Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Ditto — thanks

Confirmed

On Windows, neither Firefox nor Edge show the child tag either. Ad blocker enabled or disabled doesn't make any difference.

When I looked at the code for displaying children, it was inside an if (fpdip()) block, which I use for testing code before others are ready to see it. I have now removed that condition. So, it should work for others now.

Same behavior here. On Windows, neither Firefox nor Edge show the child tag either. Ad blocker enabled or disabled doesn't make any difference.

I'm using Firefox 86.0.1 on an Artix Linux stratum on a desktop Bedrock Linux system (so effectively Arch Linux's FF); I have both uBlock Origin and uMatrix enabled with no exceptions set up for this site, but temporarily enabling an exception for the stuff that isn't in its dark red list (i.e. mostly ad servers ⁊c., so basically just enabling google fonts and paypal objects) doesn't make anything show up. Also I'm connecting over Tor, which sometimes affects things, though idþ that's given me any issues here before.

I checked the page source, and that doesn't include the string ‘grand’, so it's probably something serverside?

That's really weird, since I created these two tags expressly for testing the ability of a page to show both a parent and children, and that's what I got. When I look at the Parent:Child page, I see both its parent and its child. Under what conditions are you viewing the page, such as browser, OS, desktop or mobile, and ads blocked or not?

We seem to be seeing different things then. https://www.chessvariants.com/tag/Parent%3AChild lists the #Parent child under the heading ‘Parent’, but #Parent: Child: Grandchild is, for me, nowhere to be found on that page.

Parents are listed, but at present children seem to be absent

There are few parent tags, but children are listed for each one of them. Most tags have no children, and for those, no children are listed.

Since any parents or children are listed on the page for a tag

Parents are listed, but at present children seem to be absent

I forgot a ! operator. I made the correction, and it now works properly.

It looks like the restriction is being applied over‐eagerly: I tried adding the square‐removal tag to Cheshire Cat and Wormhole Chesses but in both cases it tells me I mayn't tag a deleted page.

I have added a restriction against tagging hidden, unpublished, or deleted pages.

When you add a tag, you will now get feedback instead of being sent right back to the same page. When a tag has no description, you will be asked to provide one.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.