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Universal style suggestion - use figurine algebraic and bold chess moves
This is just a personal stylistic preference, but I think it would make sense if this was the standard way to style chess moves on the site.

Make chess moves bold -- this makes the moves stick out from the surrounding text, and follows the styling in chess books and some chess databases (that include annotations). In a sea of text, 6...d5 sticks out better than 6...d5.
Use figurine algebraic notation -- Instead of having moves like Nf3, replace with ♘f3. This is because in many non-English speaking countries, they refer to the pieces with different letters and this makes it more global. Also, it probably helps out beginners -- I've seen one example where someone thought the letter for the knight should be K instead of N.

Make chess moves bold

This is a personal preference. Other users can, if they wish, follow this guidance of yours. Using bold requires extra effort so in a world where many posts have typos I wouldn't expect this to have much traction.
Of course one option would be to introduce software changes to do this automatically. Frankly I don't see the business case that would justify the effort required but if you do then feel free to make the case to SE management.

Use figurine algebraic notation

This is also FIDE's recommendation but only in certain limited circumstances. From appendix C:

C.3   For the abbreviation of the name of the pieces, each player is free to use the name which is commonly used in his country. Examples: F = fou (French for bishop), L = loper (Dutch for bishop). In printed periodicals, the use of figurines is recommended.

However Chess StackExchange is not printed. It is online and editable by its users. It makes use of software like the game replayer. While you are, of course, free to use figurine notation in your own posts imposing this universally is impractical.
Currently it is possible to copy & paste games from external sources and with minimal effort post them here using the replayer. Your suggestion, were it to be made compulsory, would break this and rob forum users of an important resource. As a compulsory move therefore it makes no sense.

The idea is to have special markdown that handles this, like they have in the Mathematics site. So people would just put the moves like $Nc4 Bf6$ etc. Easy enough to edit for new users as there's currently a low volume of new questions.

I don't think these ideas will work, in my view. Here's why.

Algebraic notation on its own is distinguishable enough from regular text. Furthermore, while anyone is certainly allowed to do it on their own, it would moot to enforce such a massive change now. Almost the entire site, in essence, doesn't use and hasn't used to move boldening. Making it a sudden standard wouldn't really do much.

This is basically impossible. Incorporating so many figurines into any post would be far more tedious than simply typing a letter. Furthermore, where would we obtain them, and whose would we use? This is another reason why we have a replayer to play out moves. Lastly, on a lesser note, Stack Exchange, minus some of the sites, is built to be an English site.

The Mathematics site does this for math figures. For chess, you would just need to put the moves in a special markdown. Like $Nc4 Bg7$ etc and the markdown would handle the styling.

At least it would help me if I again wrote (as a German) S for N. Or B for P. Considering bolding, of course you want to bold only real moves and not analysis. More problems ;-)


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Why was my question about Stockfish levels off-topic?
How do Stockfish 13 Levels (Lichess) work?

This question does not appear to be about chess within the scope defined in the help center.

So, what does the help center say?

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

I don't feel very welcome at all. Other questions about how an engine works, not just using the program, were not considered off-topic:

Do Stockfish and the tablebase work together or independently?
Lichess' Stockfish's tuning
Stockfish blunders away a piece
How does Stockfish ensure an incremental change made is beneficial?
Did AlphaZero also have to learn that each piece has a value?
etc.

Your original question read (to me) like a general user complaint about how this was working on Lichess. Apologies for my misunderstanding and now that you have made it clear that you primary interest is a chess programming one I have reopened.

source: Stack Exchange

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

sort: votes


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How to disable PGN viewer showing "NN - NN"?
If nothing is put in for the title, the PGN viewer shows "NN - NN" as the title, which is confusing and distracting. How can this be suppressed by default?
[FEN ""]

My solution is to put [Title ""] as a PGN tag:
[FEN ""]
[Title ""]

Filling in the title causes a title bar to appear:
[FEN ""]
[Title "Title"]

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


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What should be the 1.e4 and 1.d4 tag info
1.e4 tag has a tag info as follows:

e4 is White's most common first move (except at the top grandmaster level). It tends to produce open games.

Do we have any sources that shows "except at the top grandmaster level" part? I think this definition is a bit vague as what a "top grandmaster" means is not clear. I thought e4 is also the most popular move at the highest level.
1.d4 tag has a tag info as follows:

d4 is one of White's two most common first moves. It tends to produce closed games.

Moreover, both tags have an ending as "it tends to produce open/closed games". I disagree with this part too. There are high number of openings with 1.e4 which produce close games, and similarly, there are high number of openings with 1.d4 which produce open games.
I didn't send an edit request directly as I am also not sure what they should be, hence I am asking here. I believe they are wrong as they are right now.


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Is it okay to ask time-dependent questions?
I thought about asking something like "Where can I watch World Chess Championship 2021?" or "Who will stream WCC 2021?" and I really liked the question. But then I realized that it will be no longer useful question after WCC ends. My intuition says do not ask something like this but I also wanted to ask here with generalizing it:
Is it okay to ask questions which are related to future but after a while it will not make sense?

Yes, questions like that are fine!

For exactly this fear I did not ask a computerchess related question, which are the worst offender :-)

Generally, questions like that are indeed accepted. They are not inherently useless, as they may provide valuable data for a researcher later on. There may be a caveat though if the question is to obscure or difficult to answer, but your example questions are nowhere near.


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Actively encouraging titled players to use this site
According to this answer, there is not even one grandmaster on Chess Stackexchange.
What a pity, especially when one considers the abundance of top experts and famous professors on e.g. Math Overflow.
My instinct is that there is a real opportunity to incorporate more, if not as much, expertise on this site.
My proposal is that Stackexchange should take the initiative and get in touch with grandmasters and international masters. Invite them to join. Those titled players who have academic backgrounds will be especially valuable.
Thanks.

Please explain your downvote

On meta, downvotes may mean disagreement rather than a question being unclear or not useful.

Grandmasters are the closest thing the chess world has to full time professionals. They are not going to waste time on something which doesn't have financial advantage for them and has very little to interest them.
StackExchange is not going to pay them to take part.
There is no real opportunity for them to gain paying students to coach via ChessSE.
Given the low level of the majority of the questions on ChessSE they are not going to be attracted by the content. Before people get over excited and protest, bear in mind that the majority of chess players are not very strong. Low level content is what they understand.


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Someone just downvoted my answer and question without any reason
Recently, I noticed that someone just downvoted one answer and question of mine in a short period of time without any comments. I suspect a possible hater. What should I do? I have asked for clarification but have not received anything till now. Even before I have had such cases.
If it would have been an obvious reason for downvoting then many people would have commented or downvoted. But no one did.
Here, is the proof:

This can be frustrating. I've had it happen too. I try not to worry about it too much. As a devil's advocate position,... Your two questions were posted on April 6 & 8. Assume a single voter for both. (1) Is it possible the voter was reviewing multiple posts over the last several days as a batch and both your posts were reviewed?  or (2) Is it possible these votes were from multiple people?  Seems like there are a lot of ways this could have happened legitimately.

@SecretAgentMan I understand that it could be by the same people or different. The point is that why don't they post any comment suggesting any improvements if they think that's a bad post. I'm not saying that my post is always correct and useful. In all three downvotes, no comments were made. It would make sense if others would have downvoted as well but no one did. So what special did they find? People like these should be sent warning messages imo. As suggested in the linked answer should I flag my post for mods?

There are mountains of pages on SE Meta sites about how there is no requirement to comment on downvotes. Suggestions for improvement are not required. Such a requirement could set off revenge downvoting too.  The tooltip (hover mouse over the down vote arrow) already provides the comment.  Some people leave comments. Some don't.  Personally I try not to worry about it too much (though I understand it can be frustrating).


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Answer deletion second opinion
I've answered this question with below, and it was deleted. I don't have much to say except to ask for a second look, as it appears the moderator hasn't read my answer past the first line. And, if their decision is agreed upon, I'd like a rule cited from this network that shows deletion, not downvoting, is the appropriate action, because that's not how the rest of Stack Exchange operates.

Note to Readers:  It appears the OP has posted an answer that restates it is Zermelo's Theorem (already found in other answers).

This was the question:

What is this thought called? Is there a name of this hypothesis or theorem or idea?

The answer "Zermelo's Theorem" was given by Matija Sirk. You made no attempt whatsoever to answer the question and instead tried to enter into a debate with the OP.

Ok, I can edit that in. I don't see why such extreme measures are necessary. "no attempt whatsoever" is blatantly false, and I've no clue where you see "debate".

I submitted an edit.

I won't "accept" this answer and I solved the problem another way so this Q&A serves no purpose and should be deleted.


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Your new site design is live!
As you can see, the new design just went live!
At this point, we are done with major revisions to the design (although you can still report CSS/styling bugs by starting a new post and tagging it with design and bug). Thank you for your valuable design feedback and for your patience while we got this out for you.
We really hope you like the design!

Congrats for the new design!

Thanks very much, the site looks great IMHO.
Just one little thing: while the favicons looked great on the feedback post...

... at their actual size they just look like a sand/grey box with a smaller, darker box inside:

(Sorry for the blurry capture, I had to resize the image for it to match the actual screen size in my 13" MacBook Pro -- but trust me, the favicons look almost exactly the same.)
The white-rook-on-blue-field favicon didn't have this problem: it was clear that the central figure was a rook.
Does anybody else experience this? And if so, can something be done about it?

I was wondering what this site is with a cooking pot icon... It seems to be the only icon that's an image inside a box, which makes the queen a fraction of the size it could've been. If the whole icon were a queen, it may look much better, but that image probably still has way too much detail for an icon. I'd probably have gone for a bishop or pawn, since those have very distinctive and simple shapes.

Yep, I noticed this issue and pointed it out internally as well. Thanks for pointing this out!

Coming here from the sidebar HNQ list. As I'm not familiar with most chess players, I had no clue what this question was about before visiting it...

@AndrewT. you ninja'd me ... I did know what the question would be about, but it was still hard to see whether it was posted on this site.

Yes, thanks for pointing this out! I agree, and I'll look at alternatives.

@Chloe dropping the speech balloon and enlarging the queen seems simplest to me - that's what happens with most sites, if you compare https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday with their HNQ icons.

@Glorfindel yes, that's what I'm thinking too. I've had covid so have been slow on this, but my goal is to get this done next week!

Thanks for your patience everyone—this has been updated!

@Chloe thanks and great job! It's far better now :D

Very late to the comment here, but a little sad the discussion we had on logo all those years ago went nowhere - https://chess.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32/what-should-the-chessse-logo-be

Thank you for the effort invested in engaging the community and implementing the new site design.
All the little details really come together very well.

Thank you all so very much. To many years more of chess galore! We shall see how everyone likes it. Strange for a sudden change, in a way, after so many years of silent blue.

Your subsequent post relevant to the new design: Option to have our screen blue, but retain the new design?

I am not personally a big fan. The site now feels very dark and crowded. But, I can see that everyone else likes it, so Ill drop that. Still excited that we have our logo and banner.


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Chess site design and logo — Draft
Chess community! I’m Chloe, the designer at Stack Exchange who’s working on the upcoming Chess site theme for you. I reviewed your responses to my initial post, and below you'll find the site design I came up with, based on your ideas and input.
Your site design
We want to give you your own theme that reflects your topic, culture, and community. This will help brand your site as unique, even while you share common elements with other sites that show you are part of a bigger Stack Exchange family.
Color scheme
Creating the logo and color scheme was a little tricky, as I wanted them to feel different than the large chess websites. In the initial information gathering post, one of you suggested using a color scheme of light and dark brown, taken from many wooden chess boards. Here’s where we ended up:

The darkest brown is used as the primary color in the logo and for the site buttons, and the lighter browns are used for background elements.
Logo
I wanted to create a simple, recognizable banner for you all that works at small sizes and doesn't mimic any existing chess sites. I went with a stylized illustration of a queen and used the font Garamond, which feels classical and is reminiscent of the typography used in a newspaper chess puzzle:

The favicons would then look like this:

Page designs
Putting it all together, here’s what we get for the main site:

And following the tradition of our meta sites being a grayscale version of the main site, these are the designs I created. The subtle change in the background is also inspired by newspaper chess puzzles:

Thoughts?
We hope you enjoy this design, but if something doesn’t feel right, now is your chance to share your feedback. This window for feedback will be open for one week. We will then work to incorporate feedback as best as we can, finalize things on our end, and lastly, deliver the design to your site.

You've done really well.  The background feels like chess without being obstructive nor over-complicated; the logo is distinct but still obviously a queen and is easily identifiable with "chess"; and using the grayscale newspaper style for meta in particular seems like such a natural decision now that I've seen it.

Update: Your new site design is live!

It looks great, thanks a lot! I just have my doubts about the vertical alignment of CHESS Meta - it looks like Meta has been misplaced by one pixel.

You're correct—good eye! I'll fix that.

Do you plan to style the badge symbols as well? For instance music.SE has little quavers and notes.

That's a great idea. Maybe a pawn for bronze, rook for silver, queen for gold?

@Chloe Sounds good! Or whichever pieces look better at that very small size.

@Chloe Or maybe for king for gold (despite being top brass), queen for silver, and a pawn for bronze, symbolizing potential.

I'd like a darker background but would not like a brighter one.
I am visually impaired, so, to enable text to be clear against background, I use Windows with a dark mode theme. What suits my eyes is something like EL&U.SE. The site branding is at the top but there is no bright background elsewhere. Bright backgrounds distract. Brighter browns are more prominent than darker browns, so if you went for bright, that would lead me to have to make my browser window narrower  or put up with bright background stripes to the left and right of the text area, as with Mathematics SE.
In order to show us how the site would look with a proposed new design, would it be possible to show that design in actual web pages with actual HTML? Images such as you show in your question show how your browser running on your device would render a page on your screen. I'm concerned with how it would look on my screen once my browser's rendered it.

Unfortunately we don't have a way for folks to preview the new theme as live pages. Does it help to know that none of the HTML has been changed? The only things this new theme changes are CSS variables and a couple images. Regarding the rest of your feedback, the colors of this design are very similar to EL&U—I actually used that theme as a starting point for this one. Are you saying that in general you prefer darker browns or that the browns in this theme specifically are too bright? And would it be better if the background of the text area were brown instead of white?


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Why does spam get an upvote?
This question was pretty clearly spam. And yet, based on users reputation (5 currently) and this being there only post, there must of been an upvote? Why? Spam shouldn't get upvotes? I know it will get deleted, but it is still confusing to me who is upvoting spam? This isn't the first time I've seen this either.

"Why does spam get an upvote?" because human is unpredictable, or they don't think it's spam.

turns out i was the one who upvoted this. actually i found the website interesting. maybe OP should've presented it in a different way, as a Q and self Answer to make it like sharing a resource? idk

Possible explanations:

the reputation increase came from an upvote on a different, now-deleted post. Indeed, reputation gained from deleted posts is not always rolled back.
the spammer created two accounts, and upvoted one from the other.
someone misclicked. Ultimately, as with drive-by downvotes, there is little point in psychoanalyzing this: there is a button on their interface, and people will click on it for all the wrong reasons in the world.

@Starshipisgoforlaunch Apparently under some conditions deleted posts can give a permanent rep increase: https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/a/31177/65548 , https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320459/why-are-reputation-points-lost-for-deleted-questions


text:
June 5 Strike - Who, What, When, Why, and How to Join
Following from Stack Overflow, and as other sites will soon have to (if they don't already have them, I have decided, with some approval, to announce the upcoming June 5 strike on this child meta. It has no scheduled ending, only when the goals are resolved. As the title suggests, there are 5 main questions about this that I would like to answer. So, let's start.

Who

You can see in this strike letter, although, it doesn't include everyone who is striking. It does have (as of 22:32 UTC June 4, 2023) 60 moderators, 10 former moderators, and 220 total users onboard at this time.

What

As is detailed in both the strike letter, discord, and the github, we will be suspending certain activities.
Moderators will (in addition to what the normal users do):

Stop handling flags

Normal users will:

Stop flagging
Stop reviewing
Stop running charcoal
Is it disputed if metasmoke will me stopped running
It is disputed over whether they should stop posting on main sites

The goals are the following:

To show SE that it needs its curators and moderators and contributors.
To reverse the unbanning of AI generated content.
It is disputed if reversing the vote arrows is a goal
It is disputed if stopping the whole AI stack wants is a goal
To get SE to listen to community feedback
Clarity on policy

When

The strike begins on June 5 and will end when our demands are met.

Why

The Stack Overflow Meta post explains the why pretty well, but I'll summarize here. Stack Exchange has decided to make the following unpopular changes:

Refusing to listen to community feedback
Making an AI with the seeming goal of replacing us human contributors
Wasting time on unpopular vote arrows
Unbanning AI generated content
Firing more of the workforce
Vagueness on policy

A note on AI generated content:It was banned because it had a habit of making seemingly correct, but wrong, posts that were plagarized and took a lot of moderation effort with limit poster effort.

How to participate

You can join by signing onto the strike and agreeing to not do the listed moderation and curation activities.

Final notes

This is not meant to do any of the following:

Pressure moderators or other users into joining if they don't want to

This is meant to do the following:

Increase the visibility and inform users of the strike.
Explain to SE what and why we are doing this.

re: why #5: 2023 Layoff impacting 58 SO/SE staff (2023-05-10) might be of interest to link.

That isnt a reason for the strike exactly. @OlegValteriswithUkraine


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Homepage spammed
Today, the home page was spammed with edits by "alip" apparently but "alip" never seems to have made said edits. Regardless it bumped a ton of questions and now the home page is quite crowded.
First, is this a bug?
Second, did "Alip" actually make these edits?
Third, are these types of mass-editing unanswered questions allowed?
Fourth, (if applicable) what can be done to prevent this?

alip did actually write a lot of answers, they've just all been deleted (they're there, but you need a certain amount of rep to see deleted answers). I wonder why. At a guess, it'd be because alip appears to be an AI, e.g. their answer to Are engines impaired by the 50-move rule? starts with "The 50-move rule in chess states that a player can claim a draw if no capture has been made and no pawn has been moved in the last 50 moves. It's a rule designed to prevent endless games and to discourage players from persisting in a position with no realistic hope of progress" -- which is completely irrelevant.

The answers all follow a similar structure and wordy style used by AIs which made me suspect AI was involved. But some of the info of the answers appear to be useful.


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PGN viewer menu is hidden behind the navigation bar
When you click the arrow pointing down on the top right of the PGN viewer, the menu appears in the top left of the screen. However, only a part of it appears:

This is very confusing. What everyone would understand (without a close look) is that "Copy Position" and "Copy Start Position" are the only available options. Now, I have removed the navigation bar (using Chrome dev tools):

A new option appears!
Solution:
For the menu (div.modal.context-menu), change top:10px to any value greater than 50px (top:75px looks good). Here is a screenshot with top:75px applied:

I tweaked the styling and the positioning of the menu (and the copy/paste modals), so they should show up in a more reasonable location now.
I was aiming for showing both right by the arrow, but for some reason that's not quite happening in production the same way I had it locally. I'll try to carve out some more time to get it in shape, but in the meantime... it should at least be more visible and usable.
Please let me know if you run into any other issues with the controls.

Thanks a lot for your efforts!


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Why is it that I need more points just to add a comment than to answer?
I just came across a thread on books on traps in chess:  Books for chess traps
The chosen answer mentions a free ebook by Bill Wall, who I did not know, and as I was trying it, the very first example given seems to contain an error.  I wanted to ask the member if he himself had gone through the book or knew Wall's rating or just quality of his work, but I can't.  I guess I can't PM members either.  So I don't know what to do, aside from making another thread and just refer to that thread and ask my question...which I just decided not to do because to me it's unnecessary really.
In my view at least, it's odd that I can make a whole new thread or I can make a big "answer" post despite my low credits, yet I can't make a short comment barely visible to anybody else and for that I need more credits.  Can someone explain this logic?

Comments aren't reviewed, maybe that's the difference? Overall I would say the SE system of moderation does a good job of holding the trolls at bay, so I wouldn't change it too much.

StackExchange is above all else a question and answer site, as opposed to a discussion site. A comment thread on a SE post is not like a thread on reddit, as many first time users expect it to be. A reputation requirement to comment helps ensure that comments are on topic, of high quality, and in accordance with the norms of the site. The hope is that while earning the necessary reputation, users will learn how things are done here before posting the first thing that crosses their mind.
There is the unfortunate consequence that some new users are unable to post what would in fact be a high quality comment, as you apparently were, but I'd wager that these are far less than the number of off-topic nonsense posts that are filtered out. Commenting is a relatively early privilege so people aren't kept out for too long.
This question has been answered in greater detail in this thread: Why do I need 50 reputation to comment? What can I do instead?

Even this is a comment I am obliged to write it as an answer. Maybe this clarify the point of the original poster. I also can't comment anything, but can propose answers. Is that efficient? I feel blocked.

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


text:
Make discussions a specific part of Chess.SE
There are many questions on Chess.SE which are more discussion-based than pure right-and-wrong. This is the nature of chess, with so many possibilities. Should we add a new question format for discussions? This is to address the existence of questions such as the following:
How to repair black's position in this Game?
Can Black reach full equality in this game?
What plan should black have followed in this game?
Colle System - Stonewall. Why not c4 and b4 after b5 and c6 for black in this game?
How to continue in this game?
All of these questions require discussion-style answers, so would it be worth it to create a new format for starting a discussion? Ideas could include the following:

Simply create a [discussion] tag which labels a question as a discussion. In one of these questions, the OP cannot select a 'right' answer since there could be multiple answers. Instead, the answers are purely ranked by votes.
Add a 'create discussion' button next to 'ask question'. Ideas include having a question-style post, but changing the comment system so that you can post an answer as an "answer to another answer". This way, posting pgn as a reply is possible, and you are not limited to the format of regular comments. Allowing people to post pgn in comments allows them to reply to answers by displaying possible other variations in the game.

Any other ideas?

In my opinion, the current format of Stack Exchange already supports these kind of 'discussions' very well. Some subjective questions are allowed, as per the help center:

Some subjective questions are allowed, but “subjective” does not mean “anything goes”. All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. What does that mean? Constructive subjective questions:

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”
tend to have long, not short, answers
have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone
invite sharing experiences over opinions
insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references
are more than just mindless social fun

So, if the question is not something like "what's your favourite opening", there's plenty of room for constructive discussion.
P.S. Chess SE is such a small site that it is unlikely the developers will build new functionality for it – I'm already more than happy with the built-in PGN viewer.

I hadn't noticed this, i assumed it was like the other SE sites. Maybe just add a [discussion] tag which says something along the lines of "This question is to promote ideas and may not have one 'right' answer". (Similar to the [reality-check] and [hard-science] tags in worldbuilding). Perhaps even put [Discussion] in the title of the question whenever this tag is used.

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


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Redefine 'psychology' tag?
The tag psychology current has the following tag wiki excerpt:

Questions relating to psychological influence on an opponent during a game.

There are currently 55 questions with this tag, and not all of them are about this type of influence during the game. For example,

Facing irregular or uncommon openings is not about the opponent but about openings.
How do I become less materialistic? is about a more general approach during the game.
Why do people say blitz chess can be bad for your chess? is essentially more cognitively oriented.
Chess helps academic performance?.

Chess psychology is much broader than what the current tag wiki excerpt suggest. I would propose the following definition, unless there are good reasons to create additional tags for specific aspects of chess psychology:

Questions related to cognitive, motivational and other psychological aspects of chess, both during and before/after games.

Go ahead and propose it.

@DagOskarMadsen OK, I have submitted the proposal :-)


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Feature: a clear separation of the league display quick-reference row w.r.t. the ordered list itself
When viewing the league display, one's own entry row is displayed as a quick reference. If one happens to be at or near the top, this results in the appearance of a double entry. This probably doesn't often result in confusion, and possibly not for long when it does occur; all that I can assert with certainty is that the rate is non-zero. Once one is accustomed to it, the problem is gone, but is liable to occur to anyone upon their first exposure to it (and to continue until clarified for the individual).
My question is: might it be better to separate them in a more clear manner?
     The purpose of this would be so that the quick-reference data can't be easily confused for an actual line item within the list itself? (Granting that they are, technically, but not in the same sense: the data are the same, but the Q.R. is only a Q.R., whereas a line item within the ordered list is positional and relative to others' data.)
     Perhaps something as simple as a horizontal rule (presumably with a one-sentence blurb indicating that the above were one's specific data, and the below were the list entries)?
For reference: when I had discovered this, I had initially thought it to be a possible glitch. My name had been the top for the list at that time, and there was no indication (beyond highlighting) that it was one entry of quick-reference and another that was the beginning of the list itself.
Note: this might be fundamental to the S.E./S.O. programming architecture, rather than the chess-specific meta. If it needs migrating to the general S.E. meta (or elsewhere), I'll understand. (Likewise, I suppose that it could be deeply embedded, hence not feasible to restructure on a whim.)


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Why Negative Marks at Forum's Oversight
Negative vote for this Question gives, bad impression of Forum.
Check by Knight NxC3+ Move Implications
None of forum's maintain this partiality Kind. I want to understand the Over All Governance of this Forum. And like to Progress in Positive Notion rather.

Maybe dilemma of I feel Governance got to something for this as STEP. I couldn't articulate well. Bothering. Hereby its Q&A is good raised the need concern. Thank You Folks!

The tooltip on the downvote button says:

This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful

You have not shown any research effort (e.g. some analysis of your own).
Your question is unclear; what do you mean by 'implications' of a certain move? Or do you just want us to analyze your game?
Your question is not useful; by the time Nxc3 is played, you're completely lost already. It's not a common tactic pattern either. It may be useful to you (I suppose so; otherwise you wouldn't have asked the question) but is not useful to future visitors of the site, which is the main criteria for a post's value.

Good analysis. Maybe showcased well. Do you have any more good answers further.


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Are problem solving questions allowed?
I'm pretty new to this site but I've been around the SE network for a while. I've always liked the Programming puzzles and Code Golf site and I was thinking about doing here something that I've seen there for a while: a weekly challenge.
What I mean is posting a diagram asking for the best move in that particular position.
Are those kinds of questions allowed or would be closed as too broad?
EDIT: I've posted an example question: Chess challenge #1: Mate in one
EDIT 2: As it seems that the question has been well received I'll keep posting challenges on a regular basis. I will post tactical and strategical challenges and I won't post another one of the same kind until the existing one has been solved.

Just to close the loop on this...
The question referenced in your first edit looks pretty good.  I posted an opinion about this a few years ago as well, and though the site has grown quite a bit since then, I think that the basic idea is still the same.
If it's a simple tactic that becomes obvious after you see the solution, without any redeeming qualities (i.e. nothing about the position makes it worthy of discussion), then it's probably not a good fit for the site.  As an example, an easy tactic from the lichess.org tactics trainer is probably too simplistic.
On the other hand, if a position creates discussion or has some novel idea (that would be worthy of discussion), then it's a better question.  The mate in one puzzle that you posted has some nice tries and the various pins are instructive IMO.
The previous discussion for reference:
What's the policy on brain teaser/puzzle questions on Chess.SE?

Whether a tactic becomes obvious after you have seen the solution depends entirely on the playing strength. And Adolfo's puzzles haven't sparked many discussions so far.

This is Chess SE not a tactics trainer site. I don't mind seeing the very occasional puzzle if it is genuinely interesting but not a puzzle of the day or even puzzle of the week.


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Where is the moderator voting about migrating Finite State Machine question to cs?
EDIT: now fully resolved - see answer
Just now a moderator has randomly and I think incorrectly shifted a perfectly decent chess question to computer science. Where is the moderator voting which took place prior to this shift? Where is the preliminary vote that it was off-topic in chess?
Migrated from:
chess may-chess-be-considered-a-finite-state-machine
Migrated to:
CS may-chess-be-considered-a-finite-state-machine
Reason given:
"because it can be answered on Computer Science Stack Exchange"
This justification is insufficient, given the official migration policy (see below).
It is certain that some questions can span two Stack Exchanges, A & B. Often it requires judgment to determine which is the appropriate site. But in many cases (as here I think) the decision is at best very narrow - the question might have been posed in either A or B and if the discussion has thrived in its starting location there is no need for fiddly moderation to interfere.
In fact though, I argue that chess is the better home for this discussion. Modelling requires selection and judgment. If the target formalism is complex or obscure, then it is perhaps in the purview of computer science, but here the formalism is simple and well-known to a numerate community such as chess.stackexchange, or easy to find.
So we focus on selection and judgment. The modelling decisions how to represent are all about chess. The response that I provided is all about what can usefully be incorporated in the FSM for chess problems and what should be left out.
In summary, this question no more belongs in cs than a tinned tomato soup discussion belongs in a base metals stackexchange. Please present your counter-arguments or reverse the migration.
Thanks for your time.
EDIT: Still no response here. I have looked at the post What is migration and how does it work?. This indicates that if the question already has good answers (which this one certainly did):

Exercise Extreme Caution. Don't vote to migrate unless the question is already at threat of deletion.

Further:

Avoid migrating answered questions. The point of migration is to send the question to a place where it is on-topic and can get answered. If the OP already has an answer, then we've already defeated the purpose of migration and the destination site won't have anything to do with the question. Avoid migrating these questions unless they are of extremely good quality and risk deletion on their current site.
Don't migrate for the sake of migration. We only migrate questions because they are off-topic on the original site. It is perfectly possible for a question to be on-topic on multiple sites, but that is not a reason to migrate it elsewhere, unless the OP requests migration. As a general rule, if someone asks a question here, and it's on-topic here, it should stay here.
If you're not sure, don't vote to migrate it. Let someone else who is sure do that, just vote to close it as off-topic, or ask for opinions from the community in a relevant chat room.

It looks like CS have thrown it back at us! Quite right. Then it is merely off-topic. I have rephrased the question to emphasise the high chess content latent in the question, and now it’s been reopened.
Issue resolved. Thanks all.


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Question still featured after bounty expires
How can this question still be in the Featured tab? Its bounty ended ten days ago, according to the timeline.
EDIT: now that a new question has been bountied, it's gone. Could be some caching issue, but let's see what happens seven days from now.


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Request to allow "Download as PGN" feature
Quite a lot of chess questions involve analyzing a certain position or game posted by the user asking the question. For example -
Did Aronian make a mistake in the opening against Anand in round 1 of the FIDE Candidates 2014?
It would be useful if there is a way to download the game provided by the user as a PGN file for quick analysis with an engine (screenshot below).

While it doesn't exactly download to a PGN file, there is a "Copy Game" option available from the down-arrow appearing at the top right of the PGN viewer. The game can then be pasted into a new/existing PGN file directly.

Yes its a nice addition to a CHESS question and answer site to have PGN files downloadable.

While it doesn't exactly download to a PGN file, there is a "Copy Game" option available from the down-arrow appearing at the top right of the PGN viewer. The game can then be pasted into a new/existing PGN file directly.

+1 That's useful, but a bit less user friendly.


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How to add comments/annotations in the replayer?
I am unable to figure out how to add a comment in a replayer, but in here it is said it can be done.
Can we get inline comments implemented in the PGN viewer? [Done!]
Can you please tell me how it is done.

To add comments, place them inside braces { and } at the point in the move list you want them to appear. For example:
[fen ""]

1.e4 c5 {Sicilian Defense} 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 e5 {Kalashnikov variation}

in a post on the main site will produce a PGN viewer with the first few moves of the Kalashnikov Sicilian along with the indicated comments.


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PGN viewer is far too wide when displayed from review
Screenshot:

Think it's pretty obvious what the problem is here. Here's the suggested edit that the bug appears in.
Reproduced on both Firefox 38.0 and Chromium 43.0.2357.81 on Ubuntu 14.04.
After a bit of tinkering, the problem appears to be the width: 900px CSS on the table.chess-replayer-board element. Changing this to width: 360px causes the board to display normally.


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How do we make users to post replies as answers and not comments?
I've recently found that many questions on the site have excellent answers on the comments, but none on the answers page. On certain occasions, as this, some of the users requested that the comments were added as an answer, and so I did. However, I don't feel it right to do so in other questions as this, where the answer is perfect but misplaced on the comments. It would seem that I was appropriating the good answer.
How should I proceed?

Quoting comments in your answer will not help. They can be seen clearly the way they stand at the moment. Better would be to write an answer with new facts that answer the question. Some questions are answerable with a simple comment like that you linked to. I see no problem leaving it "without answer", but that is just me...

Yes, a simple comment answers the question, but aren't comments supposed to be for asking clarifications or adding relevant information, not answering the question?

True... Still, I was to lazy to write an answer, and one comment was enough to point the OP in the right direction for his research. The proper answer would be too long to write down, and I don't have time to do so because of work and other responsibilities...

Yes, that's the idea, but many times a comment simply answers the question. I don't want to simply copy that comment and post it as an answer (taking all the credit), I wish that user would post it himself as an answer.


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Question voted to be closed and no comment
I found this question that had been downvoted twice and had two votes for closing for not being clear. However, there was no comment left in the question asking the OP what they meant or trying to help.
I should say that having an answer downvoted without knowing the reason can be quite annoying and frustrating for the asker. So, since we don't want to downvote newbies away (do we?) I suggest leaving a helpful comment/constructive critique when downvoting and/or voting for closure.


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How to ask tactics questions to attract useful answers?
(TL;DR: see title.)
Where are all the tactics questions?
Teichmann is often quoted as saying:

(It seems unsure if this quote is actually his, but that's an aside.)
I'm thinking about questions along the lines Here's a position, how to win material? (or What is the best move?).  There's a practical infinitude of such questions.
I conjecture that this site is facing a shortage of questions (see We need more questions...) primarily because there's not many tactics questions  (41 questions tagged tactics, of which just this one actually asks about a specific position; although, there's also this endgame question which might arguably be described as tactical).
I suspect the main reason there are not many tactics questions is because of chess engines.
Let me Fritz that for you... (or not?)
It seems difficult to ask tactics questions here, since let me Fritz that for you seems to answer all tactics questions.  But does it really?
I'm a user of chesstempo.com (a chess tactics training site where individual tactics problems have their own page, and users can add comments).  I find the comments and stats on their tactics puzzles informative.  They give human-usable information that engine-only analysis would not reveal.  E.g.

Overlooked candidate move.  I may have ultimately needed to reject these moves in a particular position, but if the position were slightly different they might work.
Overlooked opponent defense.  The defense may not work with correct play, but this needs to be calculated before committing to a given line.
The right move, the wrong reason.  It's a winning move, but how I expect to win doesn't work (there's another win I'm oblivious to).

Other concerns with engines:

Engine analysis could be dependent on a critical move sequence (or tablebases) that would be incalculable by humans.
Engine analysis leads to laziness when it comes to calculation.

How to ask tactics questions?
Essentially, what I want to ask is: how can we ask tactics questions on this site, without attracting answers like let me Fritz that for you?  Instead...

Question: How to ask tactics questions to attract useful answers?

AFAICT the reason that many tactics questions are answered with "Let me Fritz that for you" is that "Let me Fritz that for you" is an answer to the question. This is because the question is of the form "What's the answer to this tactics puzzle?" However, the interesting questions, and the ones that are useful to the asker and to future readers, do exist; they just have one other piece.
The most important essential part of getting useful answers such as the ones you describe would be for the asker to provide their own analysis in the question. After all, the first criterion to determine a question's worth is: "Has the OP put effort into their own research before asking?". Only if the asker does their homework, attempts to analyze their position, and posts their own analysis along with the question, will people be able to give answers such as "You chose the right first move, but for the wrong reasons." The asker should always have in their question the answer to "What do you think?".
Therefore, instead of asking "What's the answer to this tactics puzzle?", we should instead ask "Why is this analysis of this tactics puzzle incorrect?" (or sometimes "Is this analysis correct or incorrect, and why?"). This will create useful answers that go beyond what Fritz can do, and answerers will be able to point out tactics themes missed, board vision oversights, and all the other interesting considerations, which are applicable to far more than just a single chess puzzle.

Furthermore I suggest that questions that are just "What's the answer to this tactics puzzle?" should usually be closed as too localized, and reopened when the OP provides their answer to "What do you think?"

Instead of OP asking "what" is the best move, he/she must ask "why is this the best move". It is that simple.
People come here asking what is the best move, and they get the answer they sought -> the best move in that position. Since people answer these questions for points too, they want to be sure that their answer will be accepted and what better way is there than to "Fritz that for you" ? What you have asked is what you have got.
Now, if OP asked why is certain move the winning one, or added this as an additional question, things would be different. The answerer would have to explain why the move played is the best one.
This could produce good answers, since some good tips about tactics could be given ( look at the entire board / watch for hanging pieces / make a "luft" for the king etc ). Or maybe answerer could link positional characteristics with tactical ones, which would be extremely useful ( White sacrificed rook for a knight to capture d pawn, thus obtaining compensation in strong center etc ).
The way it stands now, OP just wants the winning move, and since here we all want to help ( and get points ) we just "Fritz that for him/her".
Another important thing is that OP is OK with it! In some of my answers OP had follow up questions which forced me to work harder in order to get my answer accepted. Therefore I had to invest a lot, which produced high quality answer ( 6+ votes ). Here, OP accepts immediately after he/she gets the winning move which means that they wanted someone to "Fritz that for them" or maybe they just wanted to verify that their Fritz is 100% right.
Therefore I conclude that there is little we can do. We can just add explanations or tips at the end of our answer, but I doubt it will produce the quality you, and all the others expect.

Well, I'm in the "let me Fritz that for you" crowd since no one cares what a USCF "B" player thinks, and rightfully so.  But along with a sploot of computer analysis needs to come at least a few sentences about why Fritz's (or Stockfish's) move is better.

Other concerns with engines:
Engine analysis could be dependent on a critical move sequence (or
  tablebases) that would be incalculable by humans.
Engine analysis leads to laziness when it comes to calculation.

I'll have to disagree with that.  To the first point, I say the best move is the best move, and that is the one we ought to seek. To the 2nd point, the use of the chess engine has made chess players stronger as of late, not weaker. There is a difference between knowing the right move, and know why it is the right move. If a player uses an engine to get a good answer but doesn't find out why the move is good, then he isn't doing himself any favors.  But any training tool (such as an instructor, engine, or book) can be misused.
While I enjoy running Stockfish, I would say there isn't a lot of room for pure tactics questions on this site.  The reasons are

They are almost always too localized, and
The poster can use an engine
themselves if they really want an answer.  The fact is, everyone has a grandmaster at his or her side.


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Interactive diagrams starting from a certain move in a game
In relation to one of the previous questions on interactive diagrams, I would like to ask whether it is possible for a game to start with the let us say 33. move?
For example, I would like to make a diagram of the following segment of the 9.round game of the Curacao Candidates Tournament 1962 between Fischer and Geller (please see the relevant question on CSE):

[Event "Curacao Candidates"]
[Site "Willemstad CUW"]
[Date "1962.05.16"]
[Round "9"]
[White "Robert James Fischer"]
[Black "Efim Geller"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "B88"]
[EventDate "1962.05.02"]
[PlyCount "136"]
[FEN "6k1/6p1/4p2p/5r2/2R5/7P/6P1/6K1 b - - 0 33"]

33...Kf7 34.g4 Rf3 35.Kg2 Rd3 36.Rc7+ Kf6 37.h4 Ra3 38.Rb7 Rc3 39.g5+ hxg5 40.hxg5+ Kg6 41.Re7 Re3 42.Kf2 Re5 43.Kf3 Rf5+ 44.Ke3 e5 45.Ke4 Rxg5 46.Re8 Rg1 47.Kf3 Rf1+ 48.Kg3 Rf5 49.Rb8 Kg5 50.Re8 Kf6 51.Rf8+ Ke6 52.Re8+ Kf6 53.Rf8+ Ke6 54.Re8+ Kd5 55.Ra8 Rf7 56.Kg4 Re7 57.Ra5+ Ke6 58.Ra6+ Kf7 59.Kf3 Re6 60.Ra8 e4+ 61.Ke3 g5 62.Ra1 Kg6 63.Rb1 Re5 64.Kd4 Kf6 65.Re1 Ra5 66.Rxe4 Kf5 67.Re8 Kg4 68.Ke3 Kg3 0-1

However, the above PGN does not appear as a diagram if the game starts with 33...Kf7. However, if you just change 33...Kf7 to 1...Kf7 a diagram appears. I guess i should then change all move numbers so that the pgn starts with 1... etc. Is there a way around this? If not, can it please be made possible?

Yes, you can already do this.
Paste the full PGN of the game.  Then you can add a header "StartPly" which says which half move to start with.
For example, to start with white's move 33, you could do [StartPly "65"] and include that in the game headers.  If you have a StartPly, you should include the FEN of the game start ([Fen ""]) as opposed to the FEN of the position in question.
Incidentally, I already edited the linked question, so you can also look at that to see how I changed the markdown.

Andrew: Thank you, both for the answer and the edit. The solution seems elegant enough. Cheers.

Note (to self): make sure you leave a blank line between the PGN headers and the moves. Otherwise the StartPly header won't work.

What if the asker did not have the prior moves? Even if they did, they shouldn't have to type them all.

@RosieF if you don't have the prior moves then you can use the FEN tag as in the OP.  The lichess analysis board will let you move pieces and very easily get the FEN for any given board position.

Agreed. But the OP's problem was with the move-numbers. It should be possible to make the viewer work even if the move numbers don't start with 1.

@RosieF indeed that'd be useful! It seems to work for move numbers below 10, see here for more details.


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What constitutes being off-topic with regards to puzzles/problems/theoretical constructions?
I noticed this topic was just put on hold as being off-topic. However, several other recent questions about extremely similar topics, for example this, this, or this, have all been deemed acceptable.
Considering the similarity of the questions and the opposite handling with regards to whether or not they are off-topic, there appears to be some discrepancy. What exactly constitutes being off-topic when it comes to these types of questions?

Does anyone even read this? It's been about a week since I posted this and not a single reply or comment of any kind. What's the point of the chess meta if no one even sees it?

To me, all those questions are not relevant and I would close them all. Still, I refrained myself from voting because someone might find them useful ( as you have commented someone may find them artistic... ). I believe that the rules for puzzles are very loose and ill defined. Something we should definitely attend to. Since the question seems equally irrelevant to me as the ones you linked to, I have voted for reopening it.

I quite appreciate these types of questions myself. The pure chess value may be debateable, but they are interesting thought exercises and have been covered by major chess publications. Of course, the community as a whole may come to the agreement that this is not the place for these questions, but there needs to be some kind of consistency in the way they are handled.

I'm sorry for not checking the site for a while. I reopened the question under scrutiny, and in my opinion, the others you cited should remain open as well.
As long as they are not open-ended (i.e. there is a definitive answer or study to be given, not opinion), such questions are suited for the Stack Exchange venue; therefore, the only objection that may remain is one regarding our site's scope. This is determined by the moderators. After the core topic is established (the game of chess), we have leeway in including/excluding related topics. So basically, it could change over time.
At this point, I call chess puzzles on-topic for chess.SE. But a few things could alter that consideration. The other moderators may disagree, or the chess.SE community may present a case for removing the topic, or some effect of that decision may prove to negatively impact the productivity of this site. But I don't see any of this happening, and chess puzzles have to do with chess, and I like chess puzzles.

Thanks for reopening. I hope you get a chance to read my own response, where I argue that chess compositions (like OTB strategy and tactical puzzles) are at the core of "the game of chess"

There are several ways to enjoy chess. The most popular way is probably to play the game. Folk who do this often enjoy tactical puzzles which sample typical critical moments that might occur in a game.
However, just as both speed skating and figure skating are sports that involve moving around on ice, let's not forget chess problem composition. This has a venerable history, and titles (from GM downwards) are awarded for showing extreme technical mastery and artistic flair. Similarly, there are titles awarded for solving chess compositions, and while an OTB (Over The Board) player can achieve GM status in their early teens, it would be rare for a composer GM to achieve that before 40.
Compositions are deliberately not intended to be a "typical position from a game", and indeed it is very much frowned upon to add extra material to make the position more "realistic" - that's not the point. The word "puzzle" is deliberately avoided - there's nothing wrong with tactical puzzles, but that's not what compositions are about.
It may be that some kinds of composition may help in over the board play, but it's irrelevant and cringing to make that kind of argument. Does high-diving skill make someone better able to swim 100m freestyle? Almost certainly not, but high-diving is still a beautiful Olympic sport.
It's curious that even today, many competitive-minded chessplayers are snortingly ignorant that someone might want to engage with chess in a purely artistic way. In Magic the Gathering, at least a "Spike" (a.k.a. a competitive player) is generally aware that this is their designation, and that another designation exists: "Johnny" the player who wants to make cool decks that lead to interesting situations.
So there are Spikes in chess.stackexchange for whom the penny hasn't dropped, and still think "speed skating" is the only game in town. If they stumble across a composition post here in chess.stackexchange they may erroneously classify it as "off-topic".
I hope that (properly edited) my answer may be added to the terms of reference of this community, because it would be good to nail this misunderstanding once and for all.
Thank you


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Is asking about players interviews (which is not related to chess board) allowed and constructive?
I flagged this question as off-topic and it's declined.
"What was the question asked to Magnus Carlsen which he refused to translate?"
Someone tell me, is it really an exact chess problem? Maybe we need a stack-exchange site like: interview.stackexchange.com! for these type of questions.


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Request to reconsider merging of a specific question
Very recently a question has been asked about winning with K+Q vs K+R.
The question was a duplicate and thus was merged with the older one.
The problem I have with this is that the OP of the merged question did not took into consideration new answers and left the old accepted one, which is of low quality in my opinion.
Without false modesty, I believe that my answer to the question was the best, and I have found another 2 answers that provide quality coverage of the mentioned endgame as well.
Further more, the other low quality answers currently have higher number of votes, and I believe this will stay the same for quite quite some time.
Since this is such an important endgame, and for the benefit of other readers and our users, I propose to undo the merge and move the new answers to the original question as their quality is significantly higher, in my opinion.
I believe that this would bring us more visitors since this endgame is not so well covered online and as I have mentioned I have found 3 answers that offer quality coverage.
Thank you for your time.
Best regards.

@RauanSagit: I hope so too. We can only wait for now... Best regards.

First, I agree that your answer is very good, indeed, one of the best summaries I've seen about Q vs R.
There are a few considerations here, and several of them deal with the Stack Exchange system itself, not just the specific question.
Duplicate questions are not a bad thing on Stack Exchange - the extra question stays in the system with a different wording and shows up in search engine searches depending on what the search terms are used.  However, it's beneficial for all answers to be in one place, not spread out over two or more questions.
This brings up the obvious downside - newer questions, especially ones to a question with an accepted answer, start at the bottom of the list with fewer votes.  Stack Exchange has a few mechanisms to try to fix this:

questions with new answers show up at the top of the home page
new answers can be sorted to the top of the question by clicking on a convenient tab
old answers can be edited (an alternative to adding a new answer)

So with that prelude, there were basically two options in this case.  We could either close the old question as a duplicate of the new one, or close the new question as a duplicate of the old one.  The old question is not inherently bad, so the convention is to merge the new question into the old one.  The only material difference is who the OP is - the person that can accept an answer.
To conclude - the hope is that the new, good answers will eventually be upvoted to the top of the question, but ultimately whether or not the very best question is accepted or not isn't a determining factor in closing duplicate questions.  It is certainly the hope that the best answer is accepted, but if it's not, then the answer that the OP considers best is accepted, and the answer that the community considers best is immediately below that, as the highest voted answer.

I guess the only thing left is for us to wait for the best answer to be properly upvoted. As it stands now this is not the case. Thank you for your clarifications. Best regards.

@AlwaysLearningNewStuff, one other thing to keep in mind is that, merging or not, the matter of what answer gets "accepted" is always in the hands of the one asking the question. And almost by definition, the one doing the asking usually won't be the ideal judge of answer quality, so the "wrong" answer sometimes getting accepted is just a part of life at SE. Just keep leading by example in contributing good content, and voting up other good content, and good things will continue to happen in terms of quantity and quality of overall traffic and voting on the site.

@EdDean: I guess you are right. The only thing we can do is to do a good job in providing useful answers. Best regards.


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A bug in the site's pgn viewer?
I recently noticed a possible bug in the site's pgn viewer. I was reading the answers to the question in this page. The first answer had a replayer. At one point of time when a pawn should capture a knight, the capturing move was not displayed correctly and it appeared as below:

I moved back to the starting position and the knight and the pawn where displaced as you can see below:

Is this a bug or is it simply because something is wrong with my browser?

It's a bug.  I fixed it in the github repo last year at some point, but apparently the version here hasn't been updated.
https://github.com/andrewphoy/chess-replayer/commit/f0d60d5329e855a91ebe70ffe4e931098fdf55bc
The issue is that any time there's a pawn move bxa6 it is incorrectly interpreted as an en passant capture which removes the piece at a5 but not at a6.

Thanks! I've updated the player to latest (and sent you a pull request with a bugfix I had to make). This will be in the next build of the site.

The PGN viewer used in this site seems to have very limited features. Why don't we include features that are available in sites like chess.com?

@balpha looks awesome, thank you for updating it!


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Why are the pieces misaligned from the board?
I recently pointed out a bug in the site's pgn viewer here and it was told that it had been fixed. But now the pieces seem to be misaligned from the chess board as seen below.
Why is this happening? Is it a bug again?

I don't understand what this issue was, but my guess is that it was a caching issue.  The version of the pgn viewer was updated last week, and immediately afterwards I saw something similar, but after a few hard refreshes it was fixed.  It could be a cached css file, but at the very least you can try a hard refresh and see if that fixes things.

If you're still seeing this, let me know; otherwise, I'm gonna guess that @Andrew's right and it was some temporary caching thing.

@Shog9 I still have exactly the same problem as the OP is describing. Notice that the heading is missing for the game.

The problem is solved now (atleast, for me).

I still have the problem. I tried Empty Cache and Hard Reload (on Chrome), but it didn't help. Any other suggestions?

@Shog9 Hmm, I switched to Japanese encoding and back to Unicode again, and now the viewer is suddenly working!

Definitely sounds like some sort of stale cache then, @Dag. You should post that work-around as an answer, in case others are encountering this.

I switched to Japanese encoding and back to Unicode again, and now the viewer is suddenly working!
I'm using Chrome.


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How to type a hidden solution?
In this answer by Andrew the solutions to the two Chess problems are hidden and appear only when your mouse hovers over the answer box.
What is the markdown for that? I tried to enter the answer editor to see, but it is a non-tag-wiki post on a meta site, so I couldn't.

You can make a line hidden by prepending it with >! (note the space before any additional text).
Example:
>! 1. e4 e5

 1. e4 e5

I made this answer community wiki so that you can edit it and view the source as well.


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Questions about ongoing games
For example, the question I played 2.f3 by accident! How do I save my position? seems to be about an ongoing game ("I almost feel like resigning here"). Consulting other people about a game in progress is against rules of almost all (correspondence) chess sites and clubs. Should we discourage such behaviour by not answering (or closing) these questions?
One can always say that we don't know the exact rules of the game being played, and it's not our business to find out if the OP is breaking rules. Or probably that it is not our business even if we know that the OP is breaking rules. On the other hand, I'd suggest that in these cases the OP should clearly say if he is not breaking any rules, because otherwise it seems very likely that this is cheating. Anyway, I think we should not deliberately encourage cheating.

This was also asked as a side question in Questions about chess.stackexchange.com but newer answered, and I didn't find any other related results.

I would also like to know what are the guidelines for this, as discussion of ongoing games is strongly discouraged or outright disallowed (and rightly so in my opinion) on almost all chess forums.

Just to make it clear, the guidelines are whatever we (by which I mean the sum total of site users, not the mods or some other body) decide them to be right here in this thread. It's a community-run site, so it's the votes on meta that will set our policy on the matter.

I don't think that we should close general questions just because a specific game is still in progress. The question might still be useful to other people, and the game will end eventually.

@WilQu They could always ask the same question after the game has ended, though. Then it will still have the same use both to the asker and any others reading it, but without providing (very likely unfair) help to one side of an ongoing game.

@GrizzyRawrz what about all similar ongoing games? Right now, there may be many players who played 2.f3 in an ongoing game, and we can't prevent them from visiting chess.stackexchange.com. That's why I think it doesn't make sense to close a question because of one specific game. Besides, even if we closed those questions, the asker can omit the fact that his game is still in progress.

These types of questions puzzle me. Is the community being complimented? Our collective judgement is better than any of the very powerful, free chess engines out there? When answering questions (usually about games that have finished) requesting analysis I never use an engine. I usually but not always mention this in my answer. It is clear to me that anyone who has access to the necessary computing power to ask a question here has access to powerful engines.

I'm posting opposing answers for users to vote in support of.

NO, questions about ongoing games are not acceptable. Any questions in which it is indicated the subject is a game in progress should be closed.

I'm posting opposing answers for users to vote in support of.

YES, questions about ongoing games are acceptable, and it's not for us to decide whether the questioner is abiding by the rules of the particular game.


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Asking advice for cheating or exploiting loopholes in chess rules
A recent question asking about exploiting possible loopholes in FIDE chess laws for gaining more time has received 5 downvotes, and the reason given in the comments is that it is not nice to get benefit such a way. I understand the reason, but (currently) I don't think it's a good enough reason to close a question.
My thinking: Discussion about loopholes in rules in general is a good thing, because it allows the people who decide the rules to improve them. Similarly, I think questions about loopholes in rules are good questions in SE - for example, they allow people to understand the rules and arbiters and tournament organizers to prepare for possible incidents.
If this question is closed because the OP should not be given advice on how to exploit the rules, nothing would stop someone else from asking a question that is essentially the same but not written in the first person. I don't think it should matter who actually asks the question, so I ask here: Should questions that are likely to yield answers that may help players to cheat or exploit loopholes in rules in unsportsmanlike manner be allowed? Naturally, I'm talking about questions that are otherwise suitable for chess.SE, i.e. they are related to chess, they have an answer etc.
A few months ago I asked a similar question in Meta, Questions about ongoing games. I think there is an important difference: a question about an ongoing game is very specific and is less likely to be asked by someone else than a question about cheating. I understand that drawing the line is going to be arbitrary, so probably this question cannot be answered simply by a yes/no vote. I'd like to hear other opinions on the subject.

Do you really think that people in FIDE who are in charge of changing rules are reading this forum?

@Salvador: There's no reason to assume they don't. Furthermore, he also said "they allow people to understand the rules" and "arbiters and tournament organizers to prepare for possible incidents", and those people definitely do read this forum. I certainly hope no one here is under the illusion that these kinds of loopholes aren't already being exploited in every tournament. Helping people to be aware of them is only beneficial to the chess community as a whole.

@SalvadorDali --  I don't think anyone writing rules at FIDE cares about this forum even if they do read it.

Discussion of the rules should be allowed.
It doesn't make sense to not allow such discussions, just because the asker may gain an improved understanding of the rules and give themselves a gameplay advantage. Considering the question you linked to wasn't about cheating, but was instead about working within the established rules of chess, it was certainly a valid one.
As for actual cheating, such as "Is it possible to have someone secretly tell me the moves I should make during the game?", I'd say this should not be allowed.
In my mind, the difference is that cheating is specifically trying to work outside the parameters of what defines "chess", and is thus no longer applicable to Chess SE.
Exploiting the rules, on the other hand, is specifically trying to work inside the parameters of what defines "chess".
The only reasons I can see for someone to downvote a question like "Can I benefit myself by getting penalties?" is because they are thinking "I wouldn't want someone doing that to me" or "I wouldn't look kindly upon someone doing that". That's pretty poor reasoning, in my opinion.
On a side note, questions like that have a net benefit. The number of people who learn to look out for that behavior is going to be far higher than the number of people who will actually engage in that behavior themselves.

I believe an expert on this subject could answer those posts. Still, this could be risky for those who answer those questions with successful way to abuse the rules. If the OP or anyone else who saw the question uses this to cheat and gets caught, he/she could "bail" on answerer and Chess SE which could bring them trouble ( possible law suit/fine... ).
That is why I am against finding loopholes in rules and analyzing ongoing correspondence games and so on... Why making things complicated? We are here to help users with concrete problems, not to create potential problems for ourselves...

If it's technically allowed (whether through oversight or whatever) it's not cheating. Whether the interpretation goes for or against, closing a question because someone might sue is shortsighted at best.

Should such questions, asking advice about possible ways to cheat, be allowed? Absolutely!
Should people be free to downvote them if they want? Absolutely!
Let me just add a few comments.
1) This forum is read by people with a wide range of knowledge, expertise and experience. There are members of this forum who are national arbiters, FIDE arbiters and even International arbiters.
2) The FIDE Laws of chess are, for the most part :-), carefully and intelligently written. There are some key elements.
First in the preface a very clever "common sense" clause:

The Laws of Chess cannot cover all possible situations that may arise
  during a game, nor can they regulate all administrative questions.
  Where cases are not precisely regulated by an Article of the Laws, it
  should be possible to reach a correct decision by studying analogous
  situations which are discussed in the Laws. The Laws assume that
  arbiters have the necessary competence, sound judgement and absolute
  objectivity. Too detailed a rule might deprive the arbiter of his
  freedom of judgement and thus prevent him from finding a solution to a
  problem dictated by fairness, logic and special factors. FIDE appeals
  to all chess players and federations to accept this view.

and in Article 11:

11.1 The players shall take no action that will bring the game of chess into disrepute.

If the arbiter thinks you are cheating he is well within his rights to punish you all the way up to throwing you out of the tournament. If you set out to cheat you should be aware of this risk.
That said there are definitely grey areas. The question the OP refers to is one of them. If I have 30 seconds left on the clock and a very difficult but winning position against my opponent's 5 minutes a deliberate illegal move giving my opponent an extra 2 minutes could certainly be to my advantage if the arbiter takes 2 or 3 minutes changing the clock settings. Even if he does it in 30 seconds that could make all the difference to me.
Note that from the arbiter's point of view this comes within the preface call for the arbiter to use his common sense. The arbiter does not have to give the extra time immediately. He can wait until the player needs it. He also has the power to deduct time from the felon's clock.


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Possibility to merge or migrate tag [chess]
After looking around on StackExchange, I realized that I found a similar site like ours, boardgames, with a chess tag on it.
Should it be merged or migrated here someday, because I found similar questions there.

Good question - it's actually been addressed on meta.stackoverflow.com in several questions.
The bottom line is that old questions are never migrated1 and new questions are only migrated if they are off-topic on the first site.
With that said, it's quite likely that a pure chess question would get better answers here than on board and card games, so depending on the question, it could be migrated shortly after being asked.  However, there have been only 6 questions asked on board and card games in the last year.  Of those, only one or two would have really been on-topic here.  Stack Exchange is fairly self-policing - most users find the correct site for their questions.

[1]: When a site first graduates from beta it's possible to do a one-time batch migration of questions from stackoverflow.com and ostensibly from other Stack Exchange sites as applicable.  Chess.SE is a ways away from graduating, and the questions on boardgames.SE are on topic there already, so they will almost certainly remain there.


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About reviewing questions
Now that I have more than 1K rep, I get  the reviewing feature which I hate, I'm not into moderation. I hate being a judge. So far I skipped all reviews but today I saw two reviews that I want to ask  you about
The first is this

Basically the editor just indented the question, would you accept such edit? Or is it point farming? How would this edit help make the question better? What rules do you follow when doing the reviewing?
The other question was edited by a spamer who removed the whole question and inserted some stupid text, what to do about it? I marked it as a spam but should I take further action to ban him from the entire SE network or something?
EDIT
I started a feature request on Meta.SO: Add captcha to anonymous edits, please support this feature by voting it up if you agree.

About the last paragraph: I have observed this kind of spam attack at least ten times the last couple of weeks. Is this a new phenomenon, or has it always been like this?

@DagOskarMadsen I don't know, we should ask someone

@DagOskarMadsen, the spam attacks have just cropped up, at least as far as I am aware.

@EdDean how come anonymous users edit questions? someone just tried  to edit the question is chess a game of luck...  it seems that he didn't even sign up, no account, anonymous user

I'm not sure why it was decided to allow suggested edits from anonymous users (as opposed to only from registered lower-rep users), but it does seem to be by design. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/147293/why-am-i-getting-many-suggested-edits-by-anonymous-users

@EdDean please read my edit

@DagOskarMadsen please read my edit

In your example, the edit isn't actually the indent, it's the addition of an appropriate tag. This is valid and helpful. However, if it was simply that indent, I would reject it, since that's really a matter of style, and there's no call to impose your style on other users.
I always accept even small edits that are correctly done. While I suppose it's possible to be motivated by the rep alone to make tiny changes, it's not really easy to tell unless there is a flood of trivial edits from a user. Per se, I would rather accept a mini improvement than reject it in the name of foiling greed that might not exist.
If I see a ton of micro edits from a particular user, I would likely reject the lot. But I haven't seen this much, and not at all on this site.
As far as the spam edit goes, you should reject the edit as spam, but an anonymous user can't be banned.

It's worth noting that the "too minor" reason is more for the benefit of the trilogy sites. On a smaller exchange like ours, the volume of suggested edits is significantly lower, and therefore doesn't eat up massive amounts of reviewer time. Thus, it's not a bad thing to be inclusive with edits that are genuine improvements. (That may change as the site grows, of course.)


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Why flaging low quality questions option isn't avaiable?
I wanted to flag this question as a low quality question but there's no such option. Why?
On that particular question, I  see it today, not yesterday, so I picked another question and took screenshots, voila that's what I saw yesterday

and

And it's not in the closing section either

What options do you see when you try to flag it?

@EdDean go to so or whatever try to flag any question, there's an option (this question should be closed because  - low quality) im on phone can't take screenshots

Right, and I myself see a low quality option if I try to flag the particular question linked to above. But you don't?

@EdDean please read my edit

Interesting. It might be that the very low quality option isn't available for flagging because the post in question has received one upvote. I found some similar discussion regarding flagging answers at least: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/220620/why-is-it-not-possible-to-flag-an-upvoted-answer-as-low-quality

The "very low quality" flag is not available on a post which has a positive score. See the meta SE question: Why is it not possible to flag an upvoted answer as Low Quality which Ed linked up there in the comments.

If the post has been found useful by someone else, you need to make a stronger case for it being "very low quality" - there's a reasonable chance that it isn't. In the past, folks repeatedly used this flag on answers that were perfectly well-written but also wrong - that's not a reason to flag, it's a reason to down-vote (and perhaps leave a comment describing the problem).

It's worth repeating that VLQ is for severe formatting/content problems. In the context of the flag, content problems means "this is ugly and degrades our site purely by its very existence". It does NOT mean "this post is bad, and the poster should feel bad". If the post is merely bad, the correct course of action is a downvote, with a comment if you are so inclined. (To be fair, the original question was probably a decent candidate for the flag, so this comment is more in the nature of general guidance.)


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Highlight squares
How can I highlight squares under atack and show arrows?
There is similiar question here. Is this feature already supproted?

No, that feature is not supported at the chess.SE site yet. To be clear, that feature is built into Andrew's PGN viewer, but that functionality wasn't part of the initial implementation of the viewer at this site. (Similarly, the ability to include comments/annotations alongside the moves is part of the viewer, but not active on the site.) I agree that highlighting and markers would be a nice addition, and I hope we'll be able to get them at some point. My understanding is that just getting the PGN viewer to integrate as seamlessly as the SE staff did was a non-trivial endeavor, so we might not see additional features until the site grows more active. (But that's pure speculation on my part.)


text:
How come this question get closed? Who asked it anyway?
While browsing this meta site, i came across this question, the user who asked it is community, i quote:
Hi, I'm not really a person.

I'm a background process that helps keep this site clean!

I do things like

Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention
Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them
Own downvotes on spam/evil posts that get permanently deleted
Own suggested edits from anonymous users

from what i understand, it's a bot, but it asked this question, how come a bot ask a question? And if community profile is used by  moderators, i mean if moderators used that account to ask the question, then how come other moderators close it? I'm confused

The community user (which is indeed a bot and is not used by the moderators) is used, as described above, to do light background cleanup work on the main chess site, and there is a similar community user on every site that is part of the SE network. It is also set up to ask occasional questions, like the one you link to, on the meta side of the chess site only, not on the main site. The question you noticed was posted by the community user just to draw attention to the site's self-evaluation process, soliciting feedback from the user base. It was closed by Andrew as "too localized" after it had served its purpose and the site self-evaluation period had ended, making the post no longer relevant or useful.


text:
We need more questions, what kind of question should we be asking more?
As long as we keep our question rate at ~2 per day, this site won't be successful. We need many more. We (people who read this) should probably ask more questions, not just answer them.
But what kind of question can we ask? There are only so many rules questions to ask (although it might be a good idea to mine old Arbiter's Notebook questions from ChessCafe to see if we can do better at answering them), and many other questions are subjective / hard to give a definitive answer to.
We could go for more high-level, hard chess content. More questions like What are the key ideas for white in the Keres Attack (Sicilian Scheveningen)?, or especially a recent question that had a position and asked how black could equalize in it (part of opening research). I can't find that question, perhaps it was deleted, but it noted itself that it was unlikely to be answered -- the reason why is clear, it would actually be hard work for a strong player to find a good answer.
Another idea I have is to do a series of questions on basic endgames -- start with basic mates, then K+p v K, working up. So that if someone has an endgame question that boils down to a drawn K+Q v K+c-pawn-on-the-seventh endgame, we can point to a question/answer where it is explained why that is a draw.
Another is to think of famous positions / moves (e.g., Shirov's ...Bh3 in the endgame) and ask why exactly is that the best move.
And so on. We need to ask more! More ideas?

More 'evaluation of this position', 'evaluation of my play' questions?

evaluate my game position? Well it could go wrong, for example few days ago I wanted to post a game that I played recently, to see how black could defend his position, but I discovered that I made a mini blunder that would allow black to be just fine, I rather analyze my games on engine so I don't look stupid here :) and if we keep posting positions where blunders are obvious then the quality of the question would be bad

I'll try and ask one per day, even if it is just "What would you do here" (I'll upload a picture of a good split in the direction of a game during the middle) or something, even if this is just a daily chess problem!

Can we ask help to solve a puzzle? like this

I  appreciate your effort to endeavour to improve the site. I feel that the reduced no. of questions may be due to the heavy moderation. However, this has both positives as well as negatives so I will not comment further. I also feel that the question and answer format itself has limited scope. People would be more interested in posting a game they recently played and discussing it in a thread. Overall, the site can improve by allowing users to post articles rather than questions or answers. A discussion area can also be introduced where the quality can be monitored by either upvoting or downvoting a post.
Coming back to your main question regarding the type of questions, how about a complete series of questions on openings? Persons answering each question should outline the main ideas behind the opening and post the first 5 - 10 moves of the opening in the graphical format which can be played back and forth. Answers to such questions would be valuable as there is a scarcity of free opening data on the net.
EDIT: I think there are some incompetent people as moderators. The website should hire and appoint its own moderators rather than allow anybody to become a moderator. A person who is a good answerer need not necessarily be a good moderator. Recently, one of my questions was put on hold by some incompetent moderator. -  What are some good middle game plans or strategies?

+1. Very very good answer. I especially like the idea for articles! Best regards.

guru, if you think that question was closed inappropriately, why not start a new meta thread about it stating your case? As with everything at the site, a decision about it is ultimately in the hands of the voting community, and if you get support at your meta thread, your post could be reopened. As it was, 5 members of the community thought your question was much too broad (see Remco Gerlich's comment) and Andrew concurred and closed the question. Again, if you'd like to make a case for its reopening, just start a thread about it here on meta. Nothing is set in stone ...

+1 for pointing out that heavy handed moderation deters users from posting new questions.  Perhaps since we are looking to increase the number of questions per day, we should look to limit the number of questions closed unnecessarily.

I quite enjoy reading questions about recent games played by the community.  You know the sort.  "What could I have done differently to capitalize from this position?"  Or "Where did I go wrong with this game?"

Edit: Some time after this post was made, inline comments/annotations were implemented on the main site, so what follows is now obsolete.

I agree that more questions about famous (and even not-famous) positions or moves would be a very welcome addition to the site. Moreover, this is a potentially quite abundant source of meaty and interesting questions, as the number of chess positions open to non-trivial analysis is essentially limitless.
One current problem that limits the potential here, though, is that it can be very difficult at the present time to give satisfying answers to truly involved analysis questions of this sort. At the risk of beating a dead horse, the reason for this difficulty is that there is currently no good way to incorporate verbal explanations with trees of variations on the site. In particular, the inline comments/annotations feature of the PGN viewer isn't active on the site right now. If it were to be made available, the ability of our users to answer such questions well would increase dramatically, and I think would lead to more such questions getting asked as well.
So one way to potentially increase the question base would be to vote in support of that feature request, as the SE team is more apt to act if there is a clear indication of support for the implementation from the community.

As a person with zero percent knowledge of chess. It's sometimes hard to understand the terms and discussions going on, here. Maybe it's a good idea to use clear or plain language in the answers or questions. This will help Chess SE to attract beginners like me :p.


text:
Instructions to post a game in the Help, FAQ, or even WYSIWIG editor
I've been trying to implement a nice diagram and have no idea how.
Based on Is it possible to make little changes to the FEN diagram I tried
[FEN ""]
1k1r3r/pPbn4/4p3/8/3Pp1B1/2q3pP/2P1Q1P1/R3K2R w KQ -
Which doesn't work. I looked at the Help and there are no instructions. To attract new users I think you all should strongly consider either adding it to the FAQ, Help, or possibly an extra button on the WYSIWIG Editor so people like me can figure out how to post games.

Two quick things that might help:

The diagrams only work on the main site, nothing will show up on meta here
In order to show just a diagram (no moves), enter just the FEN string in a code block
1k1r3r/pPbn4/4p3/8/3Pp1B1/2q3pP/2P1Q1P1/R3K2R w KQ - 0 1

As a side note, the FEN string you posted is missing the move counters.  It should have two numbers at the end (0 and 1 above) that represent the number of half moves towards the 50 move rule and the game's move number respectively.
Hopefully that gets a working diagram for you!

Hmm I copy and pasted the exact FEN code that Chess.com had next to my game so not sure why something would be missing. How do you post with moves? As I see you're a community moderator what are your feelings on adding this information somewhere easier to find?

@Ryan I definitely think we could do a better job making some or all of this easier (especially for visitors who aren't used to Stack Exchange).  I'm honestly not sure if there's a good place for it on the help page or in the help center, I'll take a look around a bit later.

To add the moves to a post see the directions in this FAQ post.

Hmm I had tried that as well, read that line breaks shouldn't effect it. Maybe I'll try again removing the line breaks and see if it works.

Nope, not a clue. Maybe you could take a look and tell me what went wrong: http://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/2677/is-there-a-name-for-the-a-position-where-king-is-on-the-first-last-row-and-an-en

@Ryan Oh I think the problem is that the pgn isn't in a code block.  Highlight all of the pgn (from [FEN ""] to the last move) and press Ctrl + K.

Ya, you all definitely need to find a place for this in a FAQ or something! Thanks for the help at least


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Is there a canonical question about Kings placing themselves in check?
Fairly often questions are asked which can be answered by "no, the king can not be in check while it is not your turn" (this one for example).
Is there a question which answers these question in a general way which we can use to close the rest as duplicates? If not, should we create one?

A common theme in those questions seems to be whether pinned pieces can give check.

This question - Moving king into check - has the clear unequivocal answer you are looking for.


text:
Are International Variants on Topic?
Are international variants of chess on topic here?  The FAQ doesn't really address this.
I found this meta question, but it doesn't address international versions.
Examples of international chess variants include:

Shogi
Xiangqi
Janggi
Shatranj

@BenCrowell That's because they're not off-topic. The consensus was that they should be allowed :)

The only "International" variation is chess. The rest are rather "local" variations. By the way, why are tic-tac-toe questions off-topic then?

I personally believe that they should be considered on topic (and I already asked one Shogi question myself, using the other meta post you link to as my justification for doing so :). Our current volume of traffic and questions is such that we would hardly be overloaded by any questions folks might like to ask about these games. And while they aren't as akin to chess as, say, chess960 is, these international games do have a common origin with chess and share many similarities in game play.
I think that many chess players that come to the site would find questions about such international variants to be interesting (though maybe I'm projecting); and of course it's easy enough to ignore these questions if so desired. If the inclusion of these kinds of questions were to somehow become problematic, or detract from the chess focus of the site, then the matter could always be readdressed too. For these reasons, I think questions about these games should be welcomed here at chess.SE.

Yup, that's what tags are for, and I'm all for curiosity. I don't think variants' volumes combined could come anywhere close to chess' anyway.

I can personally attest that learning variants can improve chess skill.