It is inevitable that anyone who invents many variants will accept that some slipped through their self-censoprship net, and I have listed some of my own regrets over the years. Perhaps just as PYO pages currently have "edit" options available to their creator they should have a "delete" option open to them, removing them at least from indexing and ideally from the website altogether. This would add a restrospective quality control, enabling inventors to react to a hostile response or even review a variant in the light of no response whatsoever. This would at least remove variants no longer considered worthwhile by even their inventors.
It would not be perfect ven in this. For one thing it would presumably not apply to pre-PYO pages such as my Great Herd. We're probably stuck with that forever just as we are with the pages for which I have posted updates that no editor has time to update. For another it might mean the loss of some pages whose virtues take time to become apparent. If a self-delete had been available at the time when I posted I'm a Wazir... I might well have dropped it as soon as it had been indexed with a bowdlerised introduction. Not well thought out, not very chess-like, theme-heavy, offensive title, it had nothing going for it in my mind at the time. Yet somehow it proved surprisingly playable. Even so, I think that a self-delete would be a move in the right direction.
A stopgap might be to fix it so that changing the title of a PYO page feeds through immediately to indexing so that it appears under the new name. Occasionally I replace a panned variant with something that I hope will go down better, but the change dpoeas not register in indexing until an editor intervenes. Thus for a while the page of my modest variants was indexed as Voyager, the single unsatisfactory theme-heavy variant that that family of games replaced.
It would not be perfect ven in this. For one thing it would presumably not apply to pre-PYO pages such as my Great Herd. We're probably stuck with that forever just as we are with the pages for which I have posted updates that no editor has time to update. For another it might mean the loss of some pages whose virtues take time to become apparent. If a self-delete had been available at the time when I posted I'm a Wazir... I might well have dropped it as soon as it had been indexed with a bowdlerised introduction. Not well thought out, not very chess-like, theme-heavy, offensive title, it had nothing going for it in my mind at the time. Yet somehow it proved surprisingly playable. Even so, I think that a self-delete would be a move in the right direction.
A stopgap might be to fix it so that changing the title of a PYO page feeds through immediately to indexing so that it appears under the new name. Occasionally I replace a panned variant with something that I hope will go down better, but the change dpoeas not register in indexing until an editor intervenes. Thus for a while the page of my modest variants was indexed as Voyager, the single unsatisfactory theme-heavy variant that that family of games replaced.