Tags Listing

This is a list of tags that have been applied to pages on this site. For now, this is mostly for editor use in reviewing tags, but eventually more tagging features will be added and this page may become more useful.

8x8 (1)
absorption (2) Pieces absorb the powers of those they capture.
arne basse (1)
boardBuilding (2)
chain (1)
chess (1)
Chess Cubed (1)
chess+compounds (20) Pieces only from FIDE chess and compounds of FIDE pieces.
chessagon (1)
chu shogi (1)
crossover:checkers (6)
drops (5) Pieces can be held in reserve and dropped.
drops:initialSetup (6)
drops:pocket (2)
drops:turncoat (5)
goal:race (4) A (or the) win condition is a race.
Historical (1)
large (1)
money (4)
movingCells (2)
multi-move (1)
multiroyal (5) A player has more than one royal piece.
musketeer (1)
Online Multiplayer (1)
pentagonal (1)
randomSetup (1)
regional (2)
seirawan (1)
setupPhase (1)
shape:board (2)
shape:cells (2)
short range (1)
side (1)
simpliFIDE (5)
Steam (1)
switch (1)
trigonal (6)
viking chess (1)

Just to help keep track: below are the results after removing Ben's tags.

Comments

Tags Listing. A listing of the tags used on our pages.

Fergus Duniho wrote on 2018-07-05 UTC

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.

Fergus Duniho wrote on 2018-07-04 UTC

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

To use both categories and tags and figure out how they can work together.
To improve the category system and forget about using tags.
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.

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.