Just tossing it up. I hope the change hasn't freaked you all out. Almost as much as I hope we didn't lose to much data or too many settings! It's not terribly clear what is supposed to have come over and what not, other than the users, forums, and posts. Sorry if you lost some settings, etc.

Coming features will include a shoutbox (live chat). Other aspects of this "bull**** service" will also be back on track and under reform.

Ah, posting enabled. This is a very cool upgrade Mig. Thanks.

Ditto that. This looks nice. The Shout Box alone is worth the price of admission.

This is interesting...but I also miss the banging head. I used him often. Bring him back, Mig...if you can

The shout box is too small - or everyone's writing too much.

Yah, will see about widening he left column.

Looks very nice! Keep it up, Mig!!

It is going to take a while for me to figure what button is where. Intial learning curve. Thats ok.

P.S. funny emoticons

Suggestion 1. How about a different theme color for every day of the week. Should be pretty easy to implement?? In other words, by the color you can identify which day of the week it is. Btw, I don't want to freak you out with my suggestions, Mig.

Suggestion 2. Could the information message be this post is modified instead of this thread is modified when you edit it??

Looks like a great upgrade! A couple of my PMs seem to be missing, but they were both created today. But that's not a big deal. Also, one PM that was created earlier, but that was updated today seems fine.


I don't remember previous version having colors.

Or an ability to embed videos:

How do I adjust the board clock time to match my actual time here at my house?


Chess Fan

Okay, I figured it out on my own, and now, I have adjusted to the correct time; so that the board time is now the same time as the time here at my house.


Chess Fan

One interesting thing is that member numbers seem to have changed. Before I was User 1312, now it's 1291.

Some features are really cool. For example,

1. You can send multiple private messages (upto 5 folks) but you got remember all their names. Or have a buddy list and select from that. This really helps when you have to send PMs to hundreds of folks for a TONC invite.

2. 200 PMs is really cool. 60 sometimes is a little less, especially when you send a long post to a guy who has maxed his PMs out. It is particularly irritating when you have written a long pm and clicked send, only to see that stupid message of maxout and your message is suddenly lost.

3. The little chat window is cool (on the left hand side). Then you have the users who are online.

4. Ofcourse, there are several new features that still need to be explored.

Complaints (I am a bad guy).
1. The colour contrast is kind of irritating. Everything is in light colour in this new board. Seems very uncolourful to me.

2. Don't know why they give the cookie information to the user. What will most ninjas do with it anyways?

You can switch to a layout with a black background (select ubbthreads-dark on the bottom of the page), but it still looks a bit messy. I suppose Mig will still do some tweaking. I kind of liked the layout of the old forum, very clear and elegant, I hope it's possible to get something similar. Otherwise the new features are nice.

Is the member number not shown with the posts anymore? I can only see it in the profile now. Also, my rank is suddenly given as "Member", although the post count is still at 3621. One more little thing, the avatars seem to be enlarged, which looks a bit strange.

edit: ah, now that I made a post my rank is shown as Ninja again.

Yeah, I agree with littlefish here, in that, I definitely liked the overall layout of the previous ChessNinja Message Board *much* better!

However, maybe, after all of this "tweaking" is done to this new Message Board, we will be able to, hopefully, have a new Board that has a similar look to the previous Board.

Other than that, yes, I very much like the new features on this new Message Board, *especially* this new live chat "shout box!"


Chess Fan

At last: custom titles! If only they had come around before being a "Queen" got into my head in a more or less foundational and eternal way.

Are non-moderators allowed to delete their own posts now? Sometimes we get tired of clearing away the threads rondino accidentally posts in the night.

And do we have Off-topic polling?

I don't think non-mods can set their own custom titles, which means you should make them up for us :P

Hey yes, I used to be Kitty Cat Ninja. Actually I would prefer Her Royal Highness Fomer-Mod Olympian Chess Ninja.

Not sure how or if I can edit another user's profile. Maybe admin status is required.

Why am I not invisible anymore? How doyou make yourself invisible?

Under "My Stuff" select "Preferences." Then click the button for "Hide from Who's Online."

The old avatars were, I forget, but something like 50x50. The new ones are 80x80, so they took your old one and stretched it out to a larger size, which always results in a loss of quality.

I've already fixed that on mine. I simply took the same photo, and made an 80x80 avatar. I think I cropped it almost identically to the old avatar, but since it's no longer stretched, it no longer looks as blurry.

That is true. But, it depends on your avatar's dimensions too. For example, LF's avatar is 48x48 and there is a loss of quality with the new board's dimension of 80 X 80. However, for guys like GC (his avatar is something like 98 x 97 I think), the quality has improved. So, one has to tailor his/her avatar to this new dimension of 80 x 80 to get clearer images. But, interestingly, the existing set of images (like CF's) are still in 48 x 48 and those need to be modified too.

Okay, it was time to redesign my avatar anyway. Just out of curiosity, why does HK's new avatar at a size of 48x49 not appear stretched? And btw, isn't it possible anymore to add a photo to the profile?

The distortion probably isn't enough to be noticable. Squeezeing a 49x48 picture to 48x48 doesn't result in nearly the amount of distortion you'd get if you squeezed a 64x48 picture to 48x48.

I thought it's 80x80 now? The other avatars do seem to be stretched to that size, only HK's doesn't.

Well. HK uses what is known as "stock avatar" (the limited number of avatars that Chessninja lets you choose yours from). I have divorced Anna Ushenina for a baseball now and it goes back to 48x48 dimension now.

But, since you want to retain your "fish" identity visually, you don't have very many options but create a new image yourself. You have become really little now.

The stock avatars appear to be smaller than 80x80. I imagine you can have any avatar 80x80 or smaller.

Incidentally, is the Shout Box not working?

So, how do I modify my avatar to make it look right here on this new Message Board?


Chess Fan

Indeed, at this present time, it appears that the Shout Box is NOT working!


Chess Fan

I still don't get it. Why are the new stock avatars displayed at their original size of 48x48, while other avatars are stretched to 80x80?

I don't know, but if you want to do something about it, one could just save one of the stock avatars in Windows Paint, expand it to 80x80, and upload it as a "new" avatar (though it might get a bit blurry that way).


Another thing, the (mega-cool) Shout Box is still down, and was down all day yesterday too. It was working Friday.

The Delete Post button doesn't seem to work, but it's not clear if it's supposed to work for anyone except Mods. You weren't able to delete your posts in the old board either.

I think inserted images are not being shown.

I don't see anything in the shout box any more. It could be something to do with my login id. Would you be able to fix that Mig?

Yeah, the Shout Box does not seem to be working again.


Chess Fan

It seems posting in certain non-Roman character sets crashes the shoutbox. Someone suggested disabling multi-language support as a preliminary measure.

I once even saw that Krish had tried to post in non-Roman characters (don't know which ones, I just got the Unicode error sign for characters I don't have a font for) but the box was otherwise working fine. This on Epiphany 2.14.3 on Debian (Etch) GNU/Linux.

Internet Explorer has unicode problems with the shout box. Other browsers okay. Next update of board software will fix it, but that might be a while. Until then I'll keep an eye out to delete any problem shouts.



img tags fixed.

Delete works differently for different people. You get an hour or so to delete your own posts in most boards. After that, only mods.

I'm still using IE 6. Would an upgrade to IE7 help, or do I need to break down and get a real browser?

Sam, I was testing if the shout box supported multiple languages. By that I mean, non-latin or non-cyrillic languages. Typically, I was trying to see if it could work for Indian languages (although almost all Indian ninjas prefer English for written communication). Curiously, it posts 2 shouts without any problem and crashes on the third one. And happens only on IE as Mig observed earlier (any IE version, so IE 7.0 isn't going to fix this problem). Mig had momentarily prevented keying in any Unicode chars but now has removed it (with the hope that nobody repeats it). Time to curtail my inevitable curiosity I think. When it crashed again yesterday, I reported to GC explaining the problem.

One thing I just noticed looking at the User Lists.

There are 90 pages of User Accounts.

Arranged in order of posting volume, Pages 37-90 have not written a single post. In other words, approximately 60% of the existing Ninja accounts, some going back to 2002, have never posted at all. (Think of all the Congratulations they've missed out on!)

Pages 17-37 have written 10 or fewer posts.

Are these accounts supposed to exist forever, or should they be deactivating after enough non-use?

Yeah and this messageboard needs more babes.

I think this problem was mentioned on the old board too. WTF

One thing I noticed, looking at the User List. Some people seem to have their Member Titles, and some don't.

For example, Inky and Crumhorn are listed as "Ninja". Ed Yetman and Knight Tour are just listed as "Member". All four were Ninjas under the old system. Could this have something to do with not posting since the board upgrade was loaded?

I wanted to change my username to Samantha Hardwick, IV but it doesn't seem to be possible on the new board.

Gee, that's a drag. (no pun intended)

Thats not what I was going for Sam.




I mean I can lower my expectations in the face of reality but even that has a limit.

I suppose it does. After the board upgrade my title was also shown as Member, and right after I made my first post it changed back to Ninja.

Looks like the problem with images has been fixed. I started some test messages and could see the image in the preview window in all forums.


One other thing. In the new setup, are all messages in this forum automatically e-mailed to the Mods? Or only the Help Forum? Or both? Or neither?

Another problem I'm noticing. I'm having trouble posting diagrams. For example, the final position from Game 2:

[img]http://www.eddins.net/steve/chess/diagram.php?fen=2k4r/p5p1/b1p1n3/4p3/1BPrP3/P1R3KP/B1R3P1/8[/img]

I see the raw text here, rather than any diagram. It definitely worked on the old software. I thought it might be a problem with this one site, so I tried diagrams using other programs:

[img]http://www.france-echecs.com/diagramme/imgboard.php?fen=rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR[/img]

[img]http://www.jinchess.com/chessboard/?pos=rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR[/img]

Nope. Strike Three. But Images are working on the new board now, as we can see:



So I don't know what the problem is with diagrams.

Probably has something to do with the lack of extension. The software doesn't read that link as an image because there's no .jpg or .gif at the end. Just a guess. I'll check. I'm surprised it worked on the old board.

Are all postings in this forum automatically mailed to the Mods, or is that only the Help Forum?

CUS-TOM TI-TLES!

I second that motion.

Get Firefox 3 and become a man!

(Really, it's excellent and the add-ons are great!)

I don't get emails when someone posts here. Maybe Mig does, but I have a hunch that SachBinger is bogarting them all.

Maybe that's it. It definitely worked before though, because you were the one who showed how it worked:

Fen to diagram testing

Actually, I was thinking of trying Google's new Chrome Browser, but nobody seems to know too much about it's capabilities yet.

Well, well, it seems as though 'ol Petrosianic got the Delete button to work *very well* for him, in that, he was able to post approximately 4,000+ posts, (most of them only about one letter in length), and then delete most of them *very quickly* in order for him to be able to take over the Number One spot in the all-time Top Posters list here on this Message Board.

Indeed, nice work, Petrosianic!


Chess Fan

One thing I've noticed. This may be a bug feature in the program that can't be changed, but it's worth noting: The Quick Reply box assumes that your message is a response to the last post posted.

Any time you reply to a message, it tells you who you're responding to. Like if I reply to a Crumhorn post, there will be a little thing in my message that says "Re: Crumhorn", with a link back to his post. This can be useful. If his post was several pages ago, I have a direct link back to it.

But if you use the Quick Reply box, it automatically assumes that you're replying to the post immediately above it. So, if Ken writes a 15 paragraph post about Mesopotamian Culture in the Nothing Thread, and I write the next post using the Quick Reply box, and it just says something like "How 'bout them Cubs?", my post will say "Re: Ken", and have a link back to the beginning of his Mesopotamian culture post, even though my post has got absolutely nothing to do with his.

Now, on the other hand, if, instead of using the Quick Reply box, I click the "New Reply" button at the top of the screen (as I've done here), then my post thinks I'm replying to the first post in the thread (Hence, this post says Re: Mig).

Not important, just worth noting.

I'd been wondering about that. Sometimes it links to a post I haven't seen or read so I've mostly ignored it...but I like that I can link back to a post several pages back. Useful.

'Y'all' probably want to check your mailboxes to see if they're full again. During an upgrade many previously deleted messages may have returned to your mailbox, filling it up and not allowing anyone to PM you...which some may consider a 'feature', and not a problem at all.

We mods can store 10 000 messages on the new board. Now I'll never have to delete another PM from CF.

How many did you have to delete before you thought you could say that truthfully?