Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

edit3: without any pasting of the Betza code for the Omega pawn into a 'box' (which I think I'd do only if I wished to slightly change the pawn's Betza code, anyway), I dragged an Omega pawn from the table in front of each K on the 8x8 diagram for the Applet and pressed 'start', then 'play it'. For some reason the Applet assumed I was playing chess, and would only allow a one or two step advance by the White pawn as my first move once I clicked on the pawn. Maybe Omega Pawns work for the Applet only on non-8x8 boards(?)

I interpreted Omega Pawns as pawns being able to move up to half-way the board. It appears you have been trying this on 8x8, where this makes no difference with the usual Pawn. You need a board with 10 ranks or more for Omega Pawns to be better than FIDE Pawns. On 12-rank board they could even be pushed 4 steps, when starting on 2nd rank.

The difference with Wildebeest Pawns is that the latter are always allowed to be pushed up to half-way the board, not only on their initial move.

I have never seen a variant where you are allowed to push a Pawn into the opponent half, other than with a single step. So I saw no need to support that in the table.

Okay, I increased the number of ranks, so that the board was 8x10. Then Omega pawns were allowed to move 3 cells forward after I started the AI and played it for a move.

@ H.G.:

Here's a CV I'm not sure if you've seen then - in it a pawn may take a single or double step at any time [edit: as is the case with Metamachy, I seem to recall]:

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/colossus

I even created the Interactive Diagram that is in it! Metamachy also has such Pawns. And indeed, these are not in the table (which I suppose is why you mention them).

One doesn't encounter such Pawns very often, and with such a table one always have to strike a balance between including everything that exists under the sun (with as a result users will have great difficulty in finding what they need), and including only the most common stuff (so that people often don't find what they need directly). Because it is very easy to change the move of a piece in the table to another one (for those bothering to read those tiny 3 paragraphs that describe how to use the Applet, in particular the second), the balance often swings in the direction of not including alternative moves for an image that is already in the table. Although notation for Pawn moves is usually more complex than for other pieces, which might favor including duplicats in that case.

In this particular case I guess that the fact that Alfaerie has a special symbol for this kind of Pawn (the 'quickpawn'), but that this symbol initially was not available as PNG/SVG, swung the balance in favor of not including it. In the mean time this symbol was created, and added to the Alfaerie PNG set, though, which makes it automatically appear in the table as well. But this adds it at the end (where indeed you can find it), and the Applet cannot guess the moves of pieces it obtains that way. So it appears now without a move.

This is again an oversight: now that the symbol exists it deserves to be in the table predefined with a move, amongst the other Pawns, and then I would give it the move you referred to. But I just created the image because I needed it for some Interactive Diagram, without giving a thought to what consequence this would have in the Applet. And you should also keep in mind that for a very long period any attempt to change anything in the Applet led to its destruction; only recently I discovered that this can be prevented by switching the article type to 'Text' (even though originally it was posted as HTML). So now I could add the Quickpawn to the list of predefined pieces, and probably will do that soon.

It would be more useful to make the generated GAME code (or actually the 'include file' that interprets this code) support fast castling; as I said, it would be very easy to give the Quickpawn that is in the table this (or any other) move, and you could copy the XBetza notation for the move from the Colossus Diagram. Almost anytone here could do that. But no one but me is likely to create support for fast castling in that include file...

Lol, no I didn't realize all those ramifications, H.G., I just happened to know of a CV or two that I guessed may have escaped your attention, based on what you wrote in your post I replied to last - just trying to help you out. :)

Well, life is complex, and there are more unexpected obstacles to deflect the desired cause of events than one would like...

I want to alert other editors to this, since I consider it a very undesirable development that authors clutter their CV rule-description articles with unrelated self-promotion. If it was up to me, it would be disallowed, and editors would actively moderate against it.

CVs do not become related merely because they have the same author, so publishing extensive lists of other CVs is unrelated info, which does not belong in the article. It is also a huge duplication of information.

It is common knowledge that authors usually invented more than one CV. If anyone is interested in other CVs by that author, he can click on the author name to get an overview of his other work. No reason to put that same information in many other places, to force it down the readers throat.

If an author has many presets that are not in the index, he can make a seperate article with an overview of that, similar to my overview of variants playable with the Interactive Diagram. But that would only be useful if the references were clickable links to those presets.

I see the point but honestly I don't see why it is so very undesirable. I don't see any harm the way it is done in this page. I have myself underlined the family link that may occur between some of my CVs, for example here for Bigorra: https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/bigorra

Now, it is true that I'm not listing here ALL my CVs, only those that present some relationship. I do think that it is an information that may interest the reader, as well as when I put a link to a GC preset page.

Of course, if the policy of this website would become to forbid such practices, I will re-write all my pages to withdraw these references. But I would regret it.

I think HG, does not refer to games that fit a "collection" of sort, but when an author promotes most of his article that, way. For example my just published games inspired by Kevin could find a their place in such a collection and therefore link to each other. But I mention nothing about my apothecary games there. That would make no sense. This is the position I'm taking and I am against the practice mentioned by HG! And I'd really like this clarified as most of my games are coming in collections!

I see the point but honestly I don't see why it is so very undesirable.

Well, I just gave my opinion regarding this practice, to instigate a discussion amongst the editors on site policy about this.

Problem is that if one person does it, others will copy the behavior, as this case shows, and before you know it every one has its full Curruculum Vitae in every page he published here.

It is different in cases where there is a clear relation with the CV you refer to. I also refer to Makromachy from the Megalomachy article, and vice versa, because the one is basically an enlarged version of the other. You (Jean-Louis) also have a progressive series of ever larger games with very similar piece sets. Such a reference is functional and useful.

What I consider undesirable is references (especially long lists of those) to CVs that are not related more to the CV of the article than hundreds of others, just because it happens to be your own invention. So a tell-tale sign is a reference to your own CV, while there are dozens of CVs that are just as similar to the CV of the article, or even more so, to which you don't refer. That a CV is also on, say, a 10x10 board, with a complete FIDE piece set plus a handful of fairies should not be considered a similarity that justifies referral, as there will be hundreds of CVs fitting that description. For that sort of vague similarities we already have the tag system.

We should ask ourselves if we think the site would be better if everyone would provide a complete list of all his inventions on every article he authors. And if that is the case, we should not rely on the authors doing it, but just let the server's article-display script automatically append it to every article. That would be quite easy to do. The script to do it exists already: you can admire its output through the personal page of the author.

The point is that the side builders have decided not to do that, even though plenty of info is automatically added to the text provided by the article author. So apparently we think it is better not to have such info on every article. And if having it on every article significantly detoriates the site, every article it is added to by the author also detoriates the site a bit. So we'd better put a stop to that as early as possible.

@Aurelian and HG: OK, I see the nuance. I was not sure of that. I agree with you that providing a full list of all his inventions in every page is not useful nor suitable.

The fact is that it was not striking me when I read that Wide Nightrider Chess page. I've seen there refs to Wide Chess and to Wide SOHO Chess which are similar to what I'm doing. There is even one to Omega Chess, which is from someone else. The ref to 3D Chess War is a bit less obvious but can be understood. I was focusing on this, so I was not sure that my own way of presenting was OK or not in your eyes.

And I had paid less attention to the rest of the page which is, this is true, less linked to Wide Nightrider Chess.

@HG, I did it first. But I think for me I explained why was that the case. Was I wrong as far as you can see? I'm wondering this as you say that if one person does it (me in this case), then it can perpetuate!

What I consider undesirable is references (especially long lists of those) to CVs that are not related more to the CV of the article than hundreds of others, just because it happens to be your own invention.

I do see Wide Chess mentioned in the Introduction, and that would be the appropriate place to include a link to it. The other two are not mentioned in the Introduction, and they don't seem related to this game.

The section called "Regarding Settings Files by the Author" would be more appropriate for his profile page, which this page already has a link to. In fact, the profile page already has a link to his Settings files, which makes this section inessential.

@HG, I did it first. But I think for me I explained why was that the case. Was I wrong as far as you can see? I'm wondering this as you say that if one person does it (me in this case), then it can perpetuate!

Well, I hadn't really payed attention to it, but IIRC it did draw some criticism, and you defended against that by saying it was impossible to have more than one Interactive Diagram on a page.

Now that isn't really true, and now that I look at it  I think the presentation as different articles is far from ideal. If this strategy would have been applied to Musketeer Chess, there would be hundreds of articles on it.

Variants that only differ in the pieces that start off-board can easily be combined: you could put both a Manticore and a Griffon in the table, and people can then put those they want to use on the gating rank. This is how I made a Diagram for Musketeer Chess. I your case it would have reduced the number of articles from 6 to 3. If the Waffle, Elephant and Frog had not started all in different locations, you could even have combined these, by leaving the piece out, and letting people move them from the table to the board first.

The section called "Regarding Settings Files by the Author" would be more appropriate for his profile page, which this page already has a link to. In fact, the profile page already has a link to his Settings files, which makes this section inessential.

Indeed. And that very same section was also appended to many other articles, where it is just as non-essential. It is spamming the site.

@ Fergus and H.G.:

I edited out the offending section from certain rules pages of mine (similar to how Jose used such sections on his pages). I meant it as a temporary measure until the day I may have had (28) presets finally published, along with rules pages (which can be favorited), which is a process currently taking ages for a lot people unfortunately. Now I'm afraid there will be not much notice/play at all of the 28 Settings Files (ready presets) of mine I was trying to advertise, even a bit, on certain rules pages of mine, to compensate for that they are 'buried' if and until any individual happens to look at my Personal Info page, and then Settings Files link, on their own initiative - a far less likely occurance than someone looking at certain rules pages of mine, I had guessed.

The author, Kevin Pacey, has updated this page.

Fergus wrote:

"...The section called "Regarding Settings Files by the Author" would be more appropriate for his [Kevin Pacey's] profile page..."

I've now put the meat of the content in that section (that was edited out by me) onto my profile page (also known as Person Information page), similar to how Jose has some such content on his profile page also. In my case I hope the content I added to my profile page will be there only temporarily. At least it will draw attention to my Settings Files link, for anyone who visits my profile page. - and leave a compact record behind if events in my life get in the way of my intentions.