Clickable moves in comments?

[revenant]

Hey Richard, a lightbulb just went on over my head.  Why not make each move referenced in people's comments be "alive" (i.e. clickable) in the same way each move is alive in the variations lists in the right margin?

Not a super-bright idea-bulb (more of an LED), and easier said than done, I know.  Especially the part where you also enable the blue triangular right-arrow and left-arrow buttons to move back and forth in a given variation.  But it's a big win if it can be programmed.  I paste some long variations & subvariations from Crafty 22.0 into my comments so I can "share the wealth" of the extensive CPU time I expend on fun problems.  Presently I guess those users who want to benefit from the analysis have to "Show PGN", paste into computer, and follow along manually.  I wonder how many find it's worth the trouble.  Whereas if they could just click on the moves, it would lower the barrier for them.  I certainly don't expect them to follow each line on their mental chessboard (I can't; wish I could).

When I organize subvariations and paste them in, I'm careful to stay consistently in algebraic notation with the correct move numbers.  In principle, not that hard for CT code to parse, no more difficult than PGN itself.  Other users who are in a bit more of a hurry make some very useful comments that unfortunately are not indexed with move numbers and are not in algebraic, just "RxN PxR" etc. which is sometimes ambiguous.  (Are two knights en prise?  Which knight is being taken, and who's taking it?)  I'm not sure what you can make out of those.  Maybe you can at least assume that a comment move that can refer to the main line, does refer to the main line.

If the feature is worth implementing, you could then also put something in the FAQ about how to make a properly parsable comment.

Thoughts?

[richard]

Hi Revenant,

I have some plans along these lines.  The general idea is to make a lot more use of the move list on the right and have an ability to add user suggested lines to any move in any line (main or otherwise).  Other users can then chose to optionally view those lines and make further comments on them.  I had planned to use a board to enter the moves but allowing a prescribed format for textual entry of the moves is probably also a good idea.

This requires a fairly big overhaul of the comments system and integration of some new features for storing and retrieving position/move information that a friend is helping out with some new code for at the moment (it would be possible to add something simple now , but I'd rather make this part of a larger rework instead of coming up with short term solutions I'd have to change again in the near future). As such , while this item has relatively high priority it will still be a few months off.

Regards,
Richard.

[revenant]

Good thinking, Richard.  Sounds like you've got matters under control on this issue as well as the many others you've responded to here in the Forum on return from your trip (great job!).

There's probably no perfect way to accommodate user comments because in the end it's us fallible humans making the comments and there's no automatic way for the system to differentiate the potentially valuable ones from the superficial (or downright off-topic) ones.  Similar obstacles exist in the implementation of tagging and also (over at the chessgames.com site) comments for whole chess games.  Once there's a lot of history it gets to be like amazon.com book reviews or IMDB movie reviews, where there are hundreds of comments but no way for a new user coming in "cold" to pry out the nuggets of wisdom without an exhaustive perusal.