from someone who has reputation in single digits, and an overcritical response typically comes from someone who has 4 digits of reputation. As far as I can see, the recipients of such treatment do not come back for more.
Initial questions might be ill-expressed or somewhat off-topic: but they usually come from someone who is genuinely interested in chess, and has reached out to us across the internet. I think we need to always read their question charitably and help them towards the question that perhaps they were trying to ask. At the very least, the experience should be a positive one, that encourages them to remain in Chess Beta for the future and contribute better as they learn more of our recondite ways.
It seems to me that treating newcomers well is the single most important step we can take towards removing the "Beta" from our name. I base this subjective assertion (channeling the "Back It Up" principle developed in the Moms4Mom stackexchange) on what I have seen in other forums and groups over the years, and seeing niceness work. If we value this community, it's in our own interest to treat newcomers with a little bit more latitude. A guy with 1 reputation today might have 10,000 a couple of years from now and be a pillar of the community.
My suggestion: at the very least, can we agree that a newcomer should be told "Welcome!" That sounds trivial, but I really believe it would set the tone for the future experience of that newcomer.
Thanks for your time!
EDIT: Good to see the following Stack Overflow blog post. Note footnote 1:

"This post focuses on Stack Overflow, but most of it applies to the
  broader Stack Exchange network as well."

I don't think that our issue is nearly as bad as some other communities, but I wonder if that's because of our small size and Beta status.
A concrete point: not just in the spirit of kindness but also that of justice.  Often when I look at the help centre about a closed "off-topic" post, it's extremely difficult to see how a post is actually off-topic given the criteria listed there. Frankly, there is judgement required, and whoever makes this judgement may need to have the courage to explain why they came down the way they did. It also requires more effort, and shows greater respect to the poster.
There are low quality posts which would not merit this treatment, but I think that these are the exception.

Interestingly, your username in Russian would mean "caress" ^^

Ha thanks for info. The name was generated randomly over 30 years ago using one coin, and I guess it's appropriate for a chess forum

The more pertinent question is how a site that is mostly attractive to beginners can bring the site past beta. This would not be the first stop for any experienced player.

@prusswan: good point. What attracts me to this site? I like the civility of the discussions, the focus of many questions on the rules, and the competence of the answers. How might we move move up-market and attract more experienced players?

I don't think the problem is the lack of "Welcome!" messages, but that "bad" questions by new users often get downvoted or nominated for closing immediately, instead of trying to engage constructively first.

I think welcome is a nice beginning to at least set up a cognitive dissonance between one friendly message and any down-voting :) One of my favourite and most successful chess sites always gives a welcome to every newcomer.

See Dunbar's number.
Regrettably, all populous online forums appear to suffer this problem. Some forums manage it better than others.
EXAMPLES
For the same reason, all parliamentary bodies grow uncivil as they approach a size of about 500, which is why such bodies seem never further to be able to grow to a size of 1000. Iceland's parliament is largely civil, for example; Britain's is not.
For the same reason, manufacturing executives have learned not to expand industrial plants much beyond a maximum practical size of about 2000 workers each. Beyond that size, further economies of scale are swamped by a general loss of morale.
SOCIAL NETWORKS
You and I will probably never interact again, because Dunbar's number. And even if you and I did interact again, our social networks do not overlap—a fact which, most unfortunately, denies you and me sufficient investment in a favorable social outcome here. Ultimately, inflation too far beyond Dunbar's number makes trolling and other antisocial behavior uncontrollable by normal social means.
See, you and I are perfectly polite to one another, but your behavior and mine cannot save our conversation from being hijacked by random rude and flagrant persons if enough participants were present.  Even if only one percent of participants are rude and flagrant, excesses beyond Dunbar empower that one percent to set the tone.
Dunbar's is not a firm or exact limit, of course. There is a gradual slide into incivility as numbers grow, but the overall social principle Dunbar implicates does nevertheless seem to be an iron law.
LITTLE PLATOONS
Before Dunbar, Edmund Burke knew it. Burke's little platoons are the blocks from which a healthy society is built.
To the extent to which Chess Beta is, through its success, gradually ceasing to be a little platoon, a major decline in civility is probably inevitable. Tragic, but true.
CONCLUSION
Your proposed "Welcome!" might only be perceived by newcomers as hypocritical. I do not despise it. It might even help at intermediate numbers but no one is welcome where numbers are too large. Only an authentic little platoon can really welcome anyone.
I wish that I had a more congenial answer to offer you.

Maybe a Dunbar tendency, I agree - other factors influence when it cuts in.

Note that Math.SE is extraordinarily helpful and patient towards people of all levels of ability.  You can ask very basic questions there and they will kindly provide a detailed, beginner-friendly explanation.  Therefore, I am skeptical that Dunbar is the entire story as far as the SE model in particular is concerned.

@Kevin Perhaps a substantial amount of people there enjoy answering questions for answering-questions-sake - a trait that is at least stereotypical of math enthusiasts, if not actually true - which helps ease some of the social weight.  In other words, they have more of a tolerance of answering "bad questions" purely for the joy of answering any questions at all.

@SouthpawHare: Perhaps.  Or perhaps the set of "beginner" questions in math is broader than in chess, so you don't run into a nest of duplicate questions so easily.

I use the Auto Review Comments userscript, primarily because it contains some pre-made comments which can be used in situations which happen quite often (such as new questions being posted as an answer), with the additional benefit that for new users, every comment will be preceded by

Welcome to Chess Stack Exchange!

It seems to me that treating newcomers well is the single most important step we can take towards removing the "Beta" from our name.

Well, it might help because more people stick here and ask questions. But according to Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites, the single most important figure is the # of questions per day and it needs to be at least 10. You can check Area 51 to see that we're far, far away of that: 2.2 questions per day is not even close to graduation.

Thanks for the link to Auto Review comments. I agree that 2.2 is far from 10, but maybe let's set our sights on 3. Do meta questions count? :)

No, meta questions don't count.

This site is already more than welcoming when it is replete with questions like Can a king be checked with another king in these circumstances
Another top question on the front page now centers around trivia. So the votes no longer mean much to me for the purpose of content value, as the site is dominated by novices and there are not even enough non-novices to downvote/close trivial content. As such content is allowed to persist, they will draw in more users who have the appetite  for it.

Actually, from a compositional perspective, I have a kind of soft spot for kings attacking one another. Key: such a position is only illegal, one can still play chess from it. But I do hope that we get a few more chunky questions. Even relatively trivial questions about legal positions can provoke some stellar answers such as Rosie's posts of some Baibakov problems. I am not sure if tolerating simplistic questions discourages experts. The art of community-building is a subtle one, and surely stackexchange.com have much more experience than me.

@Laska so who is really an expert around here? The votes cannot tell in a community of novices who vote and behave like novices. A stackexchange where the reputation system is meaningless for the purpose of expert participation, is useless to me.

well it would be nice if more grandmasters stalked the halls of chess.stackexchange. But in the mean time might as well be polite to those folks who do turn up :-)

Adding to itub's answer, "Welcome" is mostly discouraged in the SE model. This (the main sites, not Meta, where there is more leeway) is a Q&A site, not a discussion forum.
I see some of the same issues on Poker.SE, where many new questions are asking which hand wins, which is a basic rules question, that's already been covered, and those tend to get dupe flagged fairly quickly. I think we have the expectation that the poster does basic research, or attempts to analyze their game before posting here. I've been making an effort to get clarification before I flag a question, but sometimes the poster comes expecting an immediate answer, and when they don't get it, they don't come back to give clarification.

Thank you. I suggested "Welcome" as an antidote to the reflex down-voting that happens too often here to newcomers. Dupes are just one way that the Great can be offended here. People just wander in: it's not reasonable to expect them to have done "research" about the whys and wherefores of SE prior to their first post. They will come in quickly and post something. If they have a positive experience they may come back to participate further and at that point they may read more. I do get the sneaking suspicion that some people here get a kick out of down-voting, and are looking for any excuse.

"it's not reasonable to expect them to have done "research" about the whys and wherefores of SE prior to their first post." and that's really unfortunate. The "ask question" page has 2 relevant links on the right sidebar: visit the help center and asking help. Asking a question before knowing what's on-topic is like going into a restaurant and asking for a nonexistence menu without reading it.

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


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That was quick: "Is Auto Chess good for the future of chess?" closed already. Why?
Is it really the case that just two votes are sufficient to close a question these days?
I may not like the subject matter, but it would be a terrible thing if we can't discuss the evolution of gaming formats in a calm, qualitative way, without having degrees in data science to introduce the necessary analytics so that the question isn't "opinion-based".
There is a complete misconception about this term. To me, an opinion-based question is something like "Is coffee better than tea?" The Auto Chess question here is like "Are drones good for the future of society?" It's the kind of question which one can imagine encountering in a University Entrance Exam. Answers may display clear, logical thinking, evenhandedly discussing pros and cons, bearing in mind that we probably don't have statistical evidence.
Sometimes I think (and I apologize if I do fellow members here an injustice) that if a person doesn't like a subject, they will reach for the nearest convenient excuse to block that discussion, even if it is inappropriate.
This case is particularly egregious since it refers to a newcomer. What a nice welcome for this person! And as usual, the Hammer of Closing has been wielded without no argument as to how this particular question is "opinion-based". So ironically, without any supporting evidence, this closing decision is "just an opinion".
Glorfindel in particular I expected better of you! (You may take this as a compliment.)
EDIT: There is a big difference between a "discussion-based question" and a "discussion focused on diverse opinion" (which I read as intended as a euphemism for polarized argument). I see nothing wrong with discussion-based questions. If you look at some other thriving Stack Exchanges, here are some random discussion-type questions which I think are totally cool. This is exactly the kind of thing we need more of in chess.com:
WORLDBUILDING What species of animal could take over earth if humans went extinct?
WRITING How can I get 2 characters to bond while standing alternate watches?
OPEN SOURCE Does the three clause BSD license hinder academic citations?
WORKPLACE How do I tell our HR that I don't want to perform in our Christmas party?
Sometimes a question needs editing but this one is honestly focused and fine.

I didn't leave a comment because the banner above the question contains a link to the help center explaining why questions like that are closed.

That gives the stark rule in the abstract, but the whole issue here is the mapping between this rule and this question. Justification of the opinion that this mapping is correct (which it may well be) is reasonably required of anyone choosing to wield the Close Hammer. This is doubly true for a newcomer's post.
EDIT2: Thanks for your detailed response, Glorfindel. I really appreciate you taking the time.
You haven’t yet addressed my distinction between discussion-based questions and what I rephrased as polarised argument. I don’t think you have shown sufficient grounds to map the question to the policy that you cited. It doesn’t apply.
But you do introduce a surprising idea - that chess is different from other hobby Stack Exchanges, and you are trying to be closer to an engineering Stack Exchange of some kind.
This to me seems very strange. And I don’t actually see this spelled out in the CSE “terms and conditions” that I’ve read. Please let’s remember that chess is just “a bit of fun”. I am not suggesting go crazy but it is perfectly reasonable that a question may have multiple answers and yet not be “opinion-based”.

The problem, which has been observed over and over again on Stack Exchange, is that in practice most answers won't display this behaviour; they tend to generate low-quality answers (mostly) by new users who aren't too familiar with the Stack Exchange format. Then we have to moderate those answers, so on Stack Exchange we tend to tackle the root problem, which in this case is the question. Yes, it may be an interesting or even good question, it just isn't well-suited for the Stack Exchange.

And this idea rather undercuts your paragraph about problems at the SE level. These other hobby SEs manage to thrive without descending into “low-quality”.
I suspect that this strange view is one cause of the difficulties CSE has had expanding as a forum. We never escaped from Beta under our own merits, let’s remember, it’s just that the powers-that-be got tired of waiting.
The arrival of Auto Chess is an interesting topical phenomenon, and it deserves a question in CSE about its long term impact, positive and negative, on our hobby.
But I realise now that I have a broader concern with the peculiar reluctance to accept open-ended questions at all in CSE.
If you are concerned about hypothetical low-quality answers, then isn’t there a mechanism you have for mandating a minimum point level on responders to a certain question?
Bottom line: Chess is only a hobby not engineering and IMHO we should model ourselves more on other responsible and successful hobby SEs.
EDIT3: my final comment on this matter.
In my opinion we need to be extremely rigorous and self-critical in closing any question, particularly when newcomers are involved. It is all too easy to not like a subject and flail around for a vague reason like the "opinion-based" hammer. It's just not good enough. The absence of explanation to the poor newcomer of why this particular reason was applicable is particularly shocking.
The fact that Remillion came up with a better reason is no excuse for the earlier "opinion-based" reflex, although Glorfindel may feel that Remillion let him off the hook in some sense.
Glorfindel has not engaged with my point that to explain the relationship between Auto Chess and real Chess (which is more complex than Remillion's sound bite suggests) would be a useful topic for one (1) CSE question. Far better to answer that question properly in the real CSE than superficially in the meta area here. Why should the moderator prejudge the issue here? It's so odd to insist on that.
Glorfindel has also not engaged with my more general suggestion that we should model ourselves on the much busier hobby websites than ours, in order to encourage more interesting and diverse content, and bring new users in.
Of course there are subjects which would probably be irrelevant to us, e.g. politics. But that's no excuse for failing to give the benefit of the doubt to honest questions whose answer can shed light on chess.
I'm sorry to have repeated myself a little here, but I feel many of my recent points were not addressed in the moderatorial response. However, this is my last post on this matter.

I have a slightly different opinion on the topic in question: it is not suited for Chess SE at all, and should be migrated to Gaming SE.
The whole Auto Chess genre reads and plays nothing like chess. It's a different system altogether, with the only similarity being "chess" in the name. Asking about its impact on the chess community is like asking what impact an industrial lead poisoning incident would have on the sale of pencil lead.
Gaming SE would naturally be a better environment for this topic.

Now that is a tenable argument - nothing to do with “opinion-based”. However I think there is room for exactly one Auto Chess question in CSE, and your response that chess and auto chess are nothing to do with one another would be one vigorous answer

Discussion-type questions don't fly well on Stack Exchange, this has been pointed out over and over again; maybe not here but certainly on Meta Stack Exchange, e.g. here: Give each site a parallel site for polling, recommendations and subjective-ish stuff.
I didn't leave a comment because the banner above the question contains a link to the help center explaining why questions like that are closed:

Opinion-based - discussions focused on diverse opinions are great, but they just don't fit our format well.

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 on facts, references, or specific expertise.

It’s often possible to rewrite opinion-based questions to focus on a more fact-based line of questioning. If you see a way to do this, consider editing the question.

I don't see a way to rescue this particular question from being primarily opinion-based (if I did, I would have done so already), but if you do, feel free to edit it and I'll consider reopening it.

It's the kind of question which one can imagine encountering in a University Entrance Exam. Answers may display clear, logical thinking, evenhandedly discussing pros and cons, bearing in mind that we probably don't have statistical evidence.

Yes, it might be possible to formulate such a quality answer to this type of question. The problem, which has been observed over and over again on Stack Exchange, is that in practice most answers won't display this behaviour; they tend to generate low-quality answers (mostly) by new users who aren't too familiar with the Stack Exchange format. Then we have to moderate those answers, so on Stack Exchange we tend to tackle the root problem, which in this case is the question. Yes, it may be an interesting or even good question, it just isn't well-suited for the Stack Exchange.
You mention some questions with a similar nature on our sister sites. Worldbuilding and Writing see many of those open-ended questions, and they're used to moderate those kind of posts precisely because they see many of them. Still, they're kind of different: they ask the answerers to respond to a piece of fiction with other pieces of fiction. The Workplace has a back it up rule, and so do other sites that by their nature tend to subjective questions, like Interpersonal Skills and Parenting; Chess Stack Exchange is not one of those sites. I'm not sure if the question on Open Source is similar to the Auto Chess one; I think it's more akin to this question (but YMMV).

Hi Glorfindel thanks for your response, I have expanded my post substantially to address your points. Would appreciate if you can respond in turn, particularly to the trenchant new stuff after the EDIT mark. Thanks again

@Laska thanks, I've made some updates but I have to do some more work right now.

Thanks @Glorfindel - my response is after EDIT2 in my question

We do allow questions which are more discussion-oriented than your typical Stack Overflow question, e.g. this one. Just not the ones which are so open-ended and speculative like the Auto Chess one, which (as Remellion writes here) turns out to be not so chess-oriented after all. What's next? Somebody asking what the impact of Brexit or Trump's impeachment is on the future chess? We have to draw a line somewhere, and IMHO this is over the line.

See Edit 3, my final comment on this matter

I don't think it's a good idea to widen the scope of the site, IMHO it will make it less interesting to the general chess public, and I'm sure it will be a lot harder to moderate. If you want to ask a question "does Auto Chess have anything to do with chess?", that can be answered objectively and is (arguably) in scope. But that is not what the question is asking right now, not at all; such an edit would conflict with the author's intent.


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How to curb toxic behaviour in downvoting?
I am very disappointed to see that a recent question by a complete newcomer was given -5 votes.
See Who created the most chess problems? for a particularly nasty recent example of Stack Exchange's worst habit.
I think that anyone who added a negative vote on this beyond the first one was effectively violating our Code of Conduct by not being nice to a new contributor. This is not inherently a bad place, but toxic behaviour such as drive-by downvoting is neither curbed nor punished.
Here's a thought: let's prevent downvotes on someone's first post when it's already at -1.
I know that for many people life is difficult at the moment, and for some their only joy appears to be found in downvoting posts in Stack Exchange.
Please can moderators address this, thanks.
EDIT: and here’s another today: “what happens when a world Champion doesn’t defend his title?” Driveby downvote with no explanation is no way to welcome someone who is completely new here.

Since Laska explicitely asked me to comment, I think capping downvotes is definitely nicer but would have its downsides either, especially when questions are controversial (some vote up, some vote down - a cap violates commutativity and thus is problematic for democracy). A polite explanation what makes a question "bad" (which was given in this case) is e.g. OK for myself even if I'm downvoted to hell again, but YMMV. That said, since the question attracted many comments (proving it's not inherently "bad", just needs better formulation) I edit it and vote to reopen.

Related: Can we prevent people from voting down already closed posts?

Disappointed that you don’t focus on newcomers which was my intention Hauke - I don’t think your faint comment was helpful

@Laska: So, Newcomer bonus? Well, any public forum always walks the thin line between undermod (gets overrun by trolls) and overmod (scares away newbies). Frankly, I have no idea what SE already tried, to what effect, and am no newbie psychology expert anyway...Doing a survey still might be interesting.

Possibly relevant post from the Uber Meta: Why isn't providing feedback mandatory on downvotes, and why are ideas suggesting such negatively received?

First, thanks for editing the question into a much better shape. It would be ideal if you were around when it was posted, but we all understand that's not possible. I've voted to reopen it; it might still be a bit too broad according to some community members, but let's see.
Now, votes (down and up) are a way to rate content, not users. I do agree it can feel a little unwelcoming, but calling multiple downvotes toxic and a Code of Conduct violation is a little extreme IMHO. Nor has it anything to do with life being difficult. I remember the first downvotes I received (not here, on Stack Overflow) which made me think again about the quality of the posts I write. I believe they've made me a better user.

Here's a thought: let's prevent downvotes on someone's first post when it's already at -1.

I'm pretty sure I've seen that proposal on Meta Stack Exchange or Meta Stack Overflow, but all I can find right now is Do not allow giving minus one for new user questions. The problem is that we share the same content rating system with all sites, and on e.g. Stack Overflow there's a lot of bad questions in all degrees, and not many editors who are capable of turning poor questions into much better shape (if possible at all).

Has there been any exploration of what happens when someone gets rejected by downvotes. I am happy that a tough person such as you persisted Glorfindel, but how many dozens have we needlessly lost.

The company may have done some research about that (see e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/364572/295232) but I don't know if they shared the results with the general public.

@Laska there's a famous Over-Meta post by Shog. I found it recently.  I'll look for it again.

Newcomers are treated just like everyone else on the site. There are clear guidelines on how to make good questions that are useful not just to the person asking but also to anyone who in the future may have a related doubt.
When registering the Stack Exchange network, users are asked to take a look at what those guidelines are. A downvote is not something to be taken as a personal offense, but rather a warning that those guidelines are not being met, so the question is not an acceptable one.
While it's true that Stack Exchange moderation is more strict than most other online forums, it's precisely this obsession with high quality questions and answers what makes our sites the go-to resource for so many people.

Yeah fine theory but that’s not what happened here. How much greater could se be if well-meaning newcomers were not bullied out as soon as they arrive? See https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342779/what-about-the-community-is-toxic-to-new-users

@Laska read the accepted answer in the link

As I said, that’s not what happened here. A interesting open-ended question which inherently does not have a simple answer was responded to with downvotes and quibbles. Compare this nonsense to other forums such as Writing and Worldbuilding where is much less wooden insistence on a simplistic view of what is a question. The comments should be answers

I dispute your categorization of what has happened here as “obsession with high-quality”. I think it’s an obsession with something much more dubious - that only simplistic “left-brain” type questions can have a place here. Other healthy forums in SE that I learn from do not have this narrowness


text:
Questions inappropriately closed are too hard to reopen
What are the commonest checkmating moves in the Lichess (or similar) database? has been closed by 2 people.
How is it that 2 people are sufficient to close a question, while 5 are required to reopen it? We have 2 people who have voted to reopen it. Not to mention the 6 people who upvoted the question and 6 people who upvoted the answer (an excellent one by a relative newcomer). Counting the question and the answer itself, the total of 1+1+2+6+6=16 positive opinions expressed are insufficient to outweigh the 2 unexplained votes that closed this.
Also the reopen button only appears after the post has been closed. So the 5 people required to reopen can only begin to vote by coming back later.
Note also that there is no suggestion given by the two casual closers how it might be refocused. They merely click a button to invalidate all the hard work by questioner and answerer. In my opinion this is a naturally multi-faceted question, with a single scope (focus). It's really fine.
Stackexchange has, accurately in my opinion, a reputation for toxic behaviour, and I will continue to hold to account those who in my opinion are behaving badly.
So what to do?
Firstly, let this question be immediately re-opened, and kept open until 5+ people have voted for its closure.
Secondly, let's make sure that all questions can only be closed if 5+ people vote for it. If 5 people vote for closure, that is more likely to be an appropriate decision.
If these mechanisms don't work, then something more radical may be required. For example, re-open votes can directly count against close votes, and if the number drops to a low enough threshold, the question will be reopened automatically.
Thanks for your time.
EDIT: I see that that, rather than engage here in Meta on the general principle and fixing the broader problem, one of the closers has chosen unilaterally to edit the question to reduce the scope, and apparently reopened it. No consultation with OP, no explanation and no apology.
I'm glad the question has been reopened, although in my opinion, the original scope (essentially examining extreme frequencies of final moves) was fine, as it requires the same kind of analysis.
The broader question remains: how to correct (or avoid altogether) inappropriate closures by very small numbers of votes?

As the author of the closed question, yeah, it's a bit frustrating. Especially with no explanation - did the voters object to me asking about both most common and rarest moves? The alternative would be to have separate questions, but considering that the bulk of the work in answering would be the same in both cases, it just seems a bit annoying to do so.

I am very glad to see this question reopened.  Will post an answer when I get time. I hope to see @SteveBennett  ask the other question too.

@secretagentman If you felt that this should be split into two questions, then you could have simply made a comment to this effect. I believe you were one of the two persons who together unilaterally closed this question. That’s really not very constructive behaviour. If you were unhappy about the response to your comment, you always had voting for closure available as a later sanction

Possibly relevant:  system appeared to work on this question but that is anecdotal.   I was not involved. Would need a SEDE query to gather enough data to assess.

@Laska I think my answer addresses your concern. At least I hope so. Thanks for initiating this good discussion.

@SecretAgentMan yes and thanks for your response. See my comment. I wish the main moderator involved had deigned to respond.

Questions are closed when they get 5 "ordinary" close votes or 1 moderator. Reopening uses the same standard. As it happens, both the close and the reopen on this one were done by a moderator before the count got to 5.
I personally feel like this is fine the way it is. IMO it would be ridiculous for a moderator to not be able to close questions, especially with the rash of incomprehensible posts by a certain person we've had lately.

Hi D M, thanks for your thoughtful explanation. I suspected this was what was going on. Moderators need the ability to close & delete spam posts. However in most cases of closure, as here, it’s much more a matter of judgement and there’s no reason why a moderator’s vote should count more than the vote of any other member in good standing. In my opinion, moderators need the ability to cast “ordinary” close votes, 5 of which would be required to close a question. What do you think?

And as mentioned in my comment to secret agent man, even an ordinary close vote is excessive and uninformative as an initial response in most non-spam cases. The first response should be a comment expressing one’s concern, and exactly what needs to change. There is always the sanction of making a close vote available later. Posting an unexplained close vote is absolutely toxic behaviour - the default text is insufficient

I believe the point in closing it is so people don't answer the question if it's about to be significantly modified (which may invalidate the answers.) I think it's fine so long as we do, in fact, promptly reopen it once the edits are made. It's not meant as a punishment for a bad question or something.

The unexplained pre-emptive closure as usual disrupted the happy answering and it never recovered. Most people just moved on. There is a permanent cloud created by a closure and a lot of time wasted trying to resolve it as the reopening is so difficult. The sanction should be used as a last resort.
It also presumes that the moderator has perfect judgment in content matters. He or she may be experienced but in these subjective areas they should have the humility to just cast a single vote out of 5 needed rather than destroying the question with a single undocumented click.

I apologize to the OP and to @SteveBennett for the delayed response.
TL;DR: I immediately upvoted the question when I first saw it. I also cast a close vote initially because of the dual request for both "commonest" and "rarest." This was a mistake as (1) the question is good (I upvoted it) and (2) the two ideas are very strongly linked. Any good answer to one subquestion could easily respond to the other subquestion as well.
I didn't comment out of habit from SO where comments to help tend to attract revenge downvotes in my experiences.  In this case, and in this smaller Chess.SE community, that was probably a mistake in judgement on my part. I am glad to see the Chess.SE community corrected my mistake and reopened this very good question.

Q: "How is it that 2 people are sufficient to close a question, while 5 are required to reopen it?"
Comment: "I believe you were one of the two persons who together unilaterally closed this question."
My misguided close vote did not close the post. Simply put, one of the close voters was a moderator (post timeline). As @AntonMenshov points out, a mod close vote is sufficient to close the post; see Add a way for moderators to cast a normal, non binding close/open vote from the UberMeta.
With respect to

"I will continue to hold to account those who in my opinion are behaving badly."
"Posting an unexplained close vote is absolutely toxic behaviour - the default text is insufficient" (comment).

In retrospect, I think the original question is fine since the two subquestions ("commonest" and "rarest") are so strongly linked that any good answer could easily respond to both subquestions quite well. However, I am not sure words like "toxic" and "behaving badly" apply here. I acted in good faith and I admit a mistake here, but there was no malice.

There was no malice. There was no toxic behaviour. The question was first closed and then justifiably reopened. End of story.

Thanks for the detailed response. I think the problem is that moderators are denied a way of voting that does not terminate the vote immediately. It’s really not fair to them. However in the mean time I think they should not vote to close except for obvious spam cases (which should be directly deleted). Instead moderators should explain the situation and rely on other members voting one by one to close

Just an idea - spam/abusive/copy/... question (anything that can't be healed) can still be closed by 1 mod vote, whereas for unfocused/subjective/... (better edit than close) questions a mod vote counts the same as a "normal".

No question spam should simply be deleted by 1 vote not even closed. Would be grateful if moderators can do this expeditiously. But for more nuanced questions yes the current moderator 1 vote to close is too heavy-fisted. Would be good if the main moderator involved in the question under examination right now could respond here rather than being silent

@Laska relevant. Unfortunately, there is no way for a moderator to cast a non-binding close vote. Between many non-ideal solutions, the status-quo with moderator binding vote and occasional post on meta to re-open with justifications -> is the common denominator most communities use.

Thanks Anton. If the technology can’t be fixed then it falls to the moderators not to use their vote except when it’s very obviously ok (e.g. duplicate question). Otherwise they are just throwing their weight around as it’s such a hassle to reopen a question and in the meantime the discussion has been disrupted. Obviously spam is a different matter where immediate delete rather than close is the right answer


text:
Should this question be closed?
Computer science/chess related master's thesis [closed]
I want to link this person with a new initiative in mathematical chess problems which was started from an article in the Spanish magazine Problemas.
I also want to mention a recent (Jun 2022) masters thesis in Arxiv based on a chess problem from 3 years ago.
I want to talk about a new chess engine applicable to lichess which has a high computer science content.
And I want to welcome this new person to the forum.
But I cannot give these points (which all include citations), because yet again immoderate moderators have reflex-slam-closed the question.
I want to the moderators to have a long think as to whether their action in closing this question is in any sense helpful, productive, or kind. And I think in this case an apology to the questioner is in order.
Thank you.
EDIT: Thanks for re-opening the question. I participated a little in discussion here, partly because I feel that those who didn’t receive a proper welcome in chess.se are probably not participating in meta themselves. But I have nothing more to add except thank you for your time.

This interesting question has been reopened.

In the current form, the question asks simply:

interesting reading or even recommendation what could be potentially interesting chess/cs/math topic to make a research on.

This question has two main issues:

for a reference-request-type question, it is extremely unspecific of what is constituted as an "interesting reading" and is extremely wide in scope. Pretty much any material on chess engines development would be considered relevant. Thus -> Too wide in scope.
or it is a recommendation of the topics interesting for a research. Then, it is clearly opinion-based, and lacks most of the guidance from What types of questions should I avoid asking?

Therefore, I voted not to reopen the question, as well as to close it after it was reopened.
However, this question can be reopened in my opinion if it is clearly formulated as a reference-request one with a narrow-enough scope to be able to give a focused list of [hopefully valuable] resources.

I would also insist that using language like "immoderate moderators", "reflex-slam-closed", "I want to the moderators to have a long think", and "an apology to the questioner is in order" — is less than constructive and border-line rude.
Notice, that closing questions is a normal process, usually without ANY ill-intent.

It’s a lot easier to formalise a question in a suitable way when you know the answer. I see no problem editing an open question from a newcomer to get it into a better form. The closure of a question should be very much a last resort. But I certainly get the impression that too often closure is a knee-jerk immediate reflex. Saying a question is “opinion-based” is totally insufficient because where is the border between judgment and opinion? Patient explanation to the newcomer of the action by the moderator is mandatory, to my mind.

@Laska closing a question is not a last resort, it is a way to ensure the editing of a question happens. Notice, that the closing notice contains the links to the best practices, do's and don'ts.

However some of us may classify the sequence of actions, the critical thing to me is that closing a question is a snub to the newcomer, in a way that a rewording is not. If a moderator sees a problem in wording then why not fix it immediately rather than opaquely closing it? It’s just not good enough

@Laska you are misunderstanding the concept and purpose of closing questions. I would strongly encourage you to read through the site tour and help pages on that topic.

The help pages may also be wrong. We have a basic problem here in how newcomers are treated. Please engage with this issue rather than hiding behind a policy

@Laska No. Please refer back to the tour. If we allowed off-topic Q/As just because they are "newcomers", this site will become Yahoo! Answers in no time. And you know how that site went.

@Laska Also, you seem to misunderstand that downvoting/closing questions are an insult to the OP. It isn't. It's a way to review content, and related nothing whatsoever to the content's creator.

@Laska People have all the time in the world to review their Q/As before posting them. We should cast a CV for CV-worthy questions, at any time.

What? The question is CV-worthy, so we should cast a CV? What's wrong with that? Also,  will something big happen when this user leaves? Is this user important enough to change all the rules we had before and make this site a forum?

Many points are being missed. Many strawmen are being set up and knocked down. The intention behind closing a question is irrelevant. If the only information given is a superficial slur then the questioner will be gone and never seen again. If the intention in closing a question is to “ensure” that the question is reworded more “clearly” then all I can say it doesn’t work. If you want to ensure the wording gets fixed then fix the wording yourself. You have been up the steep learning curve which is stackexchange. My goal is to do something to address the reputation se has for being toxic

Why should I edit the question for the OP? So if they make bad content and post it onto the site, do I have to make it good as well? And as I and Anton has said before, this is an  OB question. How can I fix it?

The reputation that SE is toxic is made by people that don't understand how the site runs in general. Take a look at this.

Yes, I fully agree that we should close this question.
No matter if a user has a master's thesis, starts a new initiative, contributes to chess in meaningful ways, or is just a new user.
They should be treated as any user on this site.
And that question is close-worthy.
From the question:

want to ask you guys if you have any interesting reading or even
recommendation what could be potentially interesting chess/cs/math
topic to make a research on.

(emphasis mine)
Let's take a look a the tour:

Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are
primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion
rather than answers.
Questions that need improvement may be closed until someone fixes
them.

And the Help Center:

What types of questions should I avoid asking?
To prevent your question from being flagged and possibly removed,
avoid asking subjective questions where …
every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?”

Again, please refer back to the tour. SE is never meant to generate content. Quote: With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about chess.

Take a look at Chess.SE highest score question. They are not opinion-based, and they are fun and helpful to read.

It we just have questions like “what’s the capital of Portugal” then there is no point. Most worthwhile questions are asking for a considered answer. There is a mentality for whom I think this truth is uncomfortable. It’s curious to observe this at work here. There is a difference between judgement and opinion. Judgement requires experience, opinion just requires an ego.

Opinion-based question is a question that can't be answered using facts and citations. Specifically in this question, what is: a potentially interesting chess/cs/math topic? What defines it? Is my chess games interesting? Can I suggest it? If I can, and other people can too, then what will this site become? Think about that for a moment here.

This question is not opinion-based. There is no basis in opinion. It’s not like politics. Rather, the newbie is looking for some help, and used a superficial word, which has triggered you. But the question of students finding currently fertile areas to explore for research is a timeless one. So just overlook the word “interesting”, and see the deeper sense in this necessarily inexact request

@Laska the difference is, these answers are based on facts and citations. Different thing here.

Again and again, please refer back to the tour and the help center to see what opinion-based questions are defined, rather than making up your own.

Yes the help centre needs to be fixed here - that’s the point. It’s also confused about the multiple question thing. It should be closed until the text is fixed :-)

The Help Center is the rule defined by SE and the community about how this site is going to run. Many questions, like this one, don't fit into the site, and that's completely okay. It should be asked on other platforms, like Reddit or Quora.


text:
Why is this post marked as off-topic?
The following software related post has been marked as off-topic:
How can I set up en passant in Popeye engine?
The "specific"? reason given is that "the question does not appear to be about chess within the scope defined in the help center". This tells me no more, but at least I get to look at the scope, and see that software is only marked as one of the various grey areas in chess.stackexchange scope.
Therefore, any vote for putting on-hold of a grey area matter should reasonably include an indication of why the question was seen by the individual moderator as inappropriate. Otherwise we learn nothing from the whole process.
More broadly, one of the big success areas of stackexchange is to give detailed answers to pointed questions how to use technology, and it seems odd to exclude this usage in the chess area, which uses software tools so heavily.
So: reflection rather than reflex please.

You are right that it is a grey area. The line in the Help Center that I used for guidance was this -

Chess-specific questions about programming a chess engine or other
  chess software are welcome.

Your question wasn't about programming an engine or programming other chess software so I added my vote to close to two others. I don't have strong feelings on the subject and so would certainly not block any attempt to reopen. If you feel strongly (and since you have  gone as far as raising the subject here you probably do) then vote to reopen.
Note also this line in the Help Center:

Closed questions that receive edits within the first 5 days of closure
  are automatically put into a review queue to be considered for
  reopening

Thanks for the response. I saw the remark about programming questions, but see no implication there for questions about software use. I will do what you recommend


text:
Why close "Variant Chess Effects"?
A newbie's question "Variant Chess Effects" was closed as "opinion-based" by a dogpile of experienced members, and as usual there was no welcome or explanation given. So I really don't understand the mentality at work here.
Here's a chess metaphor. In problems, Castling is permitted unless you can prove it's illegal, while En passant is forbidden unless you can prove it's legal. So when someone posts a question, which category does it fall into? I think it falls into the Castling category. The onus is on the experienced member to show why this is not to be permitted.
A few posts are so fragmentary, incorrect, banal or offensive, that they are self-evidently closable without comment. But authors of other ones, like this, who have invested a bit of time and effort to pose the question, deserve more than a block from an apparently trigger-happy mod who apparently had a bad day at work. And if that's not the right interpretation for me to put on the mod behaviour then can the mods please explain. And ideally say hi, and sorry too.
The final irony is that deciding "subjectivity" seems quite subjective. I myself think that the closed question is perfectly capable of being asked in a factual way. There is a risk that mods mistakenly give the impression that anything that asks them to flex their minds in a novel way is frightening, and they must reach for one of the regular excuses for closing down this line of thinking: off-topic, opinion-based, or whatever.
And again: if this impression is not correct, there is an easy solution: the experienced members should explain their decisions.
Thanks for your time.

Here's a comment from physics.stackexchange, which I love:
"Welcome to this forum [xxxx] - I hope you will enjoy what you learn here; I see you already have some good answers. Now, people, [xxxx] is a new contributor, so try to rein in your irritation with what to you may be obvious. We all started out ignorant, and it was mostly by asking naive questions that we progressed, at least to start with. At least in my case, if I hadn't asked loads of "stupid" questions, I wouldn't have known a fraction of what I know today - and I still ask that kind of question all the time."

The fact that a definite answer is not yet known does not mean the question is opinion-based. I think many people are struggling with this. "Are there aliens?" is not an opinion-based question, it's a question we have not yet found an answer.

There's no mod closing the question though. They are regular users just like you and everyone else who has enough rep (500) to close a question.

@Andrew T. Yes I was using the term “mod” in a slack way. Thanks for pointing it out. To what should I correct it?


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Chess board drop down menu should be on top, not under the right panel
As you can see in the screenshot, the drop down menu appears under the right panel, while it should be on top of it.

I'm on Firefox 43.0.4/Windows 7.

Confirmed, yeah, that's ugly; looking at it

Yes, that's a fun combination of z-index and stacking-contexts (apparently; it really isn't my area - the team don't let me near UIs very often... not since the incident). Anyway, this should be fixed after the next deploy (which usually happens every few hours).

It's fixed, but I notice that the menu is slightly transparent. Would it make more sense for it to be completely opaque?

@nhahtdh I'll put that question to whoever made it transparent in the first place

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


text:
Tagging opening questions using a naming convention that avoids clashes with tags for players
Recently, I edited a question to replace the tags from and lisitsin with froms-gambit and lisitsin-gambit, respectively, in order to avoid future name clashes should anyone later ask questions about either Martin Severin From or Georgy Lisitsin (or both), since tags for players also use just the family name. However, when I wanted to do something similar for grob I noticed that this question had been revised to remove the tag grob-opening and only leave the tag grob. (The question is about the opening, not about Henri Grob.)
Can we establish a tagging policy for openings and players that avoids future name clashes between players and openings named after them? I see two potential policies that would consistently avoid name clashes:

Always add a noun such as "opening", "gambit" or "defence" to a tag for an opening named after a player.
Continue using family names for tags for players.
Don't add nouns such as "opening", "gambit" or "defence" to tags for openings named after players.
Combine first name and family name for tags for players.

If neither of these seems feasible or acceptable (I have not yet checked how many tags the site has for players versus tags for openings), how will consistency in tagging openings be ensured?

I have stopped editing tag wiki excerpts because of the inconsistency in tags for openings.

wish i could set a bounty on a meta post...


text:
Chess viewer does not render properly when viewing edit history
This bug also appears in the review page and appears to be directly linked. That question was asked over a year ago and still remains.
The PGN viewer has some issues with width in the review edits page, and also in the "view edits" page:

The amount of distortion varies depending on the question it seems, with no pattern that I can spot. Here, the 8 files of one board seem to be stretched across both boards:


text:
Meta: Make [tagging] a synonym of [tags]
Currently, we have (on Meta) the tags tag with 1 follower and 14 questions. We also have the tagging tag with 0 followers, 2 questions.
These are just two ways of describing exactly the same topic.
I would therefore propose making tagging a synonym of tags (like it is on StackOverflow Meta).

Done, nice catch.
tag


text:
Should [computer-chess] be deleted?
The tag computer-chess has at the moment 4 followers and 29 questions.
It seems to me as it could be easily replaced using engines (12 followers, 280 questions). Furthermore, engines has chess-computers as a synonym, which seems to me quite similar to computer-chess.
Should computer-chess be deleted / marked as synonym?

To my mind, computer-chess refers to the chess games played by computers (or rather engines or chess-computers as you noted), so they are referring to slightly different things. So probably the questions should be re-tagged because one of the tags has been misused.

I noticed computer-chess is frequently misused on questions about programming engines. I do not see why we need the slight distinction between games between engines and discussion about engines, as how an engine plays is an integral part of discussion about engines. I believe the tag should just be a synonym for engines as noted in the question.


text:
Avoiding "he" as default pronoun for players
There is a longstanding tradition in chess that players - even in the abstract - are referred to using male pronouns: "Black can improve his position", "White has lost his bishop" etc. This now seems pretty dated, and out of keeping with modern goals of gender neutrality etc.
Is there support here for:

making this a formal policy/guideline,
strongly encouraging participants to avoid "he" (in favour of "they" or just rewording the sentence) in both questions and answers,
encouraging people to edit other people's questions/answers to correct this?

(To be super clear: this has nothing to do with using (or not using) pronouns for actual known players or participants on this site. "Kasparov lost his bishop" is fine, as is "Steve has lost his mind".)
EDIT
Questions that are related but not duplicates:

Is it acceptable to edit a post just to change the pronouns? I don't think this is even about the question of pronoun-neutrality in black/white, but is about some bigger pronoun agenda. And it's only about the "is it ok to edit just to change pronouns" part of this question.

I don't think the question that this was closed as a duplicate of is even about this topic.

What's wrong with letting each contributor write his or her questions/answers in the way that feels more natural or intuitive, allowing focus to stay on the content rather than on whether or not they're fitting an ever-increasing list of formal requirements?

The problem, I guess, is that you could make exactly that same comment if my question was about not including blatant homophobia or racism. Presumably you wouldn't make such a comment in that situation, so is there something more specific to this particular question that you can say?

The difference is that sexual orientation and race are not a basic grammatical feature of the English language, while gendered 3rd person pronouns are. All you get is "he/she/it/they", and none of them make any assumptions about race or sexual orientation

I don't agree with the premise of the question but I gave an upvote because it is a valid question to clarify.

making this a formal policy/guideline

Chess Stack Exchange is part of the Stack Exchange network and abides by the same policy as all other sites.
The official policy on this matter is this:

A post speaks of a hypothetical or generic person. In this case, unless the gender somehow matters to the post, being gender neutral is beneficial.

Note the word beneficial, that means it is not required. In the linked question, you can see an example where the disadvantages (mass bumping old posts, changing quotes) outweighed the advantages of gender-neutral language. This is not just the collective opinion of Chess Stack Exchange; the Q&A on Meta Stack Exchange indicates a similar sentiment.

strongly encouraging participants to avoid "he" (in favour of "they" or just rewording the sentence) in both questions and answers

Given the episode above, I don't think (but I could be wrong) that there is much support for this here. It took me a couple of years to get used to "singular they" and now I use it more or less consistently (occasionally using "he/she" because that's how it works in my native language). I'd say: lead by example. Chess is still a rather conservative world, you can't really expect it to be on the forefront of a movement like this.

Maybe I'm quibbling, but I don't think "black" and "white" are "hypothetical or generic person[s]" when we are analysing a position. They are just a set of pieces, with no implied person even present. So I don't entirely agree that the collective opinion applies here: that would be about making sure that "nurse" is not assumed to be female, I'm saying that "black" is not even human, and does not have gender.

"Chess is still a rather conservative world, you can't really expect it to be on the forefront of a movement like this." - I don't. I actually think it's already lagging many years, probably decades, behind. Absolutely no risk of chess taking a progressive position on gender, don't worry. :)

@SteveBennett from how it's used in other langauges, either English is a weird exception or "Black" and "White" are indeed referring to the players


text:
Deleting a question while I write an answer
Admittedly, the question was a tad inane. :-) Maybe, the n00b simply didn't formulate it sensibly, as it could be interpreted to mean something legit. Still, I bothered to take some time to write a sensible answer. One second before I hitted "submit", it was deleted. Words like percent sign, dollar and ampersand could only be heard in my room, thank God.
I don't think this is the luckiest handling of things (e.g. a post could be temporarily locked, but I immediately see other problems with that; I also have no idea how the answerer could be warned - note that the question had no downvotes yet).
Either
a) What is your opinion on the matter? (yes, this should not happen/no, this is your natural risk as answerer/no, alternatives would only create larger problems),
or preferrably
b) Where was this already discussed at length on meta? ("Similar Questions" possibly would take ages. At least a quick google gave nothing.)


text:
UI for making chessboards
You can make chessboards in markdown, but it's hard to type, difficult for beginners to understand, and it's not visual representation of the end result at all. How about we have a UI for making chessboards just like Stack Snippets?

It may be hard to type, but it is a worldwide standard, and most (commercial) chess programs support the FEN notation, so you can easily import/export positions from and to Stack Exchange.
I agree that it would be nice to have a graphical editor, but I fear that it is a lot of work and won't be done by Stack Exchange developers for just a small site like this one. Maybe if somebody from the community developed a JavaScript editor, they could include it, and if not, then it might work as a user script.


text:
Vertical White Space after Diagrams
I find it difficult to go through the answers with diagram viewers because of the large white space between the end of the moves and the Start, Back menu... But that's not always the case.
For instance, in this post, there is no such space in the question, but there are spaces in my answer. I tried to understand why but I failed. Is it me or a kind of bug?

The "vertical white space" after diagrams is a text box for showing the annotation.
The reason why the diagrams on the question and the rest of your answer don't show is, there's no annotation. However, the first diagram in your answer has not only 1, but 3 annotations:
[FEN "rnb1k1nr/ppp2ppp/4p3/3pP3/1b1P3q/2N3P1/PPP4P/R1BQKBNR b KQkq - 0 1"]
[title "Position after 9. g3"]

9... Qd8! {was played and Lc0 has a pawn down and Stockfish plays to win with Qd8!} (9... Qe4? {is the obvious move but} 10.Kf2 Qxh1 (10...Bxc3 11.bxc3) 11.h3!! { and White equalizes! } 11...Bxc3 12.bxc3 Qe4 13.Bd3 Qh1 14.Bf1=)

It makes sense thank you! However, I just checked and there is still the vertical white space. I will update my post with a picture.

I refreshed my page and the problem disappeared! But there was a blank space between the end of the diagram (or the moves) and the menu (so before the annotation box). But now it's ok! If it comes back I will update my post.


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Fix rendered pgn boards so that they are the right size
Boards made from the pre code section such as this:

[fen ""] 1. f3 e5 2. g4 qh4

now show up with a large amount of blank space beneath them. I see almost a full board size of empty space beneath the board now.

This is on a windows 7 machine, using chrome 23, with a display resolution of 1048*764.
The reason is that there is a missing css definition which seems to have been accidentally removed.
Using .moves {display: inline;} will fix this issue.

This is because the css class moves no longer has the definition "display:inline" which causes the div containing class moves to be rendered on the next line below the chess board and introduces a large amount of blank space.
If you want, you can use this code in your browser's url. Make sure that chrome doesn't remove the part that says javascript:
javascript:$('.moves').css('display','inline');

Just open one of the pages, put that in the url, hit enter, and the boards will be fixed.


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How does the site's new PGN viewer work?
In particular, what controls are available when playing through a game?

You might be interested in How to add a replayer to a post?

This post is a work in progress, please feel free to add or embellish...

add link to example replayer here
There are 3 main ways to make moves using the replayer:

The control buttons
The keyboard
The mouse scroll wheel

Control Buttons

The control buttons at the bottom of the replayer should be fairly self explanatory.  You can move forward or backward, flip the board, or move to the start/end of the game.
In order to select a variation, click the desired move when the move variation selection window appears.
You may also click on the moves on the right of the board in order to go directly to that move.

Keyboard Shortcuts
These keyboard shortcuts will only work when the replayer has focus, that is, after you click on it.

→ / ← (Right / Left Arrows) - advance or backup through the game
↑ / ↓ (Up/Down Arrows) - select the variation (when the move variation selection window is visible)
Esc (Esc Key) - close the move variation selection window
F (F Key) - flip the board (switch white and black)
Home / S / H (Home Key, S Key, and H Key) - move to the starting position
End / E (End Key and E Key)

if the Ctrl (Control Key) is held, move to the end of the game
without the Ctrl (Control Key), move to the end of the current variation

Mouse Scroll Wheel

Using the scroll wheel will either advance or backup through the game (down and up respectively).
If the move variation window is visible, the scroll wheel will force the replayer to make the currently selected move (defaults to the main line move).


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How do you create/add new tags on chess stackexchange?
Do you need certain rep to do it? Is the right only reserved for mods?

Anyone with 150 reputation can create new tags. Also, anyone with 200 reputation can retag others' questions. (See this privileges page for the full rundown.) When you apply a tag that doesn't yet exist, it is created by doing so.


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Question titles - differentiation of theoretical/historical
I proposed an edit to the following question: Shortest game with 18 queens? that changed the title from:
Shortest game with 18 queens?
to
Shortest possible game with 18 queens?
And this edit was approved and then reverted with the comment: Title was fine. Reverted to original.
My reasoning for this edit was that in the initial title the question did not make it particularly clear if the question was asking for a theoretical shortest game (which the question itself makes clear), or if it is looking for a game that was actually played. The number 18 makes it relatively easy to assume that this is a theoretical question, but an analogous situation with the number 5 instead illustrates a scenario where the edit would help by removing any doubt without making the title complicated or long.
I am not proposing that all questions should mention which category they belong to in the title, however when the title could plausibly be from either then it makes sense to provide this information without having to read the question, and in my opinion only improves the title.
Thoughts? Shouldn't we be aiming to make titles as clear as possible in ways like this?

I agree with the OP, the title is unclear. Users should specify if they seek real games only, or if theoretical ones are allowed too.

Yes. Questions looking for a game that was actually played require an entirely different method of research than questions asking for theoretical games that maximize, minimize, or otherwise satisfy a certain condition.
It's likely to be a different user answering a question looking for a game than doing thinking/math/programming to answer a theoretical question. If the question author only wants one or the other, inspecificity wastes the time of one of these types of answerers.
I would also suggest dedicated tags for "theoretical" (maybe something that is better distinguished from section of game theory) or "find a game", which is different from "historical game" in that a question on a historical game would refer to and discuss a specific, known game.


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Where's the chess board?
I can't seem to find where to play chess at this site. Am I missing something or is it not available, only Q&A here?

No educational comment offered. Just an autonomous negative drive-by? A simple answer would would be less rude.

You cannot play chess here only ask questions and answer questions.

Thankyou for the clarification Akavail. I normally play online chess at Gameknot. Someone suggested checking this site but it's now obvious that they meant for chess data, not games.

http://meta.chess.stackexchange.com/questions/170/anyone-want-to-meet-in-chat-and-play-some-online-blitz lets play and get with some ideas

There isn't a chess board here, since we're a Q&A site, not a game client. Check out our about page to get a grasp of the features of Stack Exchange.


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Any possibility for Chess to graduate?
This site has been active for years, but it's never popular. Most of us (including myself) are programmers on Stack Overflow migrating to here. This site is still a beta. Look at the number of questions generated by chess.com and us! Their message board is flooded with questions. The moderators on this site rarely have anything to do.
Any possibility for us to graduate out from beta? We have very high answer rate, but we don't have enough questions!
EDIT:
My favourite site (https://quant.stackexchange.com) is a site for professional in financial mathematics. There are actually not many people who know how to ask/answer there, nowhere near the number of chess players. But they managed to graduate! They beat us in everything!! Traffic, number of questions, Google search, reputation... Somehow the site was able to attract some of the best financial mathematicians. But ... do we even have a grandmaster? I'm tempted to say the site is a failure (relative to other sites in the network).

How many forums on financial mathematics existed before Quant SE? There are tons of other sites where people can discuss and even play chess. Why would they come here instead of stay where they are? What makes Chess SE more attractive?

Someone made the following point before: Grandmasters get part of their income from advising amateurs online, so they have a direct incentive against giving away free advice. This is not true to the same degree for researchers in other fields..

I agree the site is not very competitive with other sites on this topic. There are various other chess forums on the web which are more serious about chess, and have a higher level of content provided by better chess players. For instance if I would like to get serious advice about openings, I'd head to the chesspub.com forum - getting advice from amateurs here (no offence) would just not be very useful for me.

Considering what happened to Productivity.SE, it will be a matter of time before Chess.SE gets closed as well. SE is a business not charity.

We have six times the number of questions per day and twice the number of visits per day, so I'm not sure if it's comparable.

@itub the content quality here is much worse, I would nominate this SE as a higher priority for deletion

Provided there's sufficient base of moderation for a site, it's not in danger of being shut down. If the diamond moderators start stepping down and can't be replaced, that's when we start getting concerned. Low traffic isn't really something we worry about.


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Questions about chess.stackexchange.com
I have some questions about chess.stackexchange.com, i read the FAQ but there's no answer.
When did you guys created this site? When will it be officially released? I found it this morning  by googling: "chess stack exchange" I didn't find it by googling a question, and it's not mentioned on the footer of stackoverflow, i consider myself very lucky because i found it.
And the other question, would you analyse ongoing games? Or is it against the rules of the site?

I found it here http://stackexchange.com/sites#

@Akavall so we both didn't find it by googling a question, and there aren't many chess websites or forums out there, which is a bad thing for this site

I think question and answer format is really good for chess topics, because it prevents Looooooong arguments about minor points, or even worse this player is better than that debates. If you posted on chessgames.com you know what I am talking about :). I like the site the way it is right know, and I am sure its popularity will increase in the future.

@Akavall i agree, i haven't posted in chessgames.com but i have posted in chess.com and i still receive replies after 3 months lol

This site's public beta started 10 months ago.  For more stats see our Area 51 page.
It won't be officially released until it gets enough participation.  I'm not exactly sure how much is required, but that's when.  See the Area 51 FAQ
This site is in beta.  This is why it is not listed in Stack Overflow's footer.

Would you analyse ongoing games? Or is it against the rules of the site?

@Fischer  I'm pretty sure that would be frowned upon, not to mention against the rules of most websites/clubs.


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pgn viewer support on mobile phones
Might be a dupe, the PGN viewer doesn't support Mobile phones, I tried Dolphin version 11.2.8 browser on Android version 4.1.2 samsung s3 mini and I also tried using  the SE android app, it shows the FEN not the diagram, why? and can it  be fixed? since most of us rely too much on phones thee days.

I don't think it's a dupe. The lack of PGN rendering in the SE android app has been raised already on meta, but the similar issue concerning your browser seems not to have been. It might be useful to include your Dolphin and android version information too.

@ETD just did that

As a partial fix: you can click on full site at the bottom of the screen and the board does render fine.


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What is the retagging policy?
For some of the older questions, some of the appropriate tags are missing. If tags are added, the questions are bumped to the front page.
Is this seen as undesirable, and should adding tags to old questions be avoided for this reason?

It's not undesirable, but at the same time, just exercise some restraint.  When adding a tag to an old question, try to also improve the question in other ways too.  It's less-than-ideal to retag more than ~5 old questions at a time since they'll drown out new questions at the top of the home page.
One similar note, mods can merge or do a tag rename without bumping questions, so if the re-tagging falls into that category, by all means, post a meta question with a list of questions.
Incidentally, there's also a feature request on meta.stackoverflow along these lines (prevent bumping on a simple retag).


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Tool used to create chess analysis interactive diagrams in many chess stack exchange answers
I'm new here, and I would like to know how some members of this forum are creating these nice chess diagrams for analysing positions in their answers, the picture below explains well what I'm meaning. Thank you for help.

I'd upvote this question twice if I could.

Thanks Henry. I think this should be explained as a well written tutorial for beginners on this forum, explaining to them the FEN notation, and how to create this animated diagrams :)

It should at least be in the Help section, I'd think. Otherwise you have to go around "editing" people's posts just to see what code they used to generate the interactive diagrams!

@AlwaysLearningNewStuff it's still displaying don't worry :)

@RauanSagit try this [Title "put  your title here,the one that will substitute the NN-NN title"], don't forget to put this between     tags :)

@RauanSagit: Sorry for answering this late, I did not recieve notification of your comment-I will try to find out how to set title and players and report you my results. Sorry again-best regards.

@RauanSagit: Here is the link that displays an example below. When adding additional info ( event, names of players and such ) add them below [fen ""]. They should be indented by pressing spacebar 4 times as well. There is no need to skip one line, just put them under FEN. Best regards.

@RauanSagit: I did not receive information about your comment, so I apologize for answering this late. Try to edit this answer of mine and you will see how I added title and player names. Best regards.

I personally use this site for that.
It is free, and it is an online tool.

In your answer you paste that code like this:

Press space bar 4 times;
Type square brackets ( [] );
Type fen "" inside the brackets ( [fen ""] );
Paste your code inside the "" ( [fen "Your FEN goes here"] );

If you decide to input variations like in the above picture you need to do this:

Press enter twice;
Press space bar 4 times;
Input moves;

Here is an example:

If you have further question leave a comment and I will help you.
Hopefully this answer helps you.
Best regards.

The problem with using a tool that is not integrated with SE is that if that site goes away, our content will fail.

@Tony: I'm not sure I follow. Why would our content fail if the above mentioned tool goes away? The content has been transferred, not so?

@FranS No.  If I understand, we'd be including a link to another site.  The code for the chessboard lives at the other site.  If that site goes away, all we'd have are broken links.

@Tony: Not sure where he mentions linking to that site directly - as far as I can tell he simply uses the external site to generate the FEN, which is then copied into SE. When that site disappears, his nice tool will be gone but none of the FEN's stored here will be impacted.

@FranS Ah, I see. He's left off part of the instructions.  Unless I am out of date, what he has will not work due to missing 'pre' and 'code' tags.

@TonyEnnis: Member FranS is right-I use external tool to generate FEN, then I copy/paste the FEN code here, according to SE format. " Ah, I see. He's left off part of the instructions. Unless I am out of date, what he has will not work due to missing 'pre' and 'code' tags. " Everything works-the above described procedure was used several times in my answers. You can try the above example to reassure yourself. Best regards.

@FranS Yep, it works as ALNS says.  However, sometimes I have to put a blank line between the FEN and the moves.  I don't know why, and I would not say it is because of the lack of PRE and CODE tags.

@TonyEnnis: Yes, you need a space between [fen "] and the moves. Also that first line must be indented by pressing space 4 times. Best regards.

The tool does its best to display a game title and anything else based on valid pgn headers provided.  Headers are provided in the following way: [Name "Value"] with the square brackets and quotes as shown.
Here's some additional information about non-standard headers that are supported:

StartFlipped - if this is provided, the board will appear with black on the bottom and white on the top.  If a FEN is provided with black to move, this will happen by default, however if this header is provided it is always followed.
e.g. [StartFlipped "1"]
StartPly - if a start ply is provided, the replayer will initially display the position after the given numeric ply.  For example, see the second diagram in this question.
e.g. [StartPly "5"]
Title - if an explicit title is provided, that will be the displayed title on the game.  If no title is provided, the replayer will show game information based on the white player name, black player name, location, and result.  If you are interested in the specifics, see the actual javascript code in github.

I'd be happy to elaborate if there are any questions, I just tried to get the basics in some sort of public form instead of just floating around in my head...

Is the github repo still taking issues and PRs?

Sure, I'm not sure how quickly changes can make it to this site, but I'm happy to review on github.

Also lichess has a new lightweight viewer with a lot of features https://github.com/lichess-org/pgn-viewer

All you have to do is use the following sequence.

[FEN "put your fen here but it's optional. You can leave this tag out"]
(blank line)
1. e4 e5 2. d4 *

I don't think this works on meta... but it works on the main site.
Now, it's fiddly. It frequently takes me a few tries to get it right.


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Can i post an annotated PGN chess board in chess.stackexchange.com?
I know that i can post FEN Image, that is Static diagram of chess board. But can i post interactive game or sequence of moves here in stackexchange?

Yes you can post an interactive game. Search on meta PGN viewre and you shall find instructions. Best regards.

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

Yes you can.  See balpha's answer for specific directions.
This post with additional instructions might also be helpful.


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Inconsistent player tags?
I am seeing player tags with either just the last name or the first name and the last name.  I think we should stick to a consistent format. I would suggest that firstname-lastname is a good format, for example, bobby-fischer or gary-kasparov.  Also, since most people know Bobby Fischer as Bobby Fischer and not Robert James Fischer, I don't think it is necessary to make it robert-james-fischer?
Status: not completed.

I'm bumping this because bobby-fischer and boris-spassky has resurfaced. Moderators should take action to keep tags consistent.

I'm merging mikhail-tal into tal, boris-gelfand into gelfand, and vasily-smyslov into smyslov, but leaving donald-byrne as is, because of possible future confusion with Robert Byrne.
The rest of the tags seem consistent with the last-name-except-for-ambiguous-cases rule, so the above are all that I see need to be changed.  Comment here if I missed something.

Great, I might change my last name to Tal, so you might have to reconsider that one j/k :)

I'd suggest sticking to a single last name except in cases where the first is needed for clarification. If necessary, we could create aliases later to tie them back together. I think it would save on space and clarity, but still provide a means of specificity if necessary.
Also, it's helpful to note that there are currently only tags existing for the first of the following. That suggests it's the more natural for folks in this case.
fischer bobby-fischer robert-james-fischer fischer-robert

The only thing I can think of would be cases where an opening and a player would share the same tag, for example [tag:alekhine] and [tag:alekhines-defense].  Or [tag:petrosian] (variation in KID).  I don't think it's an issue (fill out the tag wiki's well), but just something to be aware of.

OK, I think just the last name would suffice unless we have situations like the ones Andrew pointed out or if their is two  or more players share the same last name such as the Polgar sisters.

And Emanuel vs. Edward Lasker, and Donald vs. Robert Byrne...


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Why don't we use this board instead?
The pgn viewer that is currently being used in this site lack some of the features that the pgn viewer of chess.com has. So why don't we simply use it instead of using our current pgn viewer?

It supports inline comments and annotations. It just requires us to arrange the board and and moves in the Game Editor of chess.com and copy the embed code and paste it here. But I think that the HTML tag for that is currently not supported here. If we could just enable the support for that, we could get a nice pgn viewer for our site.

The PGN viewer itself that's been implemented on the site does allow for PGN comments, but unfortunately that option isn't active in its implementation at chess.SE. If you'd like to voice support for getting that feature activated, there is a meta post here: http://meta.chess.stackexchange.com/q/249/167

It just requires us to arrange the board and and moves in the Game Editor of chess.com and copy the embed code and paste it here. Aside from the other points that have been raised, this on its own would be a deal-breaker, assuming I'm understanding correctly. Requiring users to leave the site just to set up a diagram is a Bad Thing in UX.

The question is, "Is the chess.com's PNG viewer open source?" - Answer, "No".

Proprietary Rights
... provided that you do not (and do not allow any third party to) copy, modify, create a derivative work from, reverse engineer, reverse assemble or otherwise attempt to discover any source code, sell, assign, sublicense, grant a security interest in or otherwise transfer any right in the Software. ...

Even if it's an open source tool, the StackExchange probably didn't interest in using them. SE will try to improve its own code.


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Possible bug in user-reputation league display (appearance of double row-entry)
I was in my profile and noticed "top 3% this month". The ego-stroke was interesting, so I clicked it.
Upon arriving at the league list, no problems; upon clicking the week- or quarter- tabs, the #1 spot (my own, surprisingly) occupied two rows (by double entry, not by vertical aspect being stretched). Clicking the month-tab showed the double row entry as now being present there (where it hadn't been doubled upon my arrival at the page).
The problem persisted in these three tabs, though it didn't show in the year- or all-time- tabs (possibly a telling point, since I'm hardly #1 in either of those tabs).

This is normal, though perhaps a little weird. No matter what time span or sort you look at, your row always appears at the top with the gold highlight. (So you don't have to search through a bunch of pages to find yourself.) The normal ranking appears below that. In this case, you also happen to be number one.
This is what Super User's year rankings look like at the moment:

Since it's me looking at it, I appear first with all my information, but since I also happen to be #3 (so shown on the first page), my row appears again with the same information.
status-bydesign

Perhaps if the "You are here!" (as it were) were clearly separate from the actual ordered list, then the listing wouldn't throw people (or rather: it might not then continually throw them until they discover the underlying mechanic).


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Is "Checkers" on topic?
Would anyone be interested in expanding the scope of this site to include "Checkers" by creating a "checkers-tag" for it?

I'd say no. Our sister site Board & Card Games already has a [checkers] tag. While some overlap between Stack Exchange sites isn't a bad thing per sé, we should not deliberately create it without any supporting arguments.


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Why was the analyse immortal draw question deleted an hour ago?
How do I analyse immortal draw?

I really don't get this game at all. 1 day I just heard about it. I plugged it into lichess. But apparently lichess analysis is getting it wrong. It says move X is a blunder when actually it isn't at all.
I asked about why engines were confused by this
Why can't immortal draw be analysed?
and also how to analyse it but then it was closed for too broad so I made a new post and then now it's deleted How do I analyse immortal draw? with no explanation in comments.

You posted an almost exact duplicate of a previously closed question of yours. Of course it was deleted.


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(UPDATE: Yes or cunningham's law) Joke answers allowed? Seriously?

No, what you did is what is known as a gambit. You offered your opponent material (in this case a water bottle), which he accepted. This would be considered a blunder on his part, since although it gave him a temporary hydration advantage, it ended up costing him time due to uncomfortable situation it caused for his bladder, which needed to be resolved. If he had instead declined the gambit, me may have won, but such is the way of the game.

https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/33544
I have tried posting joke answers, but I believe still technically correct answers under the joke, on other se sites, and they have been removed.
Back to this site:
Already flagged the above answer. I did not get even a disputed. I really got a declined. Okay, I'm not saying I'm right or anything. I really want to understand? Seriously? what's up with this?
Note 1:
I think (joke chess)-(answers) are or should be allowed (https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/24423), but really (joke)-(chess answers)? come on.
Note 2:
If downvoting a meta question means a negative answer, then...
Note 3:
Re the answer, why can't we just that joke comments are allowed but joke answers are not? see my folklore question which has 'I would have said by virtue of being hospitalized, L'Hopital's rule should be fair game. ' i think it is ok as comment but not ok as an answer. but like ok with me i guess. i'll post a bunch of joke answers i guess. i just thought it was perhaps an oversight.

Joke answers like this are ok.
If the OP for the aforementioned link or someone else gets in trouble for offering such gambits, then well...
(alternatively this post is an application of cunningham's law)

I agree. Chess is a serious game and there should be no tolerance for any fun or jokes. All puns should be punished. All innuendo ended. Cunning linguists should have their tongues cut out. Only once we have banished all laughter can we become grandmasters.

pkr -_-..................

well i just figured it could be given as a comment instead of an answer

ok i will post an answer saying it is ok. cunningham's law

in your opinion why can't we just that joke comments are allowed but joke answers are not? see my folklore question which has 'I would have said by virtue of being hospitalized, L'Hopital's rule should be fair game. ' https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/116019/inadmissible-theorems-in-research/116035#comment305274_116019 i think it is ok as comment but not ok as an answer. but like ok with me i guess. i'll post a bunch of joke answers i guess. i just thought it was perhaps an oversight.

Ah, but the problem here is rather Poe's Law. Even if the joke is outrageous, some simply won't get it. I'm taking bets pkr's answer above falls under it. Thus, whereas I might put in puns, popcultural snippets and anecdotes into my answers, I'd avoid outright joking.

Poe's law vs cunningham's law. interesting.........post as answer?

@HaukeReddmann oh i forgot to tag you