Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

In my current game of Shogi, it won't let me play bishop takes bishop. An error message appears instead. 

Fixed. Next time, post your bug reports for Game Courier in an appropriate section.

I fixed a problem with parsing semantic URLs. It was expecting complete words without spaces, which wouldn't allow for phrases. I changed that. Now, a semantic URL like http://www.chessvariants.com/tag/Chess+Cubed will work. However, the CSS is not working for http://www.chessvariants.com/tag/Chess+Cubed/. I think it interprets this as another directory level. Instead of using "../g/", using "/g/" should fix that.

I was thinking of URL encoding the semantic URLs, but I noticed that Chrome was doing it automatically when I clicked the link. I'm not sure how universal this behavior is, though. So I have urlencoded them anyway for safe measure. I decided on urlencode() rather than rawurlencode(), because plus signs look cleaner for spaces, and the choice had no effect on whether your chess+compounds tag would work. In every case, whether I used urlencode(), rawurlencode(), or left it unchanged, it didn't work. So, plus signs should be avoided in tags.

It's also time to change the tag links on this page to semantic URLs. The code I'm using in the footer for a tag URL is this:

printf ("<A HREF="http://www.chessvariants.com/tag/%s" CLASS="tag">%s</A> ", urlencode($key), $key);

Note that $key happens to be the tag in this line of code, and you might be using a different variable for it.

Maybe using urldecode() in taginfo.php will allow tags with plus signs.

chess+compounds was working before; taginfo.php was already decoding urls.

Suggest that semantic URLs use underscores for spaces instead?  They seem easy to understand as replacing a space, less likely to be actually used in a tag name, and easy to replace in taginfo after decoding.

I think we need to come to a decision on tag relationships.  I think three things have been floated:

1. using TagParent in the database to build a treelike hierarchy
2. allowing tags to have tags via their taginfo page (this gets away from the idea that only games will have tags)
3. no formal relationship, just using the tag names (as I've done so far, with the colon-separated tag names)
4. no relationships

I agree with Fergus that 3 isn't great.  Is 1 flexible enough for what we'd want to do?  Any other ideas?

Originally 1 was my intent (hence the database column TagParent).  If we go that way (or something similar), how should the list of games with a parent tag be displayed?  Just those with the parent tag, not any of the descendents?  Or all games with the parent or descendent tags in one list?  Or several lists, one for each descendent tag?  (I think a list of games with the parent tag but none of the descendents could be useful, e.g. to find "unique" applications of the tag's description.  Having all the lists on the one page is redundant, but perhaps useful?)

Using underscores for spaces is not an option. The only two options are + used by urlencode() and %20 used by rawurlencode(). When a plus sign is part of a tag, it gets converted to %2B. The raw URL works with this, but the semantic one does not. Using urldecode() on the tag value should fix this.

I like the idea of being able to tag tag pages. Different tags will be appropriate for different kinds of pages. For example, a meta tag like "Object" could be suitable for particular tags like "Won by Checkmate", "Won by Capture", "Won by Stalemate", "Won by Total Elimination", "Won by Winning Race", etc. This is more flexible than giving something a parent tag, since it allows particular tags to have multiple meta tags.

We need to give some thought to what tags we will use. We can use the categories in the Item table as guidelines. Some of these categories are good, but there are some things I have wanted to change about them. In particular, there are a bunch of categories that are intended to imply a game played with the usual equipment, yet they would also be useful for games that are not played with the usual equipment. Using the What is a Chess Variant?  page as a guide, we could use tags that indicate various ways that a game could deviate from Chess, and sometimes tags for how a game is similar to Chess. A tag such as "Playable with a Chess Set" may be suitable for games played with the usual equipment. But it might be overkill to include tags for several features common to Chess, such as "Won by Checkmate", "Normal Castling", "2D", etc. Tags such as these would cover most of the variants on the site, which would make them less useful for navigation. "Playable with a Chess Set" is useful though, because it is more narrow than these, and sometimes a Chess set is the only equipment someone has for playing Chess variants.

While it's more flexible, tagging tag pages would lack one feature of using a tagParent. With a tagParent, the parent tag might be included on any page that includes the child tag. For example, if "Different Object" were the parent of "Stalemated player loses", then "Different Object" would automatically be added to any page with the "Stalemated player loses" tag. This might be desirable, though it could also lead to too many tags on a page. As a tag on the tag page, "Different Object" would appear as a tag in its tags section, and people could follow it to find tag pages for different types of object.

Here are some possible tags I have thought of.

• Different Pieces
• Compound Pieces
• Hopping Pieces
• Novel Pieces
• Supernumerary Pieces
• Neutral Pieces
• Move Opponent's Pieces
• Multi-Move
• Double Move
• Move Multiple Pieces
• Different Board Rules
• Cylinder Board
• Torus Board
• Vanishing Spaces
• Movable Spaces
• Different Object
• Stalemating Player Wins
• Checkmated Player Wins
• Lose All Pieces to Win
• Capture Piece to Win
• Eliminate Type of Piece to Win
• Random Setup
• Free Setup
• Alternate Setup
• Captured Pieces Change Sides
• Drop Captured Pieces
• Exchange Captured Pieces
• Promotion Only to Captured Pieces
• Absorb Captured Pieces
• Pieces May Combine
• Pieces May Split Apart
• Non-Standard Capturing
• Small
• Large
• 3D
• 4D
• Hexagonal
• Round
• Unusual Board Shape
• Cards
• Dice
• Three-Player
• Four-Player
• Multi-Player
• Based on Shogi
• Based on Xiangqi
• Oriental
• Historical
• Chinese
• Japanese

We could also include tags for specific pieces, particularly the popular fairy pieces, such as Cannon, Vao, Mao, etc.

I was thinking of a direct text replacement for spaces to/from underscores (followed by urlencode-ing the rest); but I don't know how we're directing the semantic URLs, so maybe that's not possible/easy.  The semantic URL is passing the tag with a space whether I use + or %2B, so decoding in taginfo.php won't help.  Anyway, I was mostly using "chess+compounds" on the assumption that we'd avoid multi-word tags, so I don't have a big problem with changing it.

If parent / tag-tags are used exclusively as we've described them so far, then I don't think a game page needs the parent tags included: the applied tag is descriptive enough, and viewing the taginfo will elaborate.  I agree that tag-tags are more flexible, but they seem more complex and less clear (a pretty common tradeoff).  It's also possible that tag-tags may serve both as parents and as more meta-information (though I have no examples in mind).

For the kinds of tags, I was mostly thinking along those lines, a more flexible category system.  Indeed, I had the same thought about usual equipment.  Earlier, other uses of tags came up, e.g. opinion descriptors (complexity, tactical depth, ?).  I've been avoiding repeating existing categories, but Usual Equipment as a parent to the existing categories there would be good.  If we have a parent Object (or "Goal"?), I would be inclined to skip "Win by Checkmate", and make the parent "Different Goal".  Can we make an existing category play the role of a parent to tags?  (It can be done informally by just listing it in the TagParagraph.)

For your specific tags, a few already exist as categories and I would prefer not to reproduce them.  Some seem to me too narrow or too broad, but that's without searching (and some of mine turned out to be narrower than I thought).  I've thought before of adding database information for which pieces are used in games, but that seems like a lot of work to get filled in, so your pieces-as-tags idea sounds good.

I temporarily altered taginfo.php to test some things, and I found out that even if I have it print $_REQUEST or $_GET as the very first thing it does, it has already converted the %2B to a space. An additional urlencode will not help, because the problem is that "chess%2Bcompounds" has already become "chess compounds". It must be that the apache RewriteRule command, which is used to create the semantic URL in .htaccess does URL decoding on its input. What works is to replace %2B with %252B. %25 is the code for the % sign, so that this converts to %2B, which will then convert to +. What fixed this is to use str_replace() on the output of urlencode(), like so:

str_replace("%2B", "%252B", urlencode($key))

Right now, tags are allowed to be in UTF-8, which would allow for foreign language tags. This could make conversion to pseudo ItemIDs difficult, especially if someone uses all Chinese characters or something. Also, foreign language tags would be harder to vet. So, I'm considering the idea of requiring tags to be in ASCII, which is what all ItemIDs are required to be in.

If we're going with long tag names, I'm not sure if tagSentences will be necessary.

Let's first look at how much can be said in 64 characters. This is less than half the size of a tweet. Looking at the tags I came up with earlier today, the longest is "Promotion Only to Captured Pieces" at 33 characters. If I changed that to "Promotion Only to Captured Piece", I could make 32 characters the maximum length for a tag. Sometimes, the tag itself will be self-explanatory. Let me look for an example where longer descriptions will be helpful. 

Non-Standard Capturing

Longer: Capture by means other than displacement or en passant. (90 characters)

Full: Apart from en passant capture, pieces in Chess capture by displacement. This involves moving to the space the piece is on and taking its place. In a way, en passant is a variation on capture by displacement. It involves moving to the space the captured Pawn would have moved to if it hadn't been allowed a one-time double move. The rule of en passant capture effectively allows the normal capture of a piece that was granted a special move. But capture by displacement and this variation on it are not the only ways pieces can be captured in games. Checkers capture other checkers by jumping over them. In games like Ultima and Rococo, pieces capture by a variety of different means, such as moving one space short of a piece, moving away from a piece, surrounding a piece on two sides, leaping beyond a piece, and forming geometric arrangements between pieces. These are just some examples, and you will find other means of capturing pieces in other games. This tag is for games that allow capture by any means not employed in Chess.

Non-Standard Capturing is still a bit vague. "Different Means of Capture" is more precise, and I could add "Different Outcome of Capture" for games like Shogi.

Let's think about the difference between categories and tags. In my Wordpress blog, I use both. Categories are fewer in number, and they tend to be mutually exclusive, though it doesn't always work that way in practice. I can assign multiple categories to a post, and I sometimes do, but there is the general intent that they should be exclusive of each other. The tags on my blog are more particular, and the same posts may have multiple tags without it being an issue.

Last.fm seems to use tags rather than categories to organize its site. I can go to an artist page or an album page and add tags. Many of the tags on last.fm are genre tags, and it makes sense to allow users to enter tags, because genre is something of a subjective matter, and different people sometimes organize the same music into different genres. By recording how multiple people tag artists and albums, they can show the most popular tags and usually get the genre correct without having to hire staff members to meticulously go through all the music there and place each artist or album into the proper genre. They also allow members to edit the text of tag pages, so that we can get descriptions of the genres people tag various music with.

The tags that are appropriate for Chess variants are usually less subjective than genres. Tags about ways in which games are different from Chess usually convey objective facts about these games, not merely subjective opinions. But people could use them for subjective opinions too.

One difference between categories and tags is that categories should be exhaustive, while tags don't have to be. For example, we have an Other category, but it would not make sense to have an Other tag. With tags, we could shift the emphasis from an exhaustive categorization of games to tagging how various games differ from Chess. With the exception of games playable with a Chess set, the general idea would be to assume similarity with Chess except when differences are tagged. The tagging system is also more open-ended and flexible than the categorization system. Anyone can add a new tag, but to add a new category, someone has to edit the structure of the Categories column in the Item table, then update some scripts.

The options before us are

1. To use both categories and tags and figure out how they can work together.
2. To improve the category system and forget about using tags.
3. To replace the category system with a tag system.

It may be suitable to begin many tags with the word different. Here are some we could have

Different Pieces - A tag for games that include pieces not used in Chess

Different Powers of Movement - A tag for games in which some Chess pieces move differently than they do in Chess.

Different Board - A tag for games played on something other than the 8x8 Chess board

Different Board Shape - A tag for games whose boards are not squares, rectangles, or parallelograms

Different Cell Shape - A tag for games played on boards whose spaces are not squares

Different Topography - A tag for games whose boards are not merely 2D grids of spaces, including circular, cylindrical, torus, and multi-dimensional boards, though not boards that merely differ in cell shape.

Different Rules - A tag for games whose rules differ from those used in Chess

Different Manner of Setup - A tag for games that do not begin with all pieces on the board in fixed positions

Different Means of Capture - A tag for games that allow capture by means other than displacement or en passant

Different Outcome of Capture - A tag for games in which capture has other effects than merely the removal of the captured piece from the game.

Different Winning Conditions - A tag for games with different winning conditions than Chess.

Different Draw Conditions - A tag for games with different drawing conditions than Chess.

Different Kinds of Equipment - A tag for games that use equipment other than a board and pieces.

Different Number of Players - A tag for games played with fewer or more than 2 players.

Some of these might not be necessary and could be replaced with more particular tags. For example, "Multi-Player" probably works better than "Different Number of Players." For one-player variants, we could use a "Solitaire" tag, and that covers all possibilities for this one. Some of the most broad ones might be used to consolidate groups of more particular tags instead of being used for the games themselves.

Bringing together the two things I was getting at, categories should be exhaustive and mutually excusive, but tags don't have to be. A book I'm reading on SEO points out that categories should be used for important parts of site structure. When this site began, it was all HTML pages, and each page had to go into a particular directory. Given that we had to place each page somewhere, categorization made sense. But now that we have lots of content in the database instead of in HTML files, finding a particular place for each page is no longer as much of an issue. So, instead of organizing the site around the site structure, we have the opportunity to organize it around the nature of Chess variants. It's hard to come up with a strict categorization of Chess variants unless we make it about just one feature. For example, Chess variants could be categorized by their number of dimensions. If we wanted to categorize by cell shape, as well, we may start to have problems. A 3D game could use hexagonal cells, for example. If we use categories, what we find is that various Chess variants will fall into a variety of different categories, and some that fall into some of the same categories will also fall into different categories. There seems to be no easy way to sort or arrange Chess variants by categories. Instead of falling into strict categories, Chess variants differ from Chess to varying degrees and in different ways. So, it seems more natural to organize Chess variants around the ways they differ from Chess and around some other salient features than it does to try to strictly categorize them all. A tagging system works better for this than a categorization system. What I propose, then, is to use the existing categories for automatically generating some tags, then use tags rather than categories.

The main drawback I see to this is that categories are stored in the database much more efficiently than tags are. To find out the categories for a page, we just have to check one column in one row, but to find out the tags for a page, we have to find every row for that game in the Tags table. Additionally, if we allow public tagging, this increases the number of rows for each page. However, it isn't necessary to search the whole table, since the use of indexes narrows the search to just the rows we need to find.

One option is to repurpose some of the categories and add new ones, using them to note various ways in which games differ from Chess. This would make categories the main way to organize the variants, though they wouldn't work like strict categories. This would be more efficient and uniform than using tags, but the use of tags could give people more freedom to organize variants in ways that make sense to them. For example, people might want to use tags for family relations between games, or inventors might want to organize their games around different categories than the ones we've chosen to use. So, while tagging is less efficient and public tagging will lack uniformity, it does offer some advantages.

I'm not sure how we could use both categories and tags to organize the site. It seems like there would be a lot of overlap between how each got used, and there doesn't seem to be need to have both. Some of the advantages of tagging could be had by reworking the categories, but switching to a tagging system could offer other advantages besides these, though there would also be a cost in performance.

Editors may now delete member-created tags. On the Tag Info page for a particular tag, an editor will find individual buttons for deleting the tag for particular items in case some items have been mistagged, and a button at the bottom for completely deleting the tag in case it's simply inappropriate.

It is now possible to edit the short and long descriptions of tags. A form will appear on the Tag Info page for a particular tag if you are an editor or you have added at least half of the instances of a particular tag. So, if you introduce a new tag, you should be able to edit its details immediately after creating it. Just go to the page for the tag and enter its details.

I have now added the ability to use this page to view all of your tags in one place. Look for the "Your Tags" menu item in the menu headed by your name. This link will add a query string to the URL that includes a value for personid. You will also be able to delete your tags from this page.

For the sake of giving tags a standardized look, for the sake of preventing the appearance of similar tags that differ only in case or spacing, and for the sake of being able to always use tags as the basis for ItemIDs, I have standardized tag names. When displayed, tags may use spaces, and each word will be capitalized. When stored in the database, tags will not have spaces, and capitalization will be used to tell one word from the next. In converting from a stored tag to the displayed version, it will add a space any time a lowercase letter is followed by a capital letter, and it will also add a space after a colon. The only tag this had an unwanted effect on was SimpliFIDE. So, I manually changed that one to Simpli-FIDE to make it look like a whole word.

To make it easier to reuse the same tags and for different members to use the same tags, the form field for entering tags is now populated with a datalist of all tags currently in the database. As you type in a tag name, tags that match it will show up underneath. You may select a pre-existing tag or create a new one.

I have made relationships between tags a matter of tag syntax rather than something stored separately in the database. A colon is now used in a tag to indicate that it is a child of the tag named to the left of the colon. The page for a particular tag will list its parent if it contains a colon, and it will list its children if it does not. Most tags do not have parents or children, and nothing extra will be listed for these. Visit the Drops tag and its children for examples.

I have also added the hashtag character to the beginning of displayed tags for the sake of visually distinguishing them as tags. Since it is done through PHP rather than CSS, it does not affect the link above.

Tags can now handle extended parent-child relationships, such as grandparent-grandchild relationships. For example Parent: Child: Grandchild.