Why are PGNs still hard to get by?

Discussion of chess software programming and technical issues.

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Sesse
Posts: 300
Joined: Mon Apr 30, 2018 11:51 pm

Why are PGNs still hard to get by?

Post by Sesse »

Two frustrations this Christmas:
  • Why don't simply (human) tournaments post their live PGNs directly on the web page? They're small, static files; why do you care whether 200 people poll them instead of 20?
  • In that vein, why is state of the art still “poll this PGN, which may or may not be complete, every second to see if anything changed”, even for blitz? Long-poll is a thing. WebSockets is a thing. PubSub is a thing.
I'd love to actually do something about #2, but without knowing a large group of relevant tournament directors, it doesn't actually do any good :-)