Can i ask if there is a reason the board must be turned off during installation? The only time I can turn off the forums is during peak hours, and I'd like to avoid that...

There's no technical reason that you need to turn the board off during installation. It just helps - one thing i hate is when members play with things I'm half way through installing and setting up. Setup should take no more than a minute or two, so either way your site would only be down for 5 mins or so.

run fine in 3.8 vb.

It's not quite running right on my 3.8. Previously created games look a little wonky, and new games don't generate the proper postibt. Could be a mod conflict, but I'm not sure. I guess I'll just turn that forum off for right now. Look forward to the new version.

EDIT: Also puts this at the end of replies: Posted via Mobile Device

Can't imagine where that's coming from.

Any update about vbulletin 3.8.3 ???

3.8.3 is working for me

<i>Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in [path]/showthread.php(2167) : eval()'d code on line 131</i>

I have this error on 3.8.3

Hi Carnage,

We disabled this mod a long time ago because it does not enforce legal moves, and, more than likely, will use the chess program in The Gameroom (MOTM) because it does enforce legal moves.

Your counterargument to this "your chess set at home does not do it" does not apply because when you are sitting in front of your chess set, you and the other player can easily manage things. This is not the same when folks are on the other side of the net, and they might not even be playing at the same time.

In practice, an on-line chess program MUST enforce legal moves, and the option to set up the board is important as well. However, Chess is about a set of rules and without those rules, it is simply not Chess !

So, we tried and tried to get his mod to work, and all our member-players, some rated higher than 2200 in the "real world" complained strongly.

Our only alternative, since you refuse to take this seriously and continue to argue that since it is possible to move pieces anywhere, you don't need to enforce rules, shows that you simply do not listen to your mod users, experienced players, and folks who have installed it (and removed it).

Since there is now a (alternative) vB mod that includes Chess and enforces the rules, there is an option for people who actually love Chess and want a reliable and playable Chess program for the members.

We will certainly select The Gameroom Chess program over this one, because of one reason, it is more reliable and enforces rules. You mod is "prettier" but is basically unreliable. I have seen too many games ending in frustration with this mod.

OBTW, For folks who want to play Chess, and have rules properly enforces, recommend you look here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=219483

If you don't want all the other games, you can just turn on Chess and turn off the others.

Most of my development on mods has ceased in anticipation of vbulletin 4.

My intention with this mod is to discontinue it. I will be instead working on a far more featured mod, which will include several games (chess, checkers and a few others once i've checked copywrite status on them) The mod will also probably feature a ladder system (which will inevitably require the rules of the games to be enforced)

The mod you link to there, seems on the face of it much different to this one. This mod is play by post which means games can go on for weeks if people only have the time for a move or two a day. Whereas the mod you linked to seems (without having installed it) to use live play.

In the other mod, the play can also go on for weeks or years, it just requires setting one or two timers which are easily changed in the code.

As you know, I have installed both mods, and (sorry to say) the "other chess mod" is far superior (for actally playing chess) and the developer is keen to make changes when bugs are found. For example, when debugging, our team found that it was missing one rule of play. We notified the developer and, without discussion or opinons, he fixed it. Now that chess game enforces rules 100% without error. Also, now it has notation, etc.

It is up to you.... but we have found a Chess mod that works very well, and we can easily modify to add features (which we have done), and because the developer is so responsive to make it highly usable, we will pay for the commercial version ($45) with standard chess rankings, ladders, etc.

The problem I have here is that we requested a game that enforced rules nearly two years ago, it seems. The "other mod" has one rule missing, and it was fixed within a week.... big difference in both actual usability and support. Of course, I did have to spend a few days changing the code to get it as we want it, but it was easy to change and fun.

Cheers.

Maybe you missed the part where he said that development of this mod has stopped until vB4.

Ah.... well, that is normal. There has not been any updates or development on this mod as far back as I can remember :(

That is why we are using a different Chess mod, one that is supported actively and has "basic required online chess functionality" for actally enjoying playing Chess :D

Update: We don't find the Gameroom Chess mod any better, really..... Our users don't like it either!

Can you mention the 'different Chess mod' URL here, or is that forbidden? (No offense to whoever wrote the Mod on this thread, but I'm not planning to upgrade to 4.0 anytime soon.)

No, it is certainly not forbidden :D

The other mod here with Chess is in the Gameroom.

However, that Chess mod is "not perfect" either, and our users have also commented negatively on that one. To be fair to Carnage and his mod, there are advantages and disadvantages of each, but neither actually "works" (is enjoyable to play) for our users.

In the other mod, legal moves are enforced, but you must hack the PHP code so people can actually play over a long period of time. Also, in the Gameroom chess program, you cannot observe a game being played by two other players. In addition, the Gameroom version has a clunky flash interface, so you have a waste a lot of time to go find your game (after you hack it, so you can actually play when you have time...) , and in the default (not hacked) version, if you leave the flash interface, your game is gone! Because of this, basic features like "it is your move" notifications to the forum are missing.

Our experience is that neither of the available vB.org chess mods are "keepers" for "real chess players", and this not my opinion, it is the opinion of our users who want to play chess when they have time, and want a robust, normal, rule-enforcing, observable, playable Chess feature.

The bottom line is that our users want a good Chess mod for vB. I am willing to pay for a decent one (if it really works well), but so far, we can't find any joy for our users even with any of the vB mods (two free, and the paid version of one of the free ones!)

I had to hack the code to make the Gameroom version playable, and even then, our users complained because it simply does not "answer the mail" for a great vB chess program/mod.

:(:(:(

Thanks so much for that very thorough answer! That answered every question I had and some that I didn't know enough to ask. :)

Hey lostgirl815,

You are welcome.

Best, I think is to encourage Carnage to update his mod to be a great program, but he has not released anything new in two years. His mod is also (mostly) not playable, as our users find the interface buggy and pieces move oddly, illegally and then a game they were playing for days is ruined. Very frustrating! We tried this mod a long time ago and our users complained strongly about it. Then, we tried the Gameroom Chess module, and our users complained strongly about that one too!

:(:(:(

Really, what i'd like to do is redo the whole of the javascript, this mod was written before I'd learn about js frameworks like yui and jQuery. The original version was written over two and a half years ago, it was done for my own boards I released it here when i had a slightly more polished version, realistically the problem with development is that my paid work has to take priority.

There are a number of things i'd like this mod to be able to do:
-optionally enforce chess rules.
-import/use pgn format moves
-split a thread (copy current board state into a new thread possibly with different players)
-provide back/forward buttons between moves (my dev version does this but its buggy)
-provide game win/loss/draw statistics.

Yes, this does happen, however the interface is such that it should be easy/possible to put a game back to its proper state and continue.

I've updated with the version from my dev board. It includes a much cleaner UI and a couple of other features i was working on.

No legal move enforcement, however i've been convinced that this is a necessary feature and will include it in the vb 4 version of this product (and provide a backport to this version)

Also, on your TODO list, could you add:

-- Provide an ICF rating systems for players.

So, when players play, they get rated using the same basic system as ICF (unrated players start at 1500, etc.). You could also permit admins to manual place rating of ICF rated players.

Thanks.

Regarding your comment:

We did not find that to be the case. Our users did not find anything "easy". If that was the case, we would not have deinstalled it.

Our forums have over 80K users, more than 3K active, and over 2M visitors a month. When we install a new feature, it is quite easy to test the feature and get immediate feedback from our user community, who are very computer savvy. They either like it, or they don't. They all want a robust chess program, not a buggy one where an opponent can easily mess up the board, and then have to discuss this with them. It is important for chess programs to enforce rules and for the board to be very stable.

In theory, anything is possible. In practice, either the users like it, or they don't. We have tried both vB Chess mods and removed them both.

We hope to see a robust, playable version soon!

Thank you!

PS: It does not work to argue with our users when they don't like something. They are smart enough to know what they like and don't like. Most board-jockeys learn early that listening to their members/users is the key to success.

Thanks. We will try the next release and comment :D

EDITORIAL COMMENT BELOW:

OBTW, we are not going to upgrade to vB 4.0.

We have not found the recent Jelsoft upgrades to add much value, so please make sure your next major release also works with the older versions like 3.7 and 3.8, please. Thanks. We will not upgrade to 4.0 anytime soon, unless there is a "killer app" in the release, and we have not found any of the releases over the past few years to have any "killer app" and they simply cause us a lot of work with little to no benefits :(

Speaking of YUI and jQuery, please do not hard code your static content like Javascript and images into your mod. (Not that you have... I don't recall).

In other words, please make your mod "CDN Friendly" (Content Delivery Network Friendly), like YUI. We serve our JS and images from a CDN.

Some coders hard code the paths to these scripts and images into their PHP code, which makes it hard to serve the static content via a CDN. Our CDN currently serves around 110 GB per week;

We have used both Amazon CloudFront and SimpleCDN Mirror Bucket. Because of the features of SimpleCDN, we ported from CF to SimpleCDN, FYI.

The idea is to move the mod to a more MVC design approach where it'll be possible to load/unload the modules required for the features. Some or all of the improvments will then get backported into this mod.

As for vb4, I myself was 50/50 on upgrading, but having seen a small snippet of the code in darrens blog, feel as a developer it'll be worth upgrading.

Currently, the image paths are controlled by settings however teh javascript is hardcoded into the template. This is something that I intend to change, however for the time being its easy enough to copy the none dynamic parts (eg the function defs) to a separate file and include it in the page if you need to.

As long as you're not giving into the whim of every user who doesn't anything all of the time. With 80k users, the vocal majority aren't necessarily larger then the group that's doing just fine.



When you do put in the "forced rules" option, if it's at all feasible, would you provide an option to turn enforcement off? Thanks.

Wow! That's a huge leap in thinking to go from "listening to users" to "giving into the whim of every user" LOL.

Carnage has already stated (repeatedly), it will be an option.

I haven't been reading this thread up until this most recent update. So I wouldn't have caught any repeated statements.


It's a fine line that can very easily be crossed. Users can want a lot of things, that doesn't instantaneously mean it's a good idea. The best ideas in history have always been the ones that nobody ever new they wanted.

I have this error on the top of page when make post

please, evolve this to the classic Naval Battle game!!

When I try to post a move on the game in my chess forum, I get this message:

Anyone know what is causing that and how I can fix it? Thanks.

ah... that'd be the new csrf protection thingy that got added somewhere along the line. It needs a template change but i'm not sure what atm...

Took me a while to pin this down, but I tracked the disappearance of my Quick Reply to this modification. I can't quite pinpoint the timeline, but I believe it was after I made the upgrade 3.8.4 and did the last upgrade on this shortly afterward. It appears they're not compatible, at least in that regard.

It should only edit the quick reply settings for the forum its active on.

I've not tested it on .8.4 however so there may be an unforseen complication.

We had the same problem with 3.7.4, no quick reply (running 1.1b (beta) of this mod).

In addition, the pieces did not move either using AJAX or replying with (e2-e4) so we had to uninstall the latest version (1.1b (beta)) as well.

Our forum members look forward to the day when this is a robust mod. ;) So far we have had to try and deinstall every attempt at installation.

Me too :p

Just need a few weeks free to really work on my various mods and get the creases ironed out.

Has this been fixed?

Here's how I fixed it. In the chess Template, search for: value="$session[sessionhash]"

add this line directly after it:

<input type="hidden" name="securitytoken" value="$bbuserinfo[securitytoken]" />

Link to Implementing CSRF Protection in modifications: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=177013

This mod has a ton of potential. I'm also looking forward to a more robust mod. Great work!!

I made this change and it looks like it fixed my problem with Quick Reply.

line 673 in product-chess.xml.

Ok, i tracked the problem with the quick reply down.

As posted above, the $show['quickreply'] = false; is the wrong side of the bracket.

Edit the plugin showthread_complete and edit the last 3 lines to be:

Sorry, i don't have time to put this fix into a release at the moment; i'm working on a port of this mod to vbulletin 4; just as a fyi:

The mod will be split into parts; there will be a 'core' mod "Play by Post gaming" which will then have multiple plugins to support various different games. When vb4 goes gold i'm /hoping/ to have the core finished and two plugin games; chess and chess freeplay (eg one with rules enforced, one without)

looking forward to the next release! :)