Chess Tempo

24th November 2009

Several new translations have been added to the site.

• Dutch (by phyle and phdevos)
• French (by arna, antoyo and najull)
• Italian (by andreacoda and igrino)
• Polish (by alefzero and szarlej)
• Portuguese (by alvarofrota and dahora)
• Spanish (by tornado)
• Turkish (by philiposi)

A big thank you to those who dedicated many hours to help with the translations, including those who helped with testing.

You can access language specific pages via nl.chesstempo.com, fr.chesstempo.com, it.chesstempo.com, pl.chesstempo.com, pt.chesstempo.com, es.chesstempo.com and tr.chesstempo.com. In most cases these URLs will not be required as the site should choose the correct language automatically.

If you find a bug in a translation, or if you would like to help translate ChessTempo into your language, either send an e-mail to translation@chesstempo.com or post in the appropriate thread in the translation forum. The preferred language of problem comments and forum posts is still English, however new non-English forums have been added for users who would like to post in their native language.

A new problem generator has also been completed. Improvements include:

• Computer analysis is now shown for the best opponent moves, this makes it easier to understand unexpected opponent moves.
• All longer mates will now be considered as alternatives.
• More human like responses for some opponent moves.
• Improved Pruning - Less tactics finishing too early.
• Deeper computer analysis on moves close to the alternative threshold to help clarify their status.
• Tactics with moves just under the alternative threshold are rejected.
• Many computer lines truncated to avoid showing silly moves at the edge of the search horizon.
• Many other small improvements.

Initially these improvements will only be apparent on new problems, however the generator will update existing problems over the next few weeks.

These changes will not eliminate all "needs more moves" or "needs different opponent move" situations. Please continue to use those tags where appropriate.

Several changes have been made to the stats graphs:

• A new candlestick graph shows rating fluctuations over each day in the last month, thick vertical lines show the start and end ratings for the day, and thin vertical lines show the high and low ratings for the day. Available to gold members only.
• Rating and Percentile rank graphs are now zoomable by selecting the area to be zoomed with the mouse.
• Axis labels now use more regular intervals.
• Rating distribution graphs have been merged into one graph and so the correct/incorrect distribution is now available to both silver and gold members.

For premium members, non auto-renewing membership subscriptions are now available. You can now pay for a single month or year without having to worry about your subscription auto-renewing after you have stopped using the site. Read more about the different membership options and their benefits.

10th September 2009

The first of hopefully many translations of the site has been released today. The initial languages available are German and Swedish. Thanks to c.h.andas and msiipola who have both put in a huge amount of time translating into those languages. People who have their browser default language set to one of the supported languages will have the language selected by default, all users can select any language they like with the language selector in the top right of all (non-forum) pages. Please note that the preferred language of problem comments and forum posts is still English. If you would like to donate your time to helping with translations to your language, please email translation@chesstempo.com. If you notice errors in the translation, you can also send translation bug reports to that address. The language specific pages can also be reached via de.chesstempo.com and sv.chesstempo.com, although accessing the site via chesstempo.com and using the language selector is the preferred option.

The main focus of development work over the last few months has been on features not yet ready for release, however a number of other minor changes were made without news announcements, these include:

• A "Start Dialog" was added to the tactics and endgame pages which prompts the user before the first tactic is shown.
• A new confirmation dialog warns users when they attempt to leave a page while a problem is still active (previously this would automatically fail the problem).
• A bug in en-passant checking was fixed, previously users were not punished if they played en-passant in a problem where en-passant was not the correct answer.
• Some bugs in endgames have been fixed, there are still a few more (relatively infrequent) bugs to resolve before endgames can be considered a non-BETA release.
• Username tooltips where added to usernames displayed in comments. These show the rating details for each user when the mouse pointer is held over the commentorr's username.
• Minor FAQ updates.
• Several other small UI bug fixes and improvements.