29th November 2010

Chess Tempo now provides the ability to use chess engines running on your own machine to analyse positions and games on Chess Tempo. Any UCI engine such as Rybka, Stockfish etc can be used to supply analysis which is displayed directly in the Chess Database or Analysis board pages. Full access to this feature is available to Gold members only, you can view screen shots of the new analysis interface in action on the Membership descriptions page. The Engine Analysis section of the FAQ should be read before using the engine. There is also a new Engine Analysis Chapter in the user guide.

Other changes already introduced since the last major update include:

• A new option to avoid problems with ALTS was added.
• Performance graphs for play vs computer made available to gold members.
• An Explore button was added to Play vs Computer page. This allows viewing games in the database page where opening explorer stats can be examined for the lines you played, and engine analysis and game annotation performed.
• Custom problem sets now have personal ratings, allowing gold members to track future progress on previously unrated custom problem sets. For example you can get a personal rating for "Pin" or "Fork" sets.
• Personal tagging stats have been added to help users understand the degree to which other users agree or disagree with their tags.
• Alpha and "Good Companion" board piece styles now available.

Another thanks to the volunteer translators and beta testers who have again helped greatly with this release. User "anti" is now kindly helping with the French translation. If you would like to help out with either an existing or new translation, please send an email to translation@chesstempo.com

6th September 2010

Chess Tempo now has a new Chess Game Database. The database includes over 2 million games, including all the source games for the tactics and endgame problems. There is an opening explorer, to view statistics on the popularity and performance of opening moves. A player and openings search page are also available. The database can be searched via either a quick search or advanced search interface. Advanced search includes a material search and convenient endgame finder. Tactic and Endgame problems have convenient links to the source games the problems were extracted from. Custom problem sets can now include criteria based on matching the source game header information, such as player, player rating, opening name etc. The database is documented in a new user guide that covers most of the Chess Tempo features in detail. Many of the database features are available for all users, while some of the features such as material search, source game links and custom set integration are available only to Premium members, and some of those, only to Gold members. Please see the Membership descriptions page for details. This feature is still considered to be a public BETA release, please report any bugs you find in the Bug Report Forum.

The ability to play rated games against a computer has also been added. Several computer opponents have been created, each with a different strength setting. The computer opponents are given ratings and the user is matched against the computer opponent closest to their rating. In unrated mode, users can choose the target rating of their computer opponent and the closest matching opponent will be chosen. Premium users can launch the play vs computer feature from database and problem pages in order to play positions against the computer. More details can be found in the Chess Tempo User Guide. The Play versus Computer feature is also still in public BETA stage, bug reports are welcome. You need to have Java installed on your machine to be able to use this feature.

In order to fit more items into the navigation menu, a new navigation menu has been added to the top of all pages. Other changes introduced recently or as part of this release include:

• Changes to tag votes providing more visibility of voting patterns, and more convenient voting on existing tags.
• A Chess Tempo puzzle widget.
• A warning message is now shown to those users who are still using older browsers that may not work well on Chess Tempo. Logged in users can hide the warning permanently if desired.
• Click and Click piece movement support has been enabled. It can be used simultaneously with Drag and Drop, but either Click and Click or Drag and Drop can be disabled in the preferences.
• Piece movement sounds have been added to boards, they are turned off by default, but can be turned on in the preferences. The sounds are only available on the latest versions of Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari browsers.

A final thank you to the volunteer translators and beta testers who helped with this release. If you would like to help out with either an existing or new translation, please send an email to translation@chesstempo.com

10th May 2010

An analysis board is now available, it allows exploring different lines in a position after a problem is complete. The analysis board also allows your analysis to be copied directly to a new problem comment. The analysis moves (and annotations) are shown in problem comments, accompanied by a mini-board on which the position is displayed, and the moves can be played. Your own comments can now be deleted or edited (as long as they are the most recent comment to be made on a problem). Comments can also be voted up or down, comments with several down votes will be hidden from the default comment view, and users will need to click the "show all" button to see these comments. Please read the comment voting section of the Problem Comment Guidelines before using the voting system. For further details on these changes, and how to use them, please see the Analysis Board and Problem Commenting Questions section of the FAQ.

Several new custom problem set filtering options have been added. The ability to control the order problems are served from custom sets has also been added, allowing for the creation of custom problem sets that progress in difficulty as you go through the set. You can read more about these in the Advanced Custom Set Filters and Custom Problem Set Sorting sections of the membership description page. The advanced filtering and sorting features are only available to Gold members.

24th November 2009

Several new translations have been added to the site.

• Dutch (by 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.