Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Nov 17, 2022 06:15 PM UTC:
I agree with these comments. There are at least two areas of concern why this page should not be published in its current state: the writing and the graphics.
The bad writing is a straight-forward issue. The author may not be a native English speaker or may just not be good at technical writing. That's ok - that's why we have editors. But editors should not publish something without doing the (sometimes significant) work of rewriting. And content submitters should not be surprised if no editor chooses to take the time to perform the editing - particularly if the content needs a lot of work and/or the idea isn't that good to begin with. The editors are volunteers and choose to work on what they consider to be valuable. I can say that for me, personally, how much work I am willing to put into bringing a page up to publication standards is directly proportional to how valuable I think the content is to begin with. Given that there are now thousands of Chess variants currently, it should be no surprise that, as time goes on, it is harder and harder to develop something new that is noteworthy to the community at large. This website is not a dumping ground for random ideas.
The graphics are another issue, but one that is less clear. I don't like the Galactic graphics but there have been valued members (e.g., Roberto Lavieri) who have chosen to use them as their preferred piece set. I think there is room for debate about what we should ask of submissions in this regard. There are trade-offs. But as I see it, this page has two main graphics problems: (1) There are two completely different sets, neither one of which is standard or recognizable, and (2) GIANT pointless images. This page is an extreme example, but there are lots of otherwise very good pages where the graphics are much larger than they probably should be.
In my view this page should be unpublished unless/until an editor takes the time to correct these issues.
I agree with these comments. There are at least two areas of concern why this page should not be published in its current state: the writing and the graphics.
The bad writing is a straight-forward issue. The author may not be a native English speaker or may just not be good at technical writing. That's ok - that's why we have editors. But editors should not publish something without doing the (sometimes significant) work of rewriting. And content submitters should not be surprised if no editor chooses to take the time to perform the editing - particularly if the content needs a lot of work and/or the idea isn't that good to begin with. The editors are volunteers and choose to work on what they consider to be valuable. I can say that for me, personally, how much work I am willing to put into bringing a page up to publication standards is directly proportional to how valuable I think the content is to begin with. Given that there are now thousands of Chess variants currently, it should be no surprise that, as time goes on, it is harder and harder to develop something new that is noteworthy to the community at large. This website is not a dumping ground for random ideas.
The graphics are another issue, but one that is less clear. I don't like the Galactic graphics but there have been valued members (e.g., Roberto Lavieri) who have chosen to use them as their preferred piece set. I think there is room for debate about what we should ask of submissions in this regard. There are trade-offs. But as I see it, this page has two main graphics problems: (1) There are two completely different sets, neither one of which is standard or recognizable, and (2) GIANT pointless images. This page is an extreme example, but there are lots of otherwise very good pages where the graphics are much larger than they probably should be.
In my view this page should be unpublished unless/until an editor takes the time to correct these issues.