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Author Topic: Major site upgrade  (Read 6692 times)
richard
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« on: May 21, 2008, 09:51:26 AM »

The site has just undergone a major update and there have been many improvements made.  Below is a summary of what has changed.  This will be the first of a two part update.  The first part that is now live includes improvements that will be available to all users.  The second update will contain subscription only updates and will occur as soon as testing is complete.

Given the scope of the changes it is likely that I've introduced new bugs during this update. Please report any unusual behaviour you notice as soon as possible.

IMPORTANT: You should log out of your account and force your browser to reload the page.  Depending on your browser and version you may also need to ask your browser to empty its cache.

Part 1- Improvements Available to All Users

General Board View
  - Row/Column Co-ordinates along board edge.
  - Change colour of source and destination squares of last move (so user can see where   move occurred if they look away).
  - Allow using arrow keys for moving through move sequences.
  - When dragging pieces, highlight the target square by changing the square's colour. This should make it very clear to the user where their piece is going to land thus avoiding some of the common reasons for "mouse slips".

Tactics View
 - Remove rating/tags/comments until problem complete. The idea here is to divulge less information about the problem in order to better model over the board conditions.
 - Move validity testing
   - Only valid moves accepted, illegal moves no longer fail a problem.
   - During piece dragging, valid squares marked green, invalid squares are marked red (optional feature,  off by default).
 - IMPORTANT: Blitz timing changes
     - Based on a suggestion from roq, the blitz timing has been modified to punish users more for time they use after their first move.  This is to prevent move guessing where the user hasn't worked out the tactic in their head but  play "hope" chess, thinking only one move ahead at a time. Time taken before the first move is assessed the same  as the old system but time taken after the first move is treated as twice as long as time before the first move. Hopefully this will encourage users to think through the position in a way more suited to over the board  play and thus allowing Chess Tempo training to translate more effectively to improved over the board  performance.

PGN Viewer
- Fixed bug in enpassant handling leading to some games with enpassant possibilities not being loaded.
- John Syer Has contributed:
  - Taken Piece Display.       
  - Optional display of game details fields.
  - Incremental game loading to avoid blocking UI when loading large game sets.

Problem Details View
- Show number of times a problem has been tried and that problem's success rate in the problem details view.
- When finishing session, dont hide the success rate info.
- Problem Set list (available from the View Problems page)
  - List of all problems
  - Sortable by each column, e.g. problem rating, number of moves, problem success rate etc.
  - Click on problem number to display that problem's details.
- Problem Comments List (available from the View problems page)
  - A list of comments for all active problems in the problem set, sortable by time of comment, problem id, username  or rating of commenter. This view provides much more visibility to recent comments and will hopefully encourage more responses to complaints or questions about problems in the set.
- Allow multiple tags per user per problem.  Previously users were only allowed to use one tag for each problem.

User Preferences
 - Added preferences link at top right of screen so that problem set/rating type can be set before going to tactics page. Non subscribing members have the same choice here standard or blitz.
 - Added chess piece style preferences for changing the images used for chess pieces.
 - Added chess piece size (and therefore board size) preference. The sizes range from small to rediculously large.
 - Added preferences and registration entry for users FIDE and USCF identification numbers. Will be used later to display title information for users as well as assess the efectiveness of Chess Tempo by looking at the relationship between users over the board rating changes and their Chess Tempo usage characteristics.

Front Page Summary Stats
- Added top taggers, quality raters and commenters lists on front page, hopefully this will encourage more tagging, and quality ratings.
- Added links to top users lists (and commenters).

User List
- Rank number provided in user list table.
- Switched to server side sorting to speed up display of users.
- Pages loaded incrementally from server instead of all at once.

User Stats Page
- Recent Problems display now sortable by most columns (i.e. can see recent problems sorted by rating, seconds taken etc).
- Recent problem list for free users increased from 50 to 100 problems.
- Problem attempt records are now being kept for all users as much as disk space allows, this means that while free users can see only their last 100 problems and view graphs for their last 1000 problems, if they choose to subscribe at a later time they will have access to a much longer history (hard drive space permitting). Unfortunately I've only just enabled this, so all users currently only have a maximum of 1000 attempts for each of blitz and standard,  but from now on the server will stop deleting attempts older than 1000 (at least until hard drive space becomes an issue).
- Highest and lowest rating and ranking for blitz and standard shown.
- Seconds spent on a problem was truncated to 5 minutes in the past, truncation will still occur for ratings purposes, but the full time spent will be shown in the recent attempts history.


Problem Set
- Removed many ambiguous mates (mates with longer mates or material winning alternatives to the mate).
- Removed mates where the mating side already started with large material advantage.
- Some new problems added with new generator to replace some of the lost problems, still generating many more.
- Developed a simple statistical model to predict the rating and average time of new problems based on their length, new  problems initial ratings and average time is now set using this model rather than setting them to 1500, this should  make large problem set updates less painful for users (and their ratings!) in the future.

Other Minor Improvements
- Fix colour of all standard blue links, default blue was unreadable.
- Added submit button to problem voting (confusing user interaction with previous behaviour).

Part 2 - Improvements available to paid subscribers (Coming Soon)

- FEN output for problem positions.
- Show common mistakes.
  - Track incorrect move attempts and in the problem details display the move number, move , number of users who made the move and average rating of the user that made the mistake.
- Minimum 10,000 problem history.
  - Subscription users are guaranteed at least 10,000 problem attempts to be kept.
  - Recent problems list limited only by length of history instead of 100 most recent.
  - Statistics Graphs cover full history instead of most 1000 recent problems.
  - It is undecided at this stage, but a "super premium" subscription may allow effectively infinite problem history.
- Searchable Problem Set
   - Filter/Search problem set list based on following criteria:
      - Rating Range (e.g. all problems between 1000 and 1500 or all problems > 2000)
      - Rating Type (blitz/standard)
      - Number of moves (e.g all problems with more than 5 moves)
      - Tactic Type (from tags), e.g. all problems tagged with fork or pin.
      - Mates or non-mates.
      - Quality Rating , e.g. all problems rated 4-5 stars.
      - Problem Attempt Criteria
        - All problems
        - Failed Problems
        - Correct Problems (all problems the user has attempted and got correct)
        - Seen Problems (all problems in the users recorded history)
        - Unseen Problems (all problems NOT in the users recorded history, i.e. not seen)
        - Unsolved Problems (problems user has not solved yet, i.e. unseen or never got correct).
        - Always Failed Problems (problems the user has tried but never solved).
      - Combinations of the above, so for example users can search for all mates with more than 4 moves and a rating below 2000 that have at least 3 star ratings and have not been solved by the user yet.

- Create Problem Sets based on Problem Set Search.
  - Create a problem set from a problem search and make it available in the tactics view as a custom unrated problem set.  Using problem attempts history, user can do powerful dynamic problem sets, so for example a problem set with only those problems the user keeps getting wrong that are rated under 1200 with 3 moves or less.

- Extended Problem Sets (all of these will be unrated)
 - New default problem sets.
   - Unrated, same selection process as rated but without impacting the user or problem rating.
   - Dynamic problem sets based on users history. Problem set fluctuates based on problems the user  attempts, for example user could select the "Always failed problems" set and as the user solves problem correctly  the problem set shrinks to include only those problems they had previously failed and never managed to get right.

« Last Edit: May 23, 2008, 12:28:17 PM by richard » Logged
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