Ratings & Comments
Are there any principles you use to evaluate or design chess variants? One I like is where each piece type should be able to threaten each other piece type without being threatened in return.
That's not quite a good principle, if left unqualified. A queen can threaten just about anything and, except for a knight, other pieces can threaten the queen but be taken by it possibly, in FIDE chess, for example.
From Fergus' article on designing good CVs:
'Include pieces with differing powers of movement. Each can attack the other without being attacked back.'
I think what he might have wrote instead of 'Each' was 'Some' or 'Many'.
https://www.chessvariants.com/opinions.dir/fergus/design.html
I consider non-paired pieces possible exceptions. It's not an absolute rule. Of course, there are good games that totally ignore this idea.
Has anyone besides me gotten a sudden alarming increase in Google pop-up ads showing on this CVP site? They give me a way to get rid of each kind of ad, one at a time, after clicking through about 3-4 small boxes the size of the original ad.
I have not seen any pop-up ads here. Ads should be limited to the header, sidebars, and footer, all out of the way of content. Can you provide a screenshot if it happens again?
Sorry, I guess I meant footer (i.e. not pop-up, I guess I don't understand that term - smallish ads appear sneakily from bottom, going upward on my screen). Maybe I thought it was a new trend by Google (and it's not?), but it seemed the footer ads appear especially when I am on my own game logs page.
The footer ads take up enough space (and my attention), at least today, that I wanted to get rid of them (maybe I'm just in a poor mood?), so I started trying to by clicking on the ads' small 'x' in the upper right of their 'box' - a never-ending exercise it seems, as ads (always say they are Google ads) are soon replaced by different ads.
Last week I went to a NY Post horoscope page that was evidently infected in some sort of way, but my Microsoft Defender later detected no fresh threats to my laptop. Since then, the only thing that might have changed, I thought, was detectible on this CVP site, but I guess I was wrong if footers are usual (I paid them no notice earlier, if they were appearing for a while now).
I don't recall how to share a screenshot (maybe I had a different laptop when I once did for you, Fergus), but one image with a 'slider-footer' is located at (according to screenshot I took):
www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/logs.php?stat=ongoing&age=7776000&sort=priority&userid=panther
if that works for you/helps. The footer may be what you expect, but I find it gets in the way a bit of my game log list, until I scroll further down, or remove the footer ad.
C:\Users\User1\Pictures\Capture.PNG
It happens to me too, but not on every page. I have a large sidebar on the left. Sometimes I have in addition a large footer. Here it is a large header. Having both is a bit invasive.
@ Fergus:
I was able to email you my screenshot, at least (like the last time I did a screenshot for you, when I think I had a different laptop/desktop computer).
I was able to email you my screenshot, at least (like the last time I did a screenshot for you, when I think I had a different laptop/desktop computer).
I didn't see your email, but I only asked for a screenshot when you were saying it was a pop-up ad, as I do not run pop-up ads on this site. Since you later said it was actually a footer ad, that's nothing unusual, as I do run those.
This description doesn't fit:
smallish ads appear sneakily from bottom, going upward on my screen
and I've never seen such, and I expect they shouldn't be possible.
if that works for you/helps. The footer may be what you expect, but I find it gets in the way a bit of my game log list, until I scroll further down, or remove the footer ad.
The footer ad goes below the content and above the comments. So, it should not be getting in the way of your game log list.
If what you're seeing is like what I'm seeing, there should be a chevron on a tab to the left. If you click on that, the ad will retreat into the bottom of the screen.
smallish ads appear sneakily from bottom, going upward on my screen
You might be speaking of the sidebar ads, though that's not quite an accurate description. There are no ads that change position on their own. The ads will move only when you scroll the page, just like other content on the page does. However, most of the content on the page has static positioning, which means it can move off the screen if you scroll far enough away from it. But the sidebar ads have sticky positioning, which means they stop moving up once they reach the top of the screen.
Yes Bob, that's what I think I am seeing - and clicking on the chevron makes the ad retreat to the bottom of the screen, as I found out later, too.
@ Fergus:
I sent you an email 'Kevin Pacey's screenshot' at 4:30pm today, at your email address XXXXXXX at yahoo dot com. I can forward it again to you if you cannot find it - unless my laptop has been unusually hacked, somehow.
After I wrote that I thought it was on second thought a footer ad, I searched for that term on Google and found on an early search result that apparently there is such a thing as a 'slider footer' - though I'm not sure that's what I am seeing on CVP site, especially on my own Game logs page (maybe such ads choose their 'victim' based on page(s) he visits a lot?!).
[edit: it just happened again, and I did not touch the sidebar to scroll, at all]
edit2: From a Google blurb (maybe there's other newish types of ads out there now?):
Slider ads (also called floating ads or catfish ads) are banner ads that slide in or fade in at the bottom of a page. The slider ad moves along with the page as the user scrolls up or down and stays visible unless the user closes it through the closing button.Oct 6, 2015
I edited my previous post, in case anyone missed it.
@ Fergus:
I just sent you a fresh email. Letting you know in case it's mistaken for spam.
I got your email, and since the ad was placing itself at the bottom of the screen instead of at its place on the page, I purged the ads of google ads in the footer before selecting an ad.
@ Fergus
A footer slider ad appeared again just now, at bottom of my Game logs page.
Further testing shows that the bottom screen ad is still showing up on Chrome even when code I've added tells me there is no footer ad in the HTML. Meanwhile, I have not seen it in other browsers. This may be because Chrome is owned by Google. So, I would recommend switching from Chrome to another browser. If you want a browser that supports Chrome extensions, you can switch to a Chromium-based browser that is not owned by Google, such as Edge or Vivaldi. If Chrome extensions are not important to you, then Firefox is also a good choice.
For now, I'm going to allow Google footer ads again and do some further testing.
Well, I am using the Samsung browser on my Galaxy tablet, and some pages ago I also got an ad that had settled itself at the bottom of my screen. It was easy to dispoe of, though (by clicking on a kind of tab it had).
I use Google (and gmail) though I never knowingly became a Chrome user (Google all but tries to shove it down people's throats, similar to Microsoft's trying to force people to finish installing Edge). I cannot seem to figure out if I am still not a Chrome user, despite instructions online on how to find out.
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I had changed slugify() to replace spaces with hyphens instead of underscores, but it seems that Game Courier depends upon changing them to underscores. So, I switched it back, and your game log displays again.