Comments by FergusDuniho

When you sign up, email is sent immediately. But thanks to some very strict measures that some email providers take to reduce spam, email from this site doesn't always get through. Check your spam folder, and if you still can't find any email, you may delete your new account and try signing up again with an email address from a different email provider.

When you need the value of a variable in an expression, you have to prepend a # to its name or precede it with the var operator. In "if coun1", "coun1" just returns the string value "coin1". Likewise, in "if coin2", "coin2" just returns the value "coin2".

That's what it did. With this GIF, it used the actual size of the image.

Likewise with this PNG.

Maybe it chooses something like 150x150 for excessively large images.

Game Courier selects a new seed for each game, and it keeps the same seed throughout a game. To test this, you need to make sure you are playing separate games each time. You could issue invitations to yourself, try it out on different browsers, or start each game in a new private or incognito window. If you go back to your preset's menu between games and refresh your cache, that should also work.

I used CKEditor's WYSYWYG mode to post the image, and it turns out that it set a size for the image without me realizing it. I am switching to Source mode to control the HTML.

Here it is without any size specified:

Here it is with 50x50 size:

Since the site was down for a week, I added a week of time to the players whose moves were interrupted by this downtime. But this works only in Game Courier itself. To repeat accurate calculations for each log, the Logs page would have to load each log, which would multiply the work it has to do. Instead, it relies on the value of the Deadline column in the GameLogs table. This is a fixed value that was not updated when I added code to Game Courier to compensate for the time lost by the site being down. Since this value may be mistaken, the Logs page no longer updates logs or the database when time has run out. In this case, it is mistaken, and you should simply continue your game.

It could be that each is just a separate game of Chess to be won or lost on its own terms, and they are playing four games at once, because that is the kind of challenge their intellects need.

I'm guessing that GitWeb was supposed to be installed to something like /cgi-bin/gitweb/ instead of to /cgi-bin/ itself, because it appears to be designed to monopolize the directory name as though it were a script name. I would recommend uninstalling it and reinstalling it to its own directory.

I added a week of time for the current player of every game that was interrupted. This will not show up on the Logs page, but it will show up in Game Courier.

This is clearly a labor of love, and giving the game its own domain shows your confidence in it. That said, I will point out some things. A trial-and-error process like evolution is not the same thing as a quest for a holy grail. To call this game an evolution of chess could mean one of two things. It could mean it is a mutation of chess, but so are most chess variants, and being a mutation is not a significant milestone of any kind. It could also mean that it is a time-tested accumulatíon of small mutatíons that have become widely accepted by a large community of players as a new standard. In this sense, Chess is an evolutíon of Shatranj. But since Qhesz is the new creation of one person, and it has not had time to catch on anyway, it does not count as an evolution in this sense.

It's not clear from the description of the rules whether castling with rooks is still part of the game.

The crescent moon and star is the symbol of Islam. Some Muslims might not approve of its use for a wizard type piece.

I read this on my new Likebook Mars, which uses e-ink, and the white text on a black background was making the ghosting more visible than usual. Also, it did not seem mobile-friendly enough. The links on the right had little space left, and they were overlapping a bit with the main body.

There was a tab character after the closing PHP tag. Redirecting works only if the script doesn't display any text. I deleted it, and it works now, though I had to refresh the page to see the results change in the menu.

Just testing to make sure nothing is broken after updating scripts for entering comments.

This game has its rules described in a minirules file, not in the briefrules value. Minirules files precede the use of the briefrules field. I added the latter, because only editors could upload minirules files. Go to the /play/pbm/minirules directory to edit this file.

The western style pieces you mention are not circular or wedge shaped, and they are missing some of the images I can see on the page for the font, such as the circular arrow piece, but at least they do include images that can be used for Shogi and Xiangqi, and it would be possible to add these images to the appropriate shapes to make piece sets out of them.

Carlos was jumping the gun about him. He was using translated pages, and these weren't sending the correct submit values to Game Courier. I recommended that he use English pages, and in the meantime, I fixed the problem with translated pages, so that they would work too.

Thanks, I have added Nishiki-teki to the page.

He might have done it accidentally, since he repeated the same move.

Try it again. It should be fixed now.

I got the same results on Linux Mint, and I found a site with a font preview that confirms it. So, I have moved it to the list of free fonts. Thanks.

After White's pawn takes the Queen and promotes to an Archbishop, Black has only four moves available. Two of these moves would expose it to capture without any significant consequence for White, and another would allow White to move the Archbishop to b8. The remaining move is to go to d7, checking the King. If White responds by taking the checking piece with either Archbishop, the resulting position is a stalemate. If White responds by moving the King, Black can take either Archbishop en prise. If White responds with a block on e6 from the Archbishop on e6, Black can exchange Archbishops. This might still be favorable for White. If Black takes the Pawn at b5 instead, White can still probably force an advantage. So, it looks like White could still win if the Pawn promotes to an Archbishop. The advantage of promoting to a Bishop is that White can win quickly and decisively. If the Archbishop moves to d7 for check, the Bishop can take it without causing stalemate. If the Archbishop makes its only safe move to c7, then the Bishop can safely check the King from b7, forcing the King to move to b8. The Archbishop can then move to d7 for checkmate.

That the Knight is roughly equivalent in power to a Bishop was probably one of the factors that contributed to it being used in Chess. If the Knight were as weak as a Wazir or Ferz, it might have been replaced by a Knightrider, and if it were as powerful as an Amazon, it might have been omitted.

That was due to a coding mistake I made yesterday. I replaced the count function with is_array($op1) && count($op1) instead of is_array($op1) ? count($op1) : 0, and the result was that the actual count was replaced with 1 whenever it was positive. I fixed that, corrected your log and its database entries, fixed the problem with posting here, and moved your comments from where you originally made them.

The Knight doesn't just complement the Bishop. It complements both the Bishop and the Rook, because it leaps to the nearest spaces that these two pieces cannot reach. 

There was a typo in my last change to Game Courier. Fixing that fixed the problem.

Where is it documented that Chu Shogi was the dominant Chess variant in Japan for centuries?

Okay, that's all fixed. I was rewriting the code without the use of a deprecated feature, and I didn't quite get it right last night.

It will now appear in the Related Pages menu on Game Courier pages.

That's now fixed. You were on a page with HTTPS, but the form used a full URL that began with HTTP://. I changed it to a relative URL, so that it would be HTTPS when the page is already HTTPS.

Since the author of this settings file copied the contents of an include file instead of including it, I edited the settings file directly. Since the buggy code was for evaluating potential castling moves, and this game has no castling, I removed that bit of code.

When I have "Always use HTTPS" enabled in Cloudflare, this site will not load on my Kindle Touch's browser. Since I want to be able to use the site on an e-ink device, I may have to leave this disabled. The site will still work with HTTPS in an up-to-date browser, but if Amazon will not update the browser in the Kindle Touch, there is nothing I can do on my own to update it.

The homepage is now an HTML file. This is so that it still shows content when PHP or MySQL fails. It no longer includes the What's New section, which is script-generated, but it does include a link to the What's New page.

You're thinking of "Your Game Courier Settings Files". This was on the menu for the Play subdomain, but not for the main domain. When I put the whole site on the main domain, this changed the menu used on all the pages that had been on the Play subdomain. I have now copied that menu item to the main menu.

That's now fixed. In PHP 7.1, mt_rand() was "updated to use the fixed, correct, version of the Mersenne Twister algorithm." This meant that it would generate different random numbers from the same seed, and the effect this had on CWDA was that it chose different armies for the players. For the sake of backwards compatibility, mt_srand(), which sets the seed, now allows the MT_RAND_PHP flag, which signals mt_rand() to use the old, incorrect algorithm. Using that, I reverted it back to the old algorithm, which will generate the same results that the seed used for the game previously got.

This 2012 version of BCM Shogi is no longer working. If anyone knows of a more recent version, please send me a copy or let me know where I can download it.

Finally, I tried a few more things, and I got sessions working. Now I can go to bed without worrying about this.

I added code to .htaccess to 301 redirect the play subdomain to the main domain, and I configured Cloudflare, which is used for DNS, to always use HTTPS and to rewrite HTTP URLs to HTTPS. I previously made various changes to Game Courier and to pages with links to Game Courier to use URLs with the play subdirectory in the main domain. The play subdomain will still work, but the pages it points to will have their URLs rewritten to the main domain.

If anything appears broken, let me know. Or if you're an editor, and it is something minor like a broken URL, you can try fixing it yourself.

Time is approaching when my hosting service will come up for renewal. Around that time, I could go somewhere else or stay with them. For now, I'm thinking of staying with them. There has occassionally been downtime due to problems with the hosting service. The last time this happened, they sent an email the same day explaining what had happened. Some problems may have been due to them being a new company that is still building its infrastructure. So, as it is gets older, it may become more mature and stable. Also, I just learned that they were bought earlier this year by a more established company in the Netherlands. This is fitting, because this site originally began in the Netherlands. And this has given me an idea, though I'm not ready to pull it off yet. Thanks to being owned by a Dutch company, the hosting service I'm using now sells VPS packages on servers in the Netherlands, and they are at the same affordable prices as their VPS packages in the USA. So, my idea is to get a second server in the Netherlands, and to do synchronization and load balancing between the two servers. I like the idea of having a second server there, because this site began there, and it's a good location for handling European traffic. For the present though, I don't know very much about synchronizing and load balancing two servers, and I have other things to take care of first.

I had changed some constant values from using http to using https, and this messed up with drawing images of boards, because str_replace failed to change URLs to file paths, and it couldn't find the graphics it needed. Maybe it had other effects too. I changed the constants back, and the problem seems to have gone away.

Game Courier checks where GAME Code has been entered for a preset, whether there is a list of legal moves, and the value of the rules flag to determine the extent of a preset's rule enforcement, and it now displays this information below the board, just underneath the name of the game, which links to the rules page. It used to put this information above the board before a game began, and it didn't weigh in the value of the rules flag. It now displays it below the board during the course of a game. The rules flag can be set with the command "setflag rules;", typically in the pregame code. Setting this simply serves as a signal that the code you wrote actually does enforce the rules. It has no effect on the rest of your code, and it will not provide you with rule enforcement if you don't actually program it in.

I have now copied the play header and footer to new files, and I have rewritten the original play header and footer scripts to check the server name and to use the header and footer for the domain of the page. So, if it appears on the main domain, it will use the header and footer for the main domain. This will give me the opportunity to add features from the play header and footer that were included for Game Courier to the main header and footer.

Another thing I did yesterday was enable Rocket Loader™ on Cloudflare. Once I disabled this, the problem stopped. So, I guess I will keep it disabled for now. I'll try it again when the changes I'm trying to make are finished.

That was successful. The first step is to comment out the 301 redirects of the play subdirectory to the play subdomain. That has worked, and the play subdirectory is now showing up. Before proceeding further, I need to test pages with the play subdirectory to see if this breaks anything.

I was noticing the same thing last night. I'm in the process of converting the site from HTTP to HTTPS, and it seems to be related to that, but I don't know what's happening. Notice whether this happens only when the page is an HTTPS one or whether it is also happening for HTTP pages.

I was experimenting with Cloudflare's "Always use HTTPS" option, but some pages were having problems, because they were sending form data from an HTTPS page to an HTTP page. This site has an SSL certificate through Cloudflare, and I would like to switch over to using HTTPS, but I have to fix the forms before I can do this.

HTTPS offers more security than HTTP, it enables the use of HTML / 2, which will speed up the site, and it should improve the ranking of the site in the search engines. But there are lots of pages with lots of forms to fix before this is viable. There may also be some glitches along the way.

I wouldn't say there is anything strange about its absence. You are the first person who has ever said we should have this, and no such AI exists. At best, we have programs and scripts that have been created to play some games. Even Zillions-of-Games, which has more games available for it than any other program of its kind, can only play those games that have been programmed for it. There is no AI that can read rules written in English and play the game against someone. What this site is the home of is Game Courier, which lets you play Chess variants with other people by correspondence. It is as versatile as Zillions-of-Games with respect to the games that can be played with it, but it is only for correspondence games, not for playing against a computer.

See /play/pbm/ratings.php

I have begun to replace buttons made with the INPUT tag with buttons made with the BUTTON tag. The BUTTON tag allows me to separate the display text from the form value, which allows the display text to be translated to another language without changing the value that will be passed by the form. I have already changed a few forms, and they are working correctly when translated.

I have also begun to add the notranslate class to some tags, so that translations do not mess up the data passed to the form, and so that coordinates display properly on translated pages.

After reviewing a video that Сергей Бугаевский sent me, it looks like the problem is that Google Translate is translating the page into Russian, this is changing the values of the buttons, and Game Courier is receiving values that it doesn't recognize. Looking at where it prints the value of $submit when the page loads, I see that it did indeed get translated into Russian. My recommendation for now is to click on buttons only in English.

A more long-term solution would be for me to localize Game Courier. A more short-term one would be to prevent translation or to give an error message when the value of $submit is not recognized.

This is an incomplete project. Although the concept is interesting, the page linked to from this page does not include the rules for the game, and it does not include any means to play the game. It is too early to approve this link page.

This is supposed to be a Zillions page, but it is missing the link to the Zillions file.

It will be missing if you are already signed in. In that case, just click the Send button.

I added this page to the index in order to report some changes to it in a comment. Many submissions were getting lost, because this page would show only the last 90 days worth of submissions, as though this page were analogous to the What's New page. I changed it to display all past submissions that still haven't been approved, and they go back to 2005 and -1. Let's try to process this backlog of submissions and review new submissions in a more timely manner.

In the image shown below, it is the field that says "Password:".