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Why can't I delete my comment on this question?
I'm trying to delete a now irrelevant comment of mine on this question, but I can't. The system hasn't blocked me from deleting comments for a day for deleting too many, so I think that the page is being buggy. I also can't interact with the comment flags, upvotes, or the "bookmarking" star either. What is wrong with the question page?

SE mods, as a chess mod I also can't delete (or edit) the comment.

Indeed. Which is why I have added the status-review tag to bring it to the attention of the level of mods above me.

I don't see any comments from you on the question itself. Can you clarify which one you want to remove, please? And also, what's happening when you try to delete it? Is the delete link not showing up, or do you get an error?

FWIW, I just flagged the comment for mod deletion by referring to this meta post. See whether the mod tool is possible to delete instead of trying to delete the comment from the post directly...

However, it seems really weird since you also mentioned comment flags, upvotes, and favorite (starring)... because I could flag the comment and also favorite the question just now. There doesn't seem any maintenances (read-only status) on that day either...

This issue has been fixed.
The root cause was an answer (which happened to be deleted, though the same thing could have happened on an undeleted answer) where the following was included [StartPly "124"], which indicated a starting move on the 62nd move. The only problem is that there were no moves given, and this caused the chess.js script to crash. And due to the way that the script was initialized, it caused execution of other front-side initialization to not be processed, leading to click events not being attached to buttons, etc.
To fix this:

The actual bug in the chess.js script has been fixed to check for nulls on the proper line to avoid this from happening.
The way in which the chess.js script is called has been modified to ensure that issues on the script do not affect page init logic.


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Why is there a big gap between the moves and play buttons in the replayer?
I have recently noticed an annoying feature of the replayer. No matter the amount of moves, there always a big gap between them and the play buttons. Here is a screenshot of a chosen example.

Why is this so? It is rather annoying to have to scroll past it all the time. Is there away to fix this so it formats itself accordingly with the move amount? Of course, if an answer has many moves, it will default to the built in limit such as in this answer with a long stalemate problem.

This has been fixed. Glorfindel was correct - it was happening because the chess player is not really built optimally for responsive design. Now below a certain width breakpoint, the move will show up below the board and not beside it.

1. e4 e6
Load it in a narrow screen
Moves beneath the board!

Reducing the zoom function to 50% for the given example proves that this has been fixed.

I still have this issue on mobile

This is a consequence of the responsive design. For me, at full browser width (1440px) it shows normally:

and the problem only appears when I make the window a bit smaller:

It could be fixed by removing the fixed height of the moves element, then it will look like this:

but I'm not experienced enough in responsive design to tell whether that's the best solution. So I'm tagging this as status-review to have Stack Exchange's developers to have a look.

Useful research. And it should be borne in mind that not everyone has the money to buy (or the space to put) a huge screen, and not everyone has keen enough eyesight to cope with 1440p on a normal-sized one.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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Why doesn't the replayer work on Meta?
I get that in general we don't want to be asking chess related questions here, but occasionally a meta question or answer can be illuminated with an example where the replayer or just a diagram displayer would be useful.

Because we (the ♦ moderator team) haven't asked for it yet. I was planning to do so, but then 'other things' happened and I decided not to bother the Community Managers right now.
It would be especially useful for a Sandbox question where users can test the syntax, or to provide a network-intern replayer for chess questions on Puzzling.

Well, it does now. :D Thanks to a note from Glorfindel, you'll find that the replayer has now been activated on Chess Meta so, enjoy!
Thanks to Yaakov for actually making the necessary changes for this!

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


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Tag synonym suggestions
I suggest the following synonyms:
novelty → novelties
simul → simultaneous

Both suggestions seem reasonable to me.

I have reworked the novelty into novelties. Done and done, albeit a little late.

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


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A list of “unknown” features of the replayer
The site’s replayer is a unique and useful tool, but there are some features of it the seem to a few little known that should be more widely known.
While there are questions about how to implement it, annotate the games, add annotation symbols and flip the board, I have found a couple of features that have been brushed off to the side. I want to make a list of such features here for others to use as a reference.

[startply ""]

A useful but seemingly untalked about (other than a single answer on the question about adding a replayer in a post) that allows the replayer to begin playing the moves anywhere in the middle of a game or the move sequence.
Simply put [startply ""] in the bottom line, and add the half-move number, or ply, of where you wish to start in between the quotation mark-like symbols like below. Add four spaces in front of the entire thing.
[startply "67"]

An odd number means that White will move when the play arrow is clicked/tapped/pressed on, and an even number will mean that Black will move.
For instance:

[startply "1"] will start with White's first move
[startply "2"] will start with Black's first move
[startply "3"] will start with White's second move, etc

null

This feature has been used only a few times, with this question being one of the earliest known uses of it. This seems to be a completely obscure feature of the replayer.
It is useful for skipping either side turns. While reasons for doing so are uncommon (such as to demonstrate a seriesmover problem or show a series of uninterrupted moves by one side), it still serves a purpose.
To use it, simply put the word null where a move would usually go.
Here’s an example.
[FEN ""]

1. e3 null 2. Qf3 null 3. Bc4 null 4. Qxf7#

Does anyone know of any other examples? Feel free expand this list and/or improve it.

StartPly is a standard PGN feature, and it's already mentioned here.

Excellent post, IMHO.

A feature I would like: Show the move with move number. When Sleepy mentioned 11.Qxb7 in my latest post, I first had to search what the position after the 11. move was. (Counting moves from the start is possible but unpractical.) I know you can even popup-annotate diagrams but if Sleepy lacks the right to edit my post, it can't be edited in either.

Some "unknown" features are covered in this answer by the creator of the replayer: https://chess.meta.stackexchange.com/a/283/19880

By default, the replayer orients the board from the point of view of the player who makes the first notated move. This means that if the notation begins with a Black move, the board is from Black's point of view.
To get it to display the board from White's point of view, insert the following line (with four spaces before it) in the PGN, before the notation.
[StartFlipped "1"]

Here's an example showing the position after 1 e4 and thus continuing with a Black move.
[Title ""]
[StartFlipped "1"]
[fen "rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR b - - 0 0"]

1... c5

Apparently, it is possible to also add arrows to the board in a given position. I found this out from this answer on the main site.
[FEN ""]

1. e4 {[%draw arrow,e2,e4, blue]} e5 {[%draw arrow,e7,e5, blue]} 2. Qh5 {[%draw arrow,d1,h5, red]} Ke7 {[%draw arrow,e8,e7, red]} 3. Qxe5# {[%draw arrow,h5,e5, red]}

The trick is the put a space after a move, and then write {[%draw arrow,d1,h5, red]}. The squares can be replaced to direct the arrow anywhere. The "{" and "}" are required at the front and back.
Multiple arrows can be put into one position by stringing "[%draw arrow,d1,h5, red][%draw arrow,d1,h5, red]" together between the "{" and "}".
[FEN "8/8/8/8/8/8/7R/k3K2R w K - 0 1"]

1. O-O# {[%draw arrow,e1,g1, blue][%draw arrow,h1,f1, red]}

I am not sure if red and blue are the only usable colors. It also takes a split milisecond for the arrows to appear after playing a move.

Here's another feature that I just found today in this question.
Apparently, there exists a way to avoid using
    [fen ""] to show a diagram. I call it the “Space Method.”
Simply indent your FEN string with 4 spaces (select it and press Ctrl + K):
8/8/8/6rk/8/5qPK/7P/8 w - - 0 1

And you will have your diagram!

This is not really about the spaces; it is about the FEN string being in a code block. Three backticks or tildes above and below works just as well.


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Is it acceptable to edit a post just to change the pronouns?
A user has been suggesting edits that only change the pronouns. Most of them have been rejected, but some have been approved. Is this acceptable?

I would say yes, in general, it is acceptable, IMO.

I think it's good to mention that you posted this question on Meta Stack Exchange as well. (Which is a good place to discuss it; I read your question here, thought I had seen a similar discussion on Meta.SE before, but couldn't find it. Except @bmike's question, which is a good post but given the score we can't really use it as a reference.)

@Glorfindel Maybe you are thinking of https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/336379/233944

@PirosaysReinstateMonica I don't recall reading that, but it fits the bill. Thanks!

seriously i think everyone should just change to e/h instead of he/she/him/his/her. you can never go wrong. it's like the filipino 'siya' or the spoken form 'ta3' in mandarin

If you are asking if it is acceptable/right to reject such edits then the answer is "Yes".
What is particularly egregious is that he often changes quotes, thereby making them incorrect! He deliberately causes harm.
In general, I think people's pronouns should be respected regardless of gender. Ed Dean (@EDT), one of the early stalwarts of the forum always used female pronouns. That was Ed's choice and should be respected. Changing them, even in the context of other edits, would be very wrong.
Exactly the same thing applies when one of our female contributors uses female pronouns. Leave them alone.
Because we are not sexist and respect everybody's pronouns the same should apply to those who choose to use male pronouns. Changing the pronouns people use is exclusionary and we should not be doing it and not condoning it.

If I've made a spelling error in my post, or a grammatical error such as forgetting to capitalise a sentence, that's fine to correct with an edit.
If I've made a factual error in my post, it should be fixed with an edit if it doesn't change the answer I've given.  E.g., "docker was first released in 2008" could easily be changed to 2013, "docker was first released in 2008, making it older than Go" could not.  In the case of the latter, a downvote and a comment explaining where I'm wrong such that I can reassess my answer is best.
If I've used a pronoun you'd prefer I didn't, that is neither a spelling error, nor a factual error.  It's me not catering to your wants, about which I may or may not be aware.  In this situation, my mistake should be pointed out as a comment, but no downvote left, as the answer is not made incorrect by the wrong pronoun use.  At that point, I can read the correction, and decide whether to honour it or not, as using pronouns is a choice.  Whether I decide to or not is within my power as the author, and shouldn't be edited over.


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Should we create tags named after chess players?
We've got plenty of tags named after chess players (famous and not):

fischer
tal
kasparov
karpov
alekhine
carlsen
nakamura
nepomniachtchi
ding
anand
aronian
kramnik
jovanka-houska

Most of them have only 1-2 questions! While I understand that some of these chess players are probably the greatest of all times (thus creating a tag dedicated to them seems reasonable) the rest are either not famous or haven't really affected the history of chess.
Are those tags acceptable? When should they be created?

I've been wondering the same thing recently. Ripe for Meta discussion.

Have you noticed that the tags for openings named after players can cause clashes with names of players? See Tagging opening questions using a naming convention that avoids clashes with tags for players.

I am against the usage of tags named after chess players. This does not help to define the question, nor does it help in the search. If the player's name is relevant to the question, it would have been used in the question body anyway; thus, being searchable.
In particular, I think that using a chess-player tag is harmful when tagging a question that only contains a game involving a certain chess player.
Moreover, the practice of using such tags unnecessarily complicates the "tag cloud" and makes the organization harder.

I think only for very commonly asked about players (like Magnus Carlsen). Look at these tags. If they have more than 10 or 25 questions, keep them. Otherwise, goodbye.

Re

If the player's name is relevant to the question, it would have been used in the question body anyway; thus, being searchable.

I think player name tags are helpful for those 'watch tag' things.
Then again I suppose you could always bookmark a search for the name and check it everyday if you want. But then in that case, why don't you do the same for other tags like, say, chess960?
Anyhoo that's just my vote.


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Board playback and Chess 960
This question: Can you castle twice in Chess960?
shows that there is a bug with the board playback regarding Chess 960 alternate starting positions, particularly in relation to castling.  If you scroll through the moves, and then scroll backwards to before the castle move, the King ends up in the standard starting position rather than the modified 960 position, and if you keep going the Bishop ends up on top of him, scrolling forward again causes the King to move like a Bishop, and later on the Bishop performs a castle move instead of the King.  You have to refresh the page in order to fix it.  Not sure how difficult it would be to add a check when reversing a castling move to make sure the King ends up back where he started if it's not the standard layout.


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I cannot edit my own post
For some reason, I am unable to edit this post. There is an (obvious) typo in the beginning of it, but when I try to edit in the "Hello," nothing happens.
Not sure if this is a bug or an unexplainable fluke that will be better in a few minutes.
UPDATE:
I am not even kidding; this is super strange. I can edit ANYTHING else into the post, but when I try to add the phrase "Hello, and welcome to Chess.SE!" at the beginning of my answer (the question is from a new user), the "Hello," part will not save, and it only says "and welcome to Chess.SE!"
I'm kind of freaking out right now trying to get this to work.

Why is this question getting downvotes? The community on this site bugs me....Upvoted.

Salutations such as "Hello", "Hi", etc. in the beginning of the post is automatically stripped by the system.
This is explained more on Should 'Hi', 'thanks', taglines, and salutations be removed from posts?

We now automatically remove salutations from posts as they are entered.
I got really tired of performing this edit over and over, so anything matching the form of …
some RegEx patterns

… is removed automagically at the time of submission to the server.

I believe that's a standard check in the editor. The network wide policy is that hello, welcome, and similar words and phrases shouldn't be part of an answer, although I couldn't find a meta post to verify that.

Huh, thanks. I figured it would be OK since he was a new user.


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Should the [planning] and [strategy] tags be merged?
The wiki for planning reads

Questions relating to developing a strategy while in a game

The wiki for strategy reads

Questions relating to strategical play and long term planning in chess

I see no real difference in these tags. Should we merge them? I have created a synonym proposal here (currently with one agreement vote and no disagreement votes); if you agree or disagree with the merge, please vote there.

As a note, you need an answer score of 5 or more on the tag, to vote on the synonym proposal

@HerbWolfe ah, thank you. Which tag do you need the score on?

I believe that it's the tag being voted on, in this case planning.


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The case for expanding the scope of Chess.SE
So, I was looking at the Chess.SE site stats today - I found them quite impressive, for the most part. However, one statistic was - ahem - not so great.
Area 51 says a healthy beta site has 10 questions a day, and a beta site with five or less needs work. Chess.SE averages 2.5 questions a day.
That's not so great!

So, what can we do?

I think that we need to expand the scope of the site a little bit.

Proposed Expansion #1:

Allow for chess puzzles on this site. Now, we would obviously get an influx of less-than-impressive puzzles. To combat this, I would suggest that we create a chess puzzle sandbox. Proposed puzzles with sufficient up-votes are allowed to be posted on the main site; puzzles that have not been run through the sandbox will be closed. Ideally, puzzles that make it onto the main site are not immediately obvious and show some originality. We could also add tags for various puzzle themes - skewer, pin, discovered attack, sacrifice, etc.

Proposed Expansion #2:

Allow questions about chess hardware and software, as long as they have definite, objective answers. This would include finding/identifying/creating certain styles of pieces/boards and asking about features in widely-used software/websites. We seem to get a lot of fairly reasonable questions in this area that are closed because they aren't about chess directly.

Proposed Qualifier #1

At the same time, we don't want to throw the gates open nilly-willy. I consequently incorporate my recent meta question into this expansion request, asking that as we open up to more types of questions, we also have definitive answers to what is and is not a chess variant that this site addresses. I would think that we would need to nail this down before expanding the site.

TL;DR

This site is kind of quiet. Let's broaden its scope a tad and maybe wake it back up.

Edit: So......do we have a consensus? Were would we go with this from here?

This meta question seems to agree with most of my proposals. However, I still see decent questions in my "expansion" categories received negatively (I can get some sample links, if you like).

Other than the variants, I don't really see where anything that you have proposed isn't already on topic. And, I don't know if you were aware, but unless the site has problems (overrun with flags, absent mods, nobody willing to help, etc), beta sites are no longer in danger of being closed, even with low activity.

Well, most questions on this site are already about chess software and puzzles. I hardly ever find an actual question about chess. I have my doubts that Chess will ever succed at Stack Exchange, since most chess sites already have a forum that covers the scope of this site and even further (new users there don't have to see why their questions are, from their perspective, randomly put on hold) They also don't have to deal with shogi or Machine Learning questions (topic most chess players couldn't care less about) in between the chess discussions

Allow for chess puzzles on this site.
I think it would be a good idea to expand chess.SE's scope so as to include problem chess. The chess world contains not just people playing chess face to face over the board, but also people asking and answering questions on chess web sites, and people composing and trying to solve chess problems, etc., so problem chess should definitely be on topic here.
BTW the correct word is "problem", not "puzzle". For evidence, note the name of the British Chess Problem Society and its journal The Problemist, and the use of words related to "problem" in other languages, e.g. the titles of problem journals Problemkiste (German) and Probleemblad (Dutch).
The OP mentions questions which pose chess problems, but I favour expanding this site's scope so as to include

questions about chess problems, real or hypothetical, general or specific
questions about chess problem history
questions about chess problem publications (books; periodicals; database web sites)
questions about how to construct a chess problem

What genres of chess problem? I'd certainly include:

directmates and directstalemates
helpmates and helpstalemates
selfmates and selfstalemates
win & draw studies.

Moving further from the core of the chess problem world:

series-problems e.g. serieshelpmates and seriesselfmates
retros e.g. "what were the last 2 moves?", "where were the missing units captured?", proof-games
unusual goals (as in some of the problems on this site)
variants e.g. the various forms of Circe; Madrasi;...
fairy pieces e.g. grasshopper, nightrider

What tags would be appropriate? I'd favour problem subgenres for starters, e.g. helpmate, selfmate, so that problem fans who like specific kinds of problem can search on their tags, and those who hate 'em can exclude their tags. More generally, time will tell which concepts will appear in so many questions that they are worth making tags for. In the chess problem world there are dozens of named themes. Which of them will appear in several questions, though?

Thanks for the feedback! Do you have any thoughts on the other proposals?

I'm not too fussed about chess-playing engines -- I'll let others speak up for what they'd like.

It's fine.
Don't let Stack Exchange guilt-trip you into thinking that there is something wrong with a site with fewer than 10 questions/day. Maybe it's bad from their point of view, because they want to gain users and (possibly) monetize them, but from my point of view it's perfectly fine. Actually 10 q/day seems too much for me for a smaller SE site, because it means I have to visit it more than once per day to keep up with all new content. In my experience, many of the smaller SE communities don't reach 10 questions/day, and still they are useful sites and nice communities.
If the only way to move up the numbers is including content that the users here don't like to see, then why chasing that meaningless statistic? It's even more "useless internet points" than reputation.
Also, keep in mind that I think that SE has greatly reduced the number of communities that "graduate" (i.e., move out of beta), so even if you tick that box it's unlikely that chess.se is moved to a permanent site (which means what, anyway, a slightly different theme?)

I disagree; the downvote isn't personal, I promise.

@Brandon_J Thanks for the comment, but don't worry, I know that downvotes (especially on meta) simply mean business, and I know that this is a controversial opinion. :)

Let me add that even if all you want is more questions, arbitrarily widening your scope does not seem to be the best way. It would be better to find a way to get more users with (preferably good) questions.

I don't think you should feel compelled to keep up with every question on the site. That doesn't seem healthy in the long term.

I agree with you an the intent of growing chess.SE, but further down I would like to make a point against the inclusion of chess problems/puzzles on this site - conditionally at least.
As always: Feel free to disagree with me here - I am looking forward to a constructive dialogue on this topic.
First of all: I find it really hard to ask a good question about chess!
If we compare it to, let's say Stack Overflow and programming, the "rules" and constraints of chess are well defined (with some exceptions) and rather easy to learn, which does not leave a lot of room for beginner questions.
Furthermore the problems that arise while you improve usually do not have a specific "solve-it-all" answer; Many suggestions (rightfully so!) contain the phrase "it depends" and point to some possible although rarely definitive answers.
I always considered SO as some kind of great online encyclopedia for people to learn from and grow on. I think, as the chess.SE community, we should ask ourselves, if we want to adopt this approach for this site - and adapt it to fulfill the needs of a different domain (as mentioned above, chess questions tend to go a different way than programming questions do). And if we come to the conclusion, that this is, indeed, the way we want to grow this site, I would like to suggest, that we encourage collections of suggestions, knowledge and resources for a given topic.
There recently was a question (closed) along the likes of "Tips for DIY chessboards" that would have fitted this format quite nicely. A potential answer-wiki could have for Example contained:

Ideas for board designs
Measurement for FIDE/USCF/DSB approved chessboards
Pitfalls while working
...

Formats like this  would encourage questions/threads like "Collection: Ruy Lopez, Morphy Defense" or "Defending Moves" or, to get back on the ideas of problems/puzzles, "Tactical ideas" on which an aspiring chess player could base his studies.
Lastly on @BrandonJ's suggestions: I would agree on the proposition and constraints about software/hardware questions if we have the knowledge present to also be able answer them.
Regarding chess-puzzles (I fear the term "problems" might commonly be misleading in a SE-Environment) I would encourage puzzles demonstrating a tactical motive or idea (skewer, fork, trapping pieces, backrank mate etc...), maybe in conjunction with my above proposition. This, as well as studies, would, of course, fit quite nicely with my imagination of a "knowledge database". :)
Still, I oppose regularly posting puzzles for the sake of creating questions. I highly value the quality of chess.SE and SE/SO altogether - I would rather not sacrifice this for quantity.
On a side note: Thank you for starting this discussion. I have started to really enjoy this community - and I'd like to contribute to its well-being!

Chess problems are already on-topic according to the help center,

Questions that have to do primarily with chess in its standard form
  are on-topic here. This includes questions about theory, rules,
  specific positions/games (including puzzles), chess-specific events,
  chess players, hard facts such as statistics and other historical
  data, and physical items such as chessboards, pieces, and clocks.

but I think that the full scope of chess problems should be included (Rosie F lists some examples).
We should do the same for chess variants. See my question on Shogi variants, EuroShogi and Arimaa for a few examples here. Standard (Western) chess is just one particular regional variant of about a dozen standard regional chess variants (shogi, xiangqi, shatranj, ...). Then there are the historical variants (e.g. courier chess, modern variants (like Omega chess and Big Battle, tiny variants, hard for computer variants, etc. Basically there is a whole world of chess out there if you want to expand on Western chess a bit. Which variant(s) will be standard chess in 100 or 1000 years?

I'm adding this answer just to keep track of the changes. As of August 2019, the site is no longer in beta, and Stack Exchange (or, at least, one employee) seems to acknowledge that the 10 questions/day criterion was "unworkable" 1 2, so some of the premises of this question are outdated.

Sure but rename the site to Chess Puzzles and Trivia


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Should we have a more specific definition of "chess variants"?
So I just ran across this puzzle, which has  accumulated several close votes. I've seen other questions (kind of a flurry of questions) related to dobutsu-shogi "variant" of chess that had some downvotes (I didn't have 500 rep at the time, so I don't know about close votes).
Both of these questions involve the chess-variants tag, if my memory serves me correctly.
Neither of these questions (especially the first one) fall under what I would call a chess variant, and based on the votes, neither do some members of the community. However, there isn't really a hard definition on the site of what a chess variant is, so it's hard to get a good feel of when a question is off-topic or truly a chess variant.
So, should we have a harder definition of the "chess-variant" tag? There's already consensus on some variants, but not all.
If so, how should we define it? Personally, I would include any variant played on lichess.org as well as bughouse chess and maybe s-chess, but there may be more than that, and some lichess variants aren't super popular (horde, for example).
Also, we might want to make an exception for "find the illegal position" puzzles/questions.

Somewhat tongue-in-cheek I suggest this is a duplicate of https://chess.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/563/are-shogi-variants-on-topic-what-about-arimaa

Possible duplicate of Are Shogi variants on topic? What about Arimaa?


text:
Why was my answer removed?
I wrote an answer to the question Why doesn't Lichess' Stockfish suggest this bishop sacrifice? where I offered a different perspective on how to interpret the output of an engine when the advantage is too big. It was removed for some reason

It was flagged for not being an answer. If you feel strongly then post it as a comment on the main question but don't post comments as answers.

What I find odd is that, had I written a twenty-line answer that said the exact same thing but with fancier wording, it would have probably stayed

I disagree that it's not an answer. It answers the question very directly: SF doesn't suggest the sacrifice because everything else wins more (because everything wins).


text:
Are specific question of chess games useful to our community?
Seeing that this is a site for strategic games, many people might ask these types of question: What kind of direction should I take here, what kind of move should I make in this situation, etc? My question is, Should we allow these kind of question to be asked on our website? Do these questions repel professionals? What are the pros and cons?

If the position is sufficiently interesting, I think that it's a fine question.  A position where one side is clearly lost isn't really interesting.
Tactics questions would be more interesting (i.e. white to move and win) if the answer to the problem wasn't two inches below the puzzle.  Maybe hiding the solution is an option?
Anything along the lines of "What is the correct strategy?" or "What are some of the abstract plans for [color]?" or "What is the evaluation of this endgame?" seem fine IMHO.


text:
Biased moderation?
In this answer, which is almost exactly the same answer Brian Towers already deleted, and moved to comments, because it did not answer the question, the poster re-posted it, and added nothing to it other than this derogatory paragraph:
"Addressing the unwritten question, your last three questions do display a psychological problem. I would have more respect if you posted one of your games and asked, "Don't I play great?""
When I flag this, why is this RUDE comment not dealt with, and declined as "no evidence to support it" as rude?
I have tried hard to ask and answer thoughtful questions, but you let that stand? That is not OK.
Is there an appeal process?
UPDATE: They finally deleted the abusive answer, but I am still not why it was not deleted the first time. When I brought it up in the overall Stack Exchange Meta site, while I was not supported in the way that I brought this up since they did not think that I waited long enough for resolution here, it was universally agreed that the original answer was rude.

Speaking as a mod on another site, please remember that mods are just humans. We sometimes get flags wrong, we misunderstand the situation, we misclick or fatfinger a response. Whenever you feel a flag was not handled properly, your first instinct should be to come to meta and just ask why. Don't assume malice, first ask politely what happened and why. Maybe the mods had a very good reason you're unaware of. Or maybe they made an honest mistake. Maybe they even have it in for you personally, but you can't know if you don't ask so please don't jump to conclusions.

@terdon To be honest, I am outspoken about the ways that some of things on SE are done, like about duplicate questions being closed on new users when it is really only the answer that is similar. I l also questioned when a mod deleted a conversation that he was a part of. And frankly, I have a temporary goal, and this SE has limited questions, and I have been a question hog until I get there; and I am sure not everyone appreciates that, but I still expect the same protections afforded to others. I feel at times that they won't do that. Thank you for your input.

Being outspoken and being aggressive and rude are not the same thing. All I'm saying is that I know I've fumbled a few flags in my time, either because I had misunderstood or because the interface leaves a lot to be desired and I simply misclicked. If you don't come in swinging and assuming the worst, you are far likelier to get a helpful answer. Especially since you might be wrong and there was no malice involved. As indeed seems to have been the case here.

We will have to disagree about whether it seems to be the case since there is no evidence to support either position, benign, or otherwise.

I've deleted that answer; unless you happen to have the book, it's completely useless. It suffers from the same problems as link only answers.
I agree that the cited paragraph is not respectful; self-answers are encouraged. Moreover, it does not provide an answer to the question; if that user has any problems with the way you write your posts, they should take it to Meta.
Why that flag has been declined, I don't know. In the moderator dashboard, you can't see the entire answer unless you click through; perhaps the problematic paragraph wasn't shown. It's fine to write an appeal on Meta, but please be careful how you word it.

+1 Thank you for your explanation. Frankly, I was very upset at that attack, and that nothing was done, thus, my original question above was borderline, but by comparison, it was not directed at one person.


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How many minor edits in a day is too much?
Related:
Policy regarding mass minor edits
The post Why do we make small edits to very old posts? seems really more about age of post than "size" of the edit. Including just for completeness.
I noticed the following posts with edits by the same user in a very small time span (approximately 2 hours).

Mating with B+N+handicap
Who decides to name an opening?
Why struggle for a single pawn?
Is attacking the kingside with White when Black kind-of plays the King Indian's defense setup a valid gameplan?
What's the average total time for a game of bullet chess?
What is the idea behind the Sicilian Flohr Variation?
Puzzle: Forced game end in at most two halfmoves
Can a player in check win, by checkmating the opponent, while not getting themselves out of check?
https://chess.stackexchange.com/a/39607/26335

Are proposed minor edits such as the following worthwhile to send to the Review Queue?
Solely adding backticks to chess move notations?
Changing "any other organization" to "another organization"?

One word edits that don't seem to change the meaning:

I won't speculate whether a user is trying to just get +2 internet points.
Is this considered too many mass minor edits on Chess.SE? (especially considering these are proposed edits and require reviewers)

IMHO it's a bit dumb to be complaining that people are being too helpful. Is the burden of approving these minor edits really so much? Hopefully soon they will have enough points that they don't require reviewing.

Different SE sites have different views on this I guess...hence my question for Chess.SE.

@SteveBennett some of these edits are not improvements (e.g., changing "of" to "behind", the edit that solely added backticks).  I think your comment is reasonable (for minor edits but clear improvements) until you start defending those kind of edits (no real improvement).

The minor edits were made by me (you probably alr know this). I am only making these small "improvements" only after realising that many others do the same. And i sorta do agree with @SteveBennett


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No [ratibg] requirement
I think we can safely delete the ratibg tag since we already have a perfectly functioning rating tag.
Usage:

ratibg: 0 questions
rating: 374 questions

The ratibg tag appears to be deleted.
This is now status-completed.


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Homepage Spammed - Again
Today, the home page was spammed (again) with edits or answers by "user 34927". It bumped a ton of questions and now the home page is quite crowded.
First, what happened?
Second, this is the second time I have seen this, so what can be done to prevent this?

First, what happened?

Asked and answered.

Second, this is the second time I have seen this, so what can be done
to prevent this?

TL;DR:  Vote and/or flag appropriately.
Nothing changes.  As always...

Vote on the posts.[1,2]
Vote to close[3] as appropriate if you have the rep.
Flag for moderator attention when appropriate and provide specific details why you are flagging. In the words of Jeff Atwood (co-founder), "when you see something bad happening on the site — flag it!"[4]

References:
1. Vote Early. Vote Often
2. Why is voting important?
3. https://chess.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/close-questions
4. Improved Flagging

First, what happened?

You described what happened in your question. Fortunately your moderators were not on strike and the offending AI generated answers were deleted.

Second, this is the second time I have seen this, so what can be done to prevent this?

Your hard working, unpaid moderators can not go on strike and need to be vigilant to try and handle these incidents promptly.
By the way, good to see that you are no longer on strike.

I am still on strike, I didn't flag any of these. Once they were deleted, and only then, did I say something. And this seem like a rant against strikers.


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How can we ensure that "good-subjective" questions have a place in chess.se?
There is a wonderful page in the Stackoverflow blog which illustrates the spectrum from objective to subjective questions, and notes that the expertise we want to capture usually falls between those extremes.
There are bad questions which need to be closed immediately, but too often good subjective questions in chess.se are closed on the grounds that they are "opinion-based" because "this is not a discussion site".
I think this is a distortion of the principles of stackexchange, and chess.se is greatly impoverished as a result of the current policy. Chess skill is not about objective tablebases, it is about experience & judgement. As the diagram on the Stackoverflow page shows, expertise lies between objective & subjective knowledge.
In moderator posts in chess.se, I see "experience, judgement & expertise" diminished as "opinion", and if it's merely opinion, well of course we can close it off. This is frankly awful, yet it happens many times.
Today's example is Please comment on my book idea, this is basically some trying to sanity-check the scope of a book he plans to write (and yes let me add before someone else does, he is also possibly trying to get a tiny amount of publicity). That seems a worthwhile thing to do. It may be that the question could be rephrased to give more focus, but if that's the case, then the question-closer can provide an example of this focus, rather than requiring the questioner to guess.
There are 6 questions given on the Stackoverflow page as to whether a subjective question is good. I think this question passes all 6 comfortably.
I am grateful for the thankless work of the moderators, but we need to recognize a process problem. It is the act of a moment for 1 moderator to unilaterally close a page, currently with no real effort or reaching out to the questioner to indicate how the question should be fixed. I'm not particularly getting at any moderator but it's a known bug in the process that the moderator cannot just "vote" for closing. The moderator can only close unilaterally, which puts them in an invidious position. Once closed, it takes the concerted action of 5 individuals to reopen a page: it is so inefficient.
How can we fix this broken process? At the very least, I would like before closure of a possibly good-subjective question for the moderator to provide a warning comment containing the scope of needed repairs. That gives the questioner a chance to understand what's going on, and spares other members the large process effort required to re-open the question later.
I want to see moderators using words like "judgement" & "experience". Right now, all I see is the pejorative distorting term "opinion". Until I see these other terms appear in moderator assessment, I have to suspect that sadly there is maybe also a problem of attitude. Attitude cannot be fixed by just process. I would request that some be kinder and more open to good subjective questions, as prevails in the rest of stackexchange. Chess.se will be the richer for this.
Thank you for your time.

Related (not a dupe): What can we offer that other chess sites don't?

This question has recently been closed as opinion-based when it's clearly not. It's easy to see when we rephrase the question as "What are some common reasons people accept long online games and then...?", which feels different but is asking for the same thing. It's possible to give a subjective opinion on the topic, and in fact there's probably no objectively correct answer as no research has been done on the topic. Still, the question itself isn't opinion-based. We may only know opinion-based answers so far, but the same applies to questions like "What's the optimal training program for someone in X circumstances?". I still think the question is low-quality and deserves to be closed, but it being opinion-based isn't the reason.
Similarly, one may argue that this question is also opinion-based given how the answers all point out to different positional factors. Since we can't do a deep enough analysis of the position, we could also argue that no definitive objective answer is possible and the question doesn't belong. But of course nobody on their right mind would!
As a third example, we have this one from a newcomer which got closed and then reopened (I wouldn't be surprised if the user isn't coming back after the first closure!). This is a totally legitimate non-subjective question that allows for answers based around objective observations. A question like "Would it be better to use A rather than B?" can be seen as subjective, but "What are the reasons people use A rather than B?" or "What are the respective pros and cons of A and B?" clearly isn't. Even though we may disagree that A is better than B, we can still acknowledge the reasons why people choose A in an objective manner.
I'm quite frustrated with this type of situation where someone asks a perfectly legit question and it gets closed by someone who didn't even understand it (see comments on the third example). I agree with you that we should be more lenient. But the main issue is that if 1,000 people are fine with the question and 5 aren't, it will still be closed (and then perhaps reopened), since we can't cast re-open votes on questions that aren't closed yet. Would it be possible to introduce a system like counting every upvote as a "pre-emptive reopen vote"? For instance, if it normally takes 3 votes to close but the question has 2 upvotes, then it takes 5 for that specific question. This should be done regardless of downvotes as the people who voted for closing have probably downvoted too.

"What are some common reasons people accept long online games and then...?" is a polling question, and it doesn't matter how you rephrase this, it is still primarily opinion-based, as to what things in the list of X will be common, and of those, which are common enough to be worth including in answers. The criticism doesn't hit the forest for fear of hitting a tree.

The idea of pre-emptive reopen/leave-open votes has been raised before, all across the network, and it is invariably rejected because it defeats its own purpose and leads to all manner of quality management issues. Is the system perfect now? No. Is ignoring it entirely or breaking it further in incoherent ways going to help? Heck no!

@"it defeats its own purpose and leads to all manner of quality management issues" Could you elaborate on how? I just don't see why good questions not being closed harms the community in any way.

Well, that's the point. You think they're good. Others disagree. That's why the process runs the way it does, to prevent popular questions being treated as high-quality questions. You provide several examples of questions that, at a minimum, should have been improved to more clearly define what a good answer looks like, because they're also very akin to polls as they currently stand. A question that isn't up to standards should be closed as soon as possible to avoid answers being outdated or excessive, then reopened when ready. You disagree on where the line is, but that's all.


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Can we prevent people from voting down already closed posts?
So: Forced mate in 'n' from opening.
Here was a reasonable question from a completely new user with 1 reputation, which just happened to have been anticipated 4 years ago with a completely different phraseology:
Is it possible to fully analyse, at least some openings of chess?
No welcome, no sorry, just the silent moderator goes in with the [closed] hammer. And three people vote it down. One of them at least (not sure about the timings of the other two) voted down after the question had been closed. To view it, this person must have close/reopen privilege. It's not some visitor did that: it's some person within our community who fully relishes the enjoyment that can be derived by downvoting someone with 1 reputation.
Chess Stack Exchange is far from being the nastiest Stack Exchange site, but still I find this behaviour disgusting. I've gone beyond a point of expecting the moderators here to behave in a kind way with newcomers, but until the happy day when downvoting is removed completely from Stack Exchange, can we in Chess Stack Exchange at least prevent a closed question from being downvoted further?
EDIT: I should say that on this occasion I completely agree that closing the question is absolutely the right action. My beef is with the cold manner and the downvotes

I'm a little confused about "To view it, this person must have close/reopen privilege." – to view what? Every user can see the question is closed and what the original is.

@Glorfindel: can they? I thought I read this somewhere when I was looking around

The rules are a bit complicated. Sometimes, you can't see the reason or the persons who voted to close: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/339700/295232 You can check things like this by using a private window in your browser (or a different browser) where you'll be logged out.

What a coincidence it's always the same moderator. Anyway I don't see the moderation system is that bad. If you follow the site rules (that you're strongly adviced to read before posted on several occasions) you question will be accepted, both here and in "the nastiest" site

I think the ambience in chess.stackexchange is much better than in other SE sites. In this case OP has responded to my welcome message to say that he did look beforehand to see whether the question was anticipated. The phrasing was very different. I don't object to the closure, I object to the rude way an innocent newcomer was treated. It's just not good enough

This is a symptom of the actual problem - the "normal" moderation tools don't work well since they are mostly designed to work for SO and the associated users. There is no solution in sight for a SE that is struggling with the right balance between upholding content quality (through moderation) and attracting quality users (in terms of content)

"...it's some person...who fully relishes the enjoyment that can be derived by downvoting someone with 1 reputation."  Citations or evidence needed.  I appreciate your post and the intentions behind it...I just found this phrase to be assuming a bit much without proper evidence.

TL;DR: No, we can't.
We can only encourage people not to downvote duplicate questions just because they're duplicate; they can serve as a signpost if people are searching for keywords not mentioned in the original question. More background here: Should we downvote duplicates?
We can upvote the question as a form of compensation, but we really shouldn't be doing that: see Is it reasonable to upvote in order to counter what I think is an unjustified downvote? (This goes both ways: you shouldn't downvote a question because you think its score is too high.)
I don't think we should be sorry for closing a question as a duplicate. In fact, pointing a new user instantly to a couple of decent answers to their question is a Good Thing™. Thanks for leaving a welcoming comment, though.
I've tried to find a feature request on Meta Stack Exchange to prevent downvoting closed questions, but couldn't find it. I'm pretty sure it will be met by negative reactions. There's no way of having this rule only apply to Chess Stack Exchange.

Thanks Glorfindel: should say I have no issue at all with closing this question. It's how it was done that I feel is unsatisfactory. Have updated my Q on this point.


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What should we do about the guess the password chess puzzles?
There have been a few of these posted lately. I have been down-voting and casting a vote to close. It's been pointed out that as puzzles, they are technically on topic, however, they aren't very useful. Should they be closed with a custom reason, or left open?

"Questions that have to do primarily with chess in its standard form are on-topic here. This includes questions about ... specific positions/games (including puzzles)..." (source).

Herb, you beat me to it. I had the same question though I confess I had missed the nuance regarding the password angle.

Leave
Upvote if you think they should be allowed to stand

Close
Upvote if you think they should be closed


text:
Related questions
Surely has an answer already (at least on another SE).
Asking more than one question in one post endangers you to "Maybe I could have been more focused" (Lloyd Cole) - but what if those two questions are closely related and it thus seems silly to open two questions, especially if the needed amount of background set-up is high?


text:
Collaboratively Building the Syllabus of a Chess Curriculum
Is it against the rules of this forum to collaboratively build the syllabus of a chess curriculum?
If not, we need suggestions on how to proceed and we need to add the tag 'curriculum' from now on.

I think it actually is against the rules. This is not considered a "forum" but a "question and answer website". Your post probably will not be accepted in this form, as it is not really answerable. Some similar question maybe appeared here: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/39875/where-can-one-find-a-complete-chess-curriculum/ if you are interested.

@Christian I was the one who posted the question you mentioned above.
I was looking for a complete curriculum with study material. the three answers were very helpful.
but here I am looking for creating an outline of the  curriculum with resources linked or suggested both free and commercial.
if I have to form the whole thing as a series of question then let it be.
the final result will be a downloadable pamphlet in some file format.

Okay, now I feel stupid for not checking the name ;)
I of course cannot know for sure how moderators will treat that but my experience with stackexchange just tells me, that the question might be a bit too loose. To me, what you wrote in this comment already is a bit more defined, i.e. asking for the full Syllabus. Then just the collaboration aspect of course is missing.


text:
Are the people asking questions citing engine analysis without giving a diagram the same person?
They cite a game, describe a position in words, quote some inconclusive engine analysis, and ask for an answer. Examples:

Botvinnik vs Kholmov 1969: is the knight endgame riddle being solved?
Did Leela miss a win in the following endgame ? Leela vs Dragon game
An interesting question from a Leela vs Komodo blitz game (diagram was edited into this question by someone else later)
A critical endgame in the French Winaver (diagram was also edited into this question by someone else)
A complex eight pieces opposite color Bishop endgame (diagram edited into question)
Could Boleslavsky have won against Smyslov? (diagram edited into question)
Jobava vs Milton 2005 Skandemborg game
Did Leela miss a win in the following endgame?

Some of the questions are asked by "Stefano", but there are two separate accounts with that name. Other questions are asked by "user33339" and also "user27314".
Are they the same person, and if so, is there any plan to do something about the questions?

Thanks for bringing this to our attention! You're right, you don't really need moderator-only information to see that this is the same person. Stack Exchange has a rather strict quality system which prevents users from posting too many poor questions. I do not know if this user is deliberately creating new accounts to circumvent the ban (and even if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to share it), but in the future, please flag new questions like this for moderator attention, so that we can quickly deal with them.


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Copying from the PGN viewer
I often want to transfer a position from the PGN player to, say, the LiChess engine. I really, really want to avoid clicking on "Edit", copy the raw data, and undo the edit. So, what is the correct way to "un-code" the PGN player? (Tagged feature-request; I'm fairly sure the feature exist and I'm just too stupid.

What you describe is the way I do it too ... An alternative would be (for now) to switch to the mobile view (with the 'Mobile' link in the footer).

On the right side of the bar above the PGN player diagram is a down arrow/triangle. It is a menu with options to:

Copy Game
Copy Position
Copy Start Position

It is a floating box, so it doesn't always appear right below the arrow. After selecting an option, another box appears with either the PGN of the game, a FEN of the current position without the castling, en passant, or half-move counts, or the full given FEN for the starting position.

Accepted, although it definitely doesn't work for me, either due to my quite hardcore script settings, or due to my small monitor resolution. The latter also explains why I never spotted it before :-)

Because my eyesight isn't that great, I need big pixels, and set my screen to 1280x720px. The pop-up appears so far below the top of the screen that its second item is only just visible at the bottom, and the third is not displayed. The code that displays the pop-up needs to be fixed.

An alternate option is to view the page source with a right-click anywhere on the page. Then you can find the PGN with Ctrl+F and copy-paste it from there. Whether it's less hassle or not, I cannot say for sure.

Now that you say it... :-) It is doable, but definitely more hassle, especially with more than one diagram, as modern HTML looks like as the pigs have eaten lunch on it. Glorfindel's "Mobile" suggestion definitely is elegant and working, but "Copy FEN"/"Copy PGN" buttons still would be nice.


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Late closing of opinion-based post?
Post closed as late as 2023Jan20
What is it about Magnus Carlsen?
Even Brian Towers ♦  edited Jul 20, 2019 at 11:33 (I assume mod at the time? Or not?)
But only 3.5 years later

Post Closed as "Opinion-based" by SecretAgentMan, Brian Towers♦ occurred Jan 30 at 18:04

What's up with that? Did the standard for opinion-based change in the last 3.5 years?

Since I've been called out, I'll answer for my part on my reasoning and let others educate me on my mistakes as they see fit. I was acting in good faith and have an open mind on the subject.
The OP asked multiple questions.
"[W]what makes Carlsen so good?"
"Why are people so confident in Carlsen?"
"Does he have something other players such as Aronian don't have?"
"Where is all this coming from?" (see question for context for this)
The day I cast the vote, it was my first time viewing this question. When I read the question, the net effect of the four questions seemed to solicit exceptionally broad or opinionated answers (see close reasons).
The answers that exist are reasonable, yet one includes language like "I imagine that his..."
Further, I imagine the site was much newer in 2012. A cursory look at many SE sites shows different standards in the first few years. There's no judgement and it isn't meant to be critical of those who volunteered their time in 2012. My meager contributions certainly don't even compare.


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Bounty on the question
I have made so many changes to the question https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/45115/how-does-the-alapin-variation-help-in-avoiding-the-massive-amount-of-theory-behi after every comment. And that is now the current version of the question. I just have one day left to award the bounty. I am waiting for an answer before the bounty closes.
This has happened earlier also. In that question also, the bounty has failed without anyone answering the question.
Here also, why is no one answering the question during the bounty period?

What's the question (here in this Meta post)?

From the Help Center, emphasis mine:

If you see a question that has not gotten a satisfactory answer, a bounty may help attract more attention and more answers.

A bounty is not a guarantee you'll get an answer. Frankly, as a potential answerer, I'm scared to write one if the question is changed so much. I mean, the Alapin variation is very different from the Najdorf ...


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Proposal: replace current PGN viewer
If you look at pgn-viewer, there are quite a few bugs and feature requests that have never gotten resolved. I ran into one just now in an answer I posted. The last update to the code repo (https://github.com/andrewphoy/chess-replayer) was 7 years ago and seems abandoned.
I propose using the new lichess embedded pgn viewer (https://github.com/lichess-org/pgn-viewer) instead, to get a more featureful viewer while still being lightweight.
However, the previous viewer was MIT licensed while this is AGPL-3.0. I'm not sure what the Stack Exchange policy for embedded content is.

For the record, the issue you encountered, it is not a bug. The replayer is not built to detect checks. You must exactly specify which knight is to move there. For example, the replayer is allows castling through an attacked square: https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/24112/why-is-apronus-allowing-the-white-king-to-castle-through-an-attacked-square

Please do not edit my original posts to change my context. That's what the answers or comments are for. It is a bug if you consider not replaying a valid PGN.

While moving away from what may be abandonware would be a good thing I think there is not enough information here to decide if the upsides outweigh the negatives. Information on, for example,

What is not supported in the new viewer that is in the current one?
What is supported in the new viewer that is not in the current one, and what benefit will they bring?
Will the user interface change in any way for features that are supported by both? The joy of standards is that there are so many to choose from ...
Will existing posts be broken? Reassurance will be required here.
Is it proposed to provide any guidance on how to use the viewer, especially to new users?

would be extremely useful. Without this I'm afraid my position (as a software developer) is "if it ain't broke don't fix it."

While we are at wanted features: A small b or w arrow or dot indicating the orientation of the board and who has the right to move. (At the moment it seems that the board points to the player who will move, without any indication. Can be overruled to standard look-from-White, but confusing nonetheless.)

While an upgraded replayer is a nice idea, my concern is coding out things such dummy pawns (How likely is it that a non-orthodox promotion is optimal?), moving into check, null moves, etc. Doing so would take away a fun aspects and functions of our replayer that other sites do not support.

Yes, we have to balance out coding custom moves with the added features/bugfixes compared to the current viewer. I lean towards replacing but that's what meta votes are for.


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New badge format for Chess.SE?
Most sites use the standard circle badge, but some like English Language Learners (ELL).SE have a custom badge shape, is it possible for the Chess.SE site to have a custom one too (a rook shaped badge)?

A relevant post (on this meta) by one of our designers from earlier this week: Custom Chess SE design and logo - Information gathering :)

Update: Your new site design is live! – and it includes some great-looking custom badge designs :)

This is currently only done for sites which have a custom design. For sites with the plain Beta design, only the site logo can be changed.
Coincidence or not, new custom designs are currently being rolled out to seven sites (example). We can hope Chess Stack Exchange is one of the next sites, but there are many more sites on the list:

Congratulations to our 29 oldest beta sites - They're now no longer beta!
Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta

When that happens, one of the designers will post a question here asking for input, and you will be able to post an answer with suggestions. IMHO, a chess piece will certainly work as badge icon, but I'd use a different one than in the logo.


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Changing the Chess Stack Exchange logo
The logo for the Chess Stack Exchange (I pulled the image off of the HTML file) is, to put it plainly, horrible. It is a white rook on a blue background, which is very plain and visually unappealing. We need something much cooler like there is for the Worldbuilding Stack Exchange, to name an example. I personally do not have any ideas, but I am hoping someone here knows how to improve it.

I feel we've already got something special in that our site logo isn't one or two letters in a text balloon. Our activity levels are too low to (currently) warrant a custom design like Worldbuilding.

@Glorfindel I agree with you, but maybe a slight buff could be useful depending on how we view such a minor change and what ideas there may be.

Related on Meta.SE: How long until graduated sites get a new site design and increased privileges threshold? and Give Graduated sites waiting on a custom design something to set themselves apart from Beta sites

You'll probably get a new logo with the rest of your design, not before that. For a beta logo, it's already quite good. And it takes a long, long time to get rid of the beta design for a site.

A relevant post (on this meta) by one of our designers from earlier this week: Custom Chess SE design and logo - Information gathering :)

Update: Your new site design is live!

Oh wow lol. I didn’t expect this! This is great!

Many small sites are awaiting design (not just Chess), and when the site gets a design, it will get a snazzy icon (like Worldbuilding) among other design features.
For the time being, the site uses the default Stack Exchange colors: a kind of sky blue with white text (main site) and black with white text (meta sites).  To my knowledge, there is only one exception for CraftCMS to the default color scheme.
There are restrictions to changing the icons, particularly in regards to copyright.  Thus, Stack Exchange have been flexible enough to allow custom temporary icons (like the rook icon here) on some sites, but are unable to go beyond that.
I tried making some icons at Islam which I thought looked okay, but got the response:

I'm sorry to act as a blocker but unless this is part of a unicode character set, we can't use custom art, even if y'all create it. I need to be extremely limiting in what I ask our branding team to do so the guidelines are pretty strict. Until this site gets approved for a full site design or we change the process somehow, you'll need to stick to basic (non-emoji) text.
Catija ♦, January 2020

Realistically, I feel the rook icon is about as good as you'll get until full design.  (Alternatives would be changing it to a knight or other chess piece, or an abbreviation "Ch" for "Chess"; these are not really concrete improvements.)


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Custom Chess SE design and logo - Information gathering
Congratulations, Chess SE community! We’re going to be creating a custom site design for you that we hope will represent your subject and we want you all to really love it. You’ve been waiting three years and we really want to do this well. To facilitate this, we’re reaching out now to ask you for what you’d really love to see in the design and logo.
My name is Chloe, and I’m one of the designers at Stack Exchange. I’m a frequent and enthusiastic chess player, and I’m so excited to create something special for you that truly represents this community.
A quick history lesson about site theming
Originally, site designs were part of the site graduation process. When a site left beta, they'd get their design. But, at the time we only had one designer who was working on designs and the designs were very specialized and often involved a lot of custom illustrations. We got into a situation where several sites were in queue for graduation but the designer didn't have the bandwidth to actually create the designs.
Before she worked here, one of our Community Managers, Catija, asked the question Can Beta sites slated for graduation get full-site abilities without site design upgrade? on MSE. This kicked off several discussions within the CM team of the time and community members and the eventual decision was to implement "Design-independent graduation" in September 2015. This meant that many sites were finally able to leave beta without waiting on a design.
At that time we also had much more strict guidelines for when a site could graduate - they had to consistently get 10 new questions per day. This level of volume made graduation impossible or very unlikely for many sites - meaning many would stay in beta forever. As such, the CM team considered another request Catija made - Let's break up with "Graduation" and remove a bunch of "Beta" labels  - and that's what eventually happened, too. In 2019, we removed the beta label from 29 sites - including this one - and another 59 in December 2021.
We've also gone through several design systems changes, including launching Stacks version 1.0, which make creating and building in designs much simpler for both our design team and the developers. In fact, we showed off how flexible it could be in our April Fools prank this year "Filters for Stack Overflow".
What to expect
Over the next few weeks, we'll be communicating with you about your site design, so please help us out as much as you can. We know that you have great ideas about what you want this site to look like - so share them with us! You've got a week now to pool up your thoughts in answers to this question, at which point I'll start working on this site.
I’ll spend some time working on a design based on your guidance, and we'll be back when it's ready to show you what the design and logo look like. At that point, you all will have a week to make suggestions for adjustments to the design. Our hope is that there will be little that needs adjusting but, due to the size of our backlog, we can't allow more than one phase of feedback, so any changes will need to be recommended at this point.
We'll then consider the changes proposed and make any adjustments that we feel are beneficial. Changes that are too big or are out of scope likely won't be possible, but we'll make sure to explain why we opted against making a change should that happen. Please understand that design is often a subjective thing and we may end up with community members differing in their opinions, so we'll be taking that into account when deciding. Decisions about the final design will be made by the design team and CMs with the concerns of the community taken into account.
Also, it's worth keeping in mind that the goal of these designs is to make something topical, unique, and attractive, but we'll be designing within the scope of our newer site theming. We'll be able to create a logo, background colors, and textures in addition to your logo - but please don't expect illustrations like what you may have seen on some of the older site designs.
Process
Over the next month or so, we’ll be going through a few steps to get your site design up and running. This post is the first of those steps. I’ll also be using this post to track the phases in the table below.

Step
Status

Information Gathering
complete

Design V1
complete

V1 Feedback
complete

Design adjustments (if needed)
complete

Developer cleanup and shipping of final design
complete

What we need from you
As I've mentioned already, we need some inspiration from you so that we can get started on this design and create something you'll really be proud of. So far, I was able to find some older discussions about logos and site designs here on Meta, including this one from 2012. Feel free to reference them if there are ideas you like already - or give us new ones! We're really looking for design ideas rather than needing you to design anything for us.
When you're answering this question, think about:

What symbols or images are important to the subject of this site?
In addition to black and white, are there any colors you feel are tied to chess?
What tone/mood/feeling would you like your theme to emit? While this is subjective, it helps to set some design guardrails. So, when answering with your thoughts, some good axes to mention are where the theme might sit inside these spectra:

From fun to serious
From classic to modern
From simple to complex

How could a good logo represent your subject?
What are things to avoid?

If you have any questions, let me know! We're really looking forward to hearing from you and getting your site design underway.

Update: Your new site design is live!

Great news, I'm excited to hear this and can't wait to see the first drafts!

In addition to black and white, are there any colors you feel are tied to chess?

Many chess boards and pieces are dark and light brown. That would generally make for a softer and warmer theme than just black and white.

How could a good logo represent your subject?

IMHO, the current one works well, except that it's not really clear at smaller resolutions (e.g. in the site switcher or the Hot Network Questions sidebar widget).
As for artistic inspiration, I've always been a fan of the Metamorphosis series of M.C. Escher:

It would be nice if you could find a way to blend a chess board into a list of questions ... Oh, and I'm pretty sure the community can come up with a more iconic position than a smothered mate. That could make a nice side contest.

"Many chess boards and pieces are dark and light brown. That would generally make for a softer and warmer theme than just black and white." → Another option would be the white-green combination used by those rollup chess "boards" found in chess clubs.

What symbols or images are important to the subject of this site?

Obviously there are chess pieces ♙♘♗♖♕♔♚♛♜♝♞♟ there's also some chess notation which might also be usable:

Symbol
Meaning

!
a very good move

!!
a brilliant—and usually surprising—move

?
a bad move; a mistake

??
a blunder

!?
an interesting move that may not be the best

?!
a dubious move that is not easily refutable

=
equal chances for both players

+/= ⩲
White has a slight plus

=/+ ⩱
Black has a slight plus

+/− ±
White has a clear plus

−/+ ∓
Black has a clear plus

+−
White has a winning advantage

−+
Black has a winning advantage

?! and !?
I'm especially fond of !? and ?! since it's a Q&A site.
Also iconic in chess, are the poses you make when thinking, like this one (credit: Lana Chess Photography):

In addition to black and white, are there any colors you feel are tied to chess?

I feel like DGT boards are iconic, since they're often used for the top boards in tournaments:

This might be a reasonable color scheme.
Other than this, a kind of "newspaper chess puzzle" feel might work (image source):

What tone/mood/feeling would you like your theme to emit?

I suggest a theme that feels "intellectual", more on the serious side of the spectrum.  Classic and modern are both acceptable.  I favor simple over complex: chess is very simple to learn (very hard to master)---there's something elegant about chess.

How could a good logo represent your subject?

Many sites and chess clubs use a stylized pieces for logos:

Maybe it's reasonable to also do so here (the LiChess logo is a masterpiece!), but it feels a bit overused.

What are things to avoid?

I feel like a logo used in London was a total disaster (ow, my eyes hurt):

And the Chennai Olympiad logo was too complicated:

Concur re: London and Chennai logos.

The London logo reminds me a lot of Victor Vasarely's op art style. But those are supposed to grab and keep your attention which is probably not appropriate for a website.

It would be funny to have ! and ? as upvote and downvote, but that might be confusing.

The words "black" and "white" are used in chess, but chess pieces are seldom literally black and white, and the squares on the board are best when their contrast is a good deal less than the black/white contrast. Please, no big white areas in our site's design! 2) If our logo is to be a chess piece, I suggest sticking with the rook -- we already have "brand recognition" by a rook.

@qwr: They don't do custom upvote/downvote buttons anymore, so that probably won't happen.

A thinly veiled reference to the London logo might be something for the error or captcha page though …


text:
What should the ChessSE logo be?
Update: Chess.SE is in the process of graduation.

A pretty straight-forward question ripped right from the 7 essential meta questions of every beta; what should the logo for the website be? I've got one in mind that I'll "answer myself" with, but I encourage other people to answer with their ideas for a logo or a sketch of a logo too.
EDIT:Textual ideas are welcome, but I am planning to mark the correct answer as an actual picture, so please keep this in mind.

I would have a look at some of the other Stack Exchange logos and sites for ideas: http://stackexchange.com/ or http://stackexchange.com/sites# . Also think about what chess invokes in your mind - for me it's a prestigious 1920's gentlemens club full of leather, lacquered wood, ceiling high bookshelves, cigars and expensive port :). A chess piece is an obvious candidate for a logo, but which one? Which chess piece is most associated with knowledge? Perhaps depicting pawn promotion in some way could invoke the idea of gaining knowledge, elevated understanding.

thousands of sites use the knight or the king, it would be interesting to use a pawn or a bishop ^^ (interesting, but seriously don't)

I don't think that this graduation means you get new logos and themes.

A relevant post (on this meta) by one of our designers from earlier this week: Custom Chess SE design and logo - Information gathering :)

Update: Your new site design is live!

I just made this logo. I thought it more in keeping with the existing Stack Exchange design and closer to the popular Stack Overflow logo.

+1 Very cool!  I hope this gets chosen

Definitely my favourite of the bunch. I'm marking this as the correct answer, hopefully this gets chosen :D

beautiful! ivoted for it :)

Just saw this. It looks super snazzy.

I like this one also because it's small and simple enough that it could be used also in the hot network questions (where the logos are 16x16).

Greetings from Super User! I saw your community ad, so I thought I'd have some fun, too:

To be honest, I feel like this would make great promotional art instead of a logo. It is a bit tall... :P

Very nice, and welcome to chess beta! I like how you and @JamesTomasino have each combined chess pieces and the SE logo in different and interesting ways. This definitely has the makings of another good promo (as I agree with you that it probably works better that way than as a logo).

A stack of chessboards arranged in an offset pattern. The upper, clearly seen chessboard makes the theme very easy to recognize, while the stack plays with both the stackExchange name and the amount of questions asked.

Hard to imagine, is it possible to add a visual? For example, here's a photo-based example, which was found searching for 'stack of chess boards'

@blunders: Feel free to add a photo or use the idea for your own answer, this time with visual. I am a totally inebt illustrator.

[Visual just to give ideas, not to be copied exactly.]

NOTE: Mainly just the combination of silhouette, glossy 3-D drop shadow, and symmetry of the pieces. Style of the pieces not part of the "visual idea."

[Visual just to give ideas, not to be copied exactly.]

NOTE: The point of the visual is black/white facing off as knights, not the solid black/white checkerboard background, which to me is too much.

A chess piece with a question mark? :p /bad-at-logo-ideas

Logos are best expressed with visuals, even if through rough ones. I've posted a few answers as examples. I'd suggest trying an image search engine like Google images, getting the URL, then posting an image as one answer by clicking the image icon in the answer toolbar, then pasting in the URL for the image. That said, understanding how logos work is hard, and not sure that I'd be able to explain it even if I tried, thought do believe in crowdsouring ideas, so strongly suggest posting ideas if you have them!

[Source: "Through the Looking-Glass" artwork.]

NOTE: Point of example is the metaphors presented, those being knowledge (tree), stability (rocks), and checkerboard field. Really not sure how it'd playout in a logo, but it does tell a story visually, and is not the normal visual logo you'd get in chess related ventures.

[Visual just to give ideas, not to be copied exactly.]

NOTE: The visual is the "glow", not the style of the piece used. The diagonal offset of the board appears to be okay.

[Visual just to give ideas, not to be copied exactly.]

NOTE: Point of example is the "time-lapse effect" of the checkmate, not the background, which may or may not be of use visually.


text:
Why was this reopened?
This question was closed for being off-topic and better suited for community building by me, a bunch of other users, and a moderator (I think Brian Towers) yesterday. Then Federico Potoni removed some advertising, which was even what it was closed for (but still a good edit). For some reason they also pressed the sumbit for review, when the close reason was clearly not resolved. Then Rewan Demontay and a second moderator (I believe Glorfindel) reopened it. Why was it reopened?

Because three people (the editor too, see the edit summary) felt it deserved another chance? We're not Stack Overflow which gets flooded with bad questions, we can afford to give questions a little more care. I don't know the answer to the question, but I can imagine there's a chess-oriented marketplace / community for software like this (one of the comments gives some pointers).
If other users think it's still too much of a recommendation question, they can still close it again; my vote is not binding in that sense. But other recommendation questions (e.g. for books) usually stay open on this site, also because we can support them better than larger sites.
By the way, the list of close and reopen voters is public; it's visible in the question's timeline.

It was closed for being off-topic not because it is related to a recommendation.

Other, less specifically chess-related subjects may also be on-topic, depending on how chess-related the specific Q&A is. 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.

This was only about publicizing something to the chess community, and as such I suggested it was better for community building. A bunch of other people agreed with me and closed it as off topic. Then an edit was made that didnt make it more on topic, and yet it was reopened?? @Glorfindel

It's definitely not suitable for Community Building, I'm glad it didn't get migrated there.

It about "building a community to use my product" aka "Community building" @Glorfindel

No, he wants to publish something, not build a community around his product. (BTW, you don't need to @ me, comments under a post always ping the post author. And you as well, as long as we're the only people in this comment thread.)

"How do I make my browser extension known to the chess community?" is about "making it known" and "getting a community" and "advertising". From your link: "Creating, expanding, and cultivating communities, their content, and the relationships among members. This includes things like attracting new people with advertising, getting more contributions from members, moderating your moderators, or just making your community grow as a whole." That is what that question is.

No, it's not. Just pretend the question used the words "all people who play chess".

Still about advertising and getting a community, rewording to say the same thing doesnt change the meaning