Shall we update Talkchess' software?

[kinderchocolate]

Julien, please I beg you, please convince them to get a PGN viewer. I'm sick of the 10 pages Houdini analysis. Also, can you please change the Engine Origins to public?

[michiguel]

Julien, please I beg you, please convince them to get a PGN viewer. I'm sick of the 10 pages Houdini analysis. Also, can you please change the Engine Origins to public?

We don't have the power to change that. But let's focus on the software for now.

Miguel

[Ron Murawski]

I ask for thread view. I nearly never use flat view.

In flat view it is hard to see who answered to a post. Therefore people
quote far too much. And it still does not work.

In thread view this is easy to see and you can also see in what part of the
thread a post belongs. Typically a long thread has some active topics
and a lot of dead ends.
In thread view I can see from the color of the links which post I have
already seen and which are new.

I am not sure if the thread view issue is important enough to vote against
new software. Therefore I have not voted (yet).

Harald

+1 Harald!

Several years ago the Winboard Forum switched from being an active and successful threaded forum into being a sleepy flat forum. It is very difficult to have good technical discussions without threading. I agree that in a perfect world that all posters using flat view could judiciously quote what they are responding to, but in real life it doesn't happen. People tend to quote everything or nothing.

With threaded view I can follow sub-threads that interest me, and ignore other parts that don't. With flat view I'm forced to wade through both wheat and chaff.

Ron

[lucasart]

- ability to use many plugins (starting with the much needed pgn-replayer)

That would be great!

The only draw back, for a few users, is that the thread view would be unavailable.

That's not a draw back: removing thread view is a great feature! Typically in thread view you have pages and pages of bla bla going on about a single thread, and you can't see the other threads without clicking flat view (which is the first thing I do when logging to this forum).

Another thing that is annying is people who puts very very long quotes in their message, rather than quoting selectively (or who put pages and pages of engine output as quoted text). If there was a way to open/close a quote block in a click, that would be a very good feature too.

I like the forum as it is, but change is always welcome if it makes it even better!

[Mike S.]

I have always critizised the fullquotes and the simple, effective solution would be to remove "quote" from the buttons.

[Eelco de Groot]

I just fear if it is going to cost money the owner may not be in a position to do that. It might really help a lot if we could find a way to finance any costs by ourselves. There was of course once a donation option on the ChessUSA page, but I do not know if it is still there, and some years ago when we started the new forum it could not be accessed from The Netherlands. If this is going to take very long (years ), I am a bit afraid people will get frustrated so it may be better to first ask what the possibilities are. Also the end of the year is a busy time for the shop. We have been talking about an upgrade before, also our webmaster needs to have some time available for any upgrade.

Will it be possible to migrate our archives to the new software. Instead of threaded view some forums have the option of going to the parent post, that would be enough for me but I don't think that is possible in Open Chess for instance. I never use the replay option on other forums when available but some users really like that apparently (Linux users don't have a lot of options of using a comfortable GUI for this maybe? There is for instance HIARCs now, for MAC as well as Windows, but is that available on Linux?)

Regards, Eelco

[Don]

Julien, please I beg you, please convince them to get a PGN viewer. I'm sick of the 10 pages Houdini analysis. Also, can you please change the Engine Origins to public?

I also hate seeing pages after page of chess program analysis output. New forum software puts this in a scroll-box so that you are not forced to scroll page after page to get to the next post. These are just 2 of the many features.

[S.Taylor]

I indeed voted yes.
But in truth, I prefer the old system in many ways.
The thread view in this system is much worse than the thread view in the old system. So i therefore don't use it.
Now we are already talking about an even newer system? OK, why not. That's if it is more user friendly, and not less user friendly.

A feature i like about the present system is that i can see all new posts every time i come back to it. This should not be absent in the next one.

[Paloma]

+1 Ron and Harald

[Don]

I ask for thread view. I nearly never use flat view.

In flat view it is hard to see who answered to a post. Therefore people
quote far too much. And it still does not work.

In thread view this is easy to see and you can also see in what part of the
thread a post belongs. Typically a long thread has some active topics
and a lot of dead ends.
In thread view I can see from the color of the links which post I have
already seen and which are new.

I am not sure if the thread view issue is important enough to vote against
new software. Therefore I have not voted (yet).

Harald

+1 Harald!

Several years ago the Winboard Forum switched from being an active and successful threaded forum into being a sleepy flat forum. It is very difficult to have good technical discussions without threading. I agree that in a perfect world that all posters using flat view could judiciously quote what they are responding to, but in real life it doesn't happen. People tend to quote everything or nothing.

With threaded view I can follow sub-threads that interest me, and ignore other parts that don't. With flat view I'm forced to wade through both wheat and chaff.

Ron

You don't really need to expound the benefit's of thread view. I think we all know it has certain advantages and what those advantages are and we respect that. Ideally we should all get what we want but life is always full of these kinds of tradeoffs.

For me personally I would quickly adapt to thread view if that is all there was, so it's not a big deal to me. I would have to say that I only slightly prefer flat view. I'm like that with most of things that people delight in getting all religious about, such as programmer indentation style. People will fight endlessly over that and I could care less. I'll use whatever style everyone else is using. Same with aliases, I prefer people use their real name but I would never lose any sleep over this one. In OpenChess alias are allowed. No big deal. Different things have different importance to different people.

If this is a really big issue for you then you should vote for keeping the current site, but it will be changed sooner or later anyway regardless of what we want because at some point it will simply become unsupportable. Nobody is ever going to add new features to this.

So people should ask themselves whether they are willing to adapt to something better which won't be the exactly the same and whether what you get is worth anything you lose. I think it comes down almost solely to only this one issue because as far as I can tell everything else is superior.