Another few small changes:
The feed on the front page is useful, because it is sorted in date order. Newer moves and comments are at the top.
The stats page is a concession towards everyone's competitive urges. I've toyed with the idea of a site-wide leader board, but that'd encourage a lot more (over-)competitiveness and thus cheating. Sticking with the "friendly game of chess" approach I'm keen to avoid such problems. However it's always fun to be a little competitive with your friends, so being able to track your games seemed like a reasonable compromise.
As you can see from my stats page I'm only winning about a third of my games. So now you know I'm not joking when I say on my profile page that I'm "not that good at chess"!
updated: 2009-01-26 05:18:11
It's getting better and better( I still thik being able to scroll comments/previous moves whilst keeping the board at the top would be good). Another suggestion (are these annoying?) Being able to sort the home page list of games by number of moves, date last played, abc by opponent etc. would be a nice and useful feature) maybe.
Sorting should be pretty easy to do. Will add it to the TODO list...
Don't worry, getting suggestions isn't annoying (as long as they aren't too crazy...)
Thanks. but still not liking the board-always-at-top idea, huh?
Nope. ;^)
Though why again did you want it? Might be able to come up with an alternative solution.
Just find that having something that scrolls inside something else that scrolls gets old fast.
I want to have visual access to the board at all times, whilst be able to look down at previous moves, comments etc. Maybe that isn't anything to do with frames?!
Well if you want to look through the previous moves you can always browse them. Just click on a move and then you get forward/back arrows to run through all the moves. Doesn't help with the comments though.
I do know what you mean about wanting to able to see the board when looking at moves/comments, but it's just frames are really horrible. I like the simplicity of the board at the top and the moves below. With a scroll-wheel on your mouse it's pretty easy to flick between board and moves/comments.
There are two things that I could do that might help:
Or a "third way" could be to have a button you can press to turn on frames temporarily...
Yes, great. More ideas, from my walk home from work: a) A switch to turn a 'help' mode so not only does a selected piece enable the possible moves to shown but also positions where the piece can be captured a light in a 3rd colour. It might be a chess-tutor-too-far, or help people making stupid mistakes. You could choose to allow it or not when starting games then if chosen it would be writ large "You allowed help-mode for this game" or "Your opponent is using help-mode"?! b) I want to delete 'active' games from my list, or at least hide them as some games haven't got passed 3rd move for a month! c) A Forum to accompany the site? I want to make suggestions but they might not be under one of your blog headings. Scrub that - Forums are annoying and promote geek-speak. Surely I'm getting annoying now? How do you know how to do all this?! I'd also love to know how people have heard about it. The map idea, in 4-D, could show the history of the site as people joined etc.?!
In the future I'd quite like to have a way for people to run simple tournaments. Strictly opt-in only. I imagine there'd be groups of people who want to compete with each other like that. Again though I need to get some more core stuff done first.
One big feature I've been mulling over is the ability to undo moves. I need to get the balance right on it, so it can't be abused, but I think it might make things a bit more beginner friendly without being too much of a chess tutor/helper. Just gets a bit fiddly with a move potentially being there for a while, then getting undone, then a new move made, but the opponent not seeing that the move was changed and them making a wrong move...
Don't worry about suggesting ideas. At the end of the day I can just pick and choose what I like the sound of...
If you could click on a "mark game as inactive" that would be good, rather than having to wait 30 days. Someone might only make a move every 29 days. Game 1000 could have been auctioned for charity! I like the tournament/undo ideas, like you say, if you can suss it out. What do you see as the 'core stuff' you mention?
By core stuff I meant signing up, playing chess etc. Whereas a forum or similar things wouldn't be strictly necessary for playing games of chess.
At the end of the day I've only got limited time, so keeping the features to a minimum, but making sure they work well is usually the best strategy. The fewer features there are the less there is to go wrong!
Anyway, all of this talk does filter into my brain, so some of it will get done at some point...