Glitches

[yoella]

Has anyone ever made the right move and have it tell you it was wrong?

That's happened to me twice today, and it's really annoying. Especially when they were worth a lot of points.

[richard]

Hi Yoella,

By "right move" I assume you mean you made the move in the suggested solution and it was rejected rather than you were sure your move was correct but was rejected due to be different to the suggested solution.  I get lots of complaints about the latter (some justified, some not), however this is the first complaint I've had of the former  so this part of the system seems to be working for most people (there were some issues with correct moves not being shown in the problem history but this is different to what I think you are saying).  Sometimes I let go of the piece too soon when dragging the piece to the target square which leads to my solution being rejected as the piece is dropped on the wrong square, is it possible sometime like this is happening? Some users have reported that their browser slows down after a long session, it is possible that accurately dropping the piece may become harder as the computer begins responding more slowly to drag and drop movements.  Do you have more details on when this occurs? Which browser and operating system version are you running?

Thanks,
Richard.

[yoella]

I'm using Firefox and XP, and I'm fairly certain I clearly dropped the piece on the square, but honestly, it was late, so who knows. I've only encountered it a couple times since, so perhaps it was just a mishap. Maybe it's just too strict on how it registers where a move is being made to? Like, which part of the piece has to be over the square for it to count?

[richard]

Hi Yoella,

I had a closer look at this and my guess is that the following is happening:
- The drop position is dictated by the mouse pointer rather than the center of the piece.
- If you select the piece to move by clicking on the extreme edge of the piece then it is possible to drop the piece so it is almost perfectly centered in the target square but the mouse pointer is just outside the square hence registering the drop on the adjacent square.

This wouldn't show up very often as most of the time users drag the pieces by clicking close to the center of the piece rather than on the periphery.

I'd guess most people would expect the drop to be dictated by the piece location not the pointer location.  I'll see if I can change the behaviour the next time I update the UI (a couple of weeks away).

Regards,
Richard.

[leftwardknight]

It would be *way* cool if the target squares would somehow highlight as you dragged the pieces. This way you would know which square you were dropping on.

Great site.

[richard]

It would be *way* cool if the target squares would somehow highlight as you dragged the pieces. This way you would know which square you were dropping on.

Great site.

Excellent suggestion, I'll see how easy this will be to do.

Regards,
Richard.

[drahacikfm]

Another possible solution:  If the mouse pointer is in one square, and more than 50% of the piece is in another square, reject the move as being illegal.  (Not sure what happens if you make an illegal move.  Haven't wanted to try one for fear of losing rating points

[richard]

The new unreleased UI has move validity checking where illegal move attempts are ignored.  There is also an optional feature that during piece dragging will highlight the square which is the current drop target , hopefully this should make it very clear where the piece will land.

Regards,
Richard.