Lichess is an excellent website. Open source[0], truly free[1] and provides an amazing UX. Lichess is a true gift to the chess community.
[0] https://github.com/ornicar/lila [1] https://lichess.org/features
[0] https://github.com/ornicar/lila [1] https://lichess.org/features
The lead developer of Lichess, Thibault Duplessis, gave an excellent talk the other year if you're interested in the story behind Lichess. [0]
The frontend virtual dom was initially Mithril and has later been replaced with snabbdom [1]. No React or Vue.js.
Combined with a lightweight-ish frontend (Cordova build for native mobile) and, voila, impressive performance with a decent UI all while not having to maintain separate web, iOS, and Android apps.
Although maybe in the early days it was, for some reason, written in PHP; I'd be quite surprised if that were the case.
I’m also building some software integrated with lichess to help people get good at chess, fast. Any chess hackers interested in contributing, please email me! Contact info is in my profile.
Lichess matches people by rating, so on average, if I blunder my way into a large deficit, my opponent may just as well blunder me out of it.
Not a chance. People at lower ratings screw up what should be wins all the time. Your opponent may be hoping for a stalemate or to run out the clock or waiting for you to blunder.
I just got hooked on lichess after not playing Chess since I was a kid, it's a lot of fun, I also spend a fair bit of time in analysis...
It's not quite as polished as Lichess and if you've never played Tetris with a keyboard before that may be a significant learning hurdle (though it's actually a very good control scheme for the game). But overall it's a really cool site. (There's also Tetris Friends, but I just always found the general style of the site very offputting.)
Wait, whaat?
Are there pointy-clicky interfaces to tetris nowadays? Well, of course there must be.. I think I last played tetris as the original version made by that Russian guy (or was it so long ago that it was a Soviet guy?) running on DOS.
1. I can't even scroll the page horizontally on Chrome.
2. There are 2 menus with a completely different interface.
3. The Android mobile app gives you a completely different experience, and I think there is no lobby, so I often pick a match from Chrome and then switch to the app (and of course the "Open in Mobile App" button doesn't work for me).
4. In general I find the UI is very confusing:
4a. There are 3 places where to write something about a match: your personal notes (never used this, I guess the value proposition here is that your notes will be stored along the match, but I don't think almost anybody cares about notes about games played last year for instance), the chat (which works only between the current 2 players, and you can't access it from the analysis page) and the spectators chat (I suppose this has a purpose for highly spectated matches and live commentary, but I could also run a separate browser where I'm not logged in and read that too so it sounds useless to me).
4b. The match history at the bottom of the chessboard is useless to me 99% of the times, as it's completely empty.
4c. Often the same information is displayed in different parts of the page, I already mentioned the menu problem, but also when playing you can see some infos about the players both on the left and the right column. All these things complicate the UI.
To close on a positive note the feature I like the most of lichess is probably the analysis page, super useful and well done.
Certainly there are ways that it could be improved, but calling it "terrible" seems like a huge exaggeration to me and does practically warrant an illustrative alternative that would better suit the OP.
I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. If you asked designers about the state of mobile UIs about 12 years ago I think many would have praised them, then it came the iPhone and they vanished completely.
I've only mentioned very clear examples in my post, would you, as a designer, put 2 completely different menus (with basically the same functionalities), whose buttons are visible at the same time, on an app? Would you want to have the app scrollable if needed or not?
> I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.
Of course, currently lichess.org is doing the opposite by the way.
My complain was about the mobile app being a _completely_ different experience. i.e. there isn't the lobby, the first thing you see after you go to lichess' homepage.
- I've got the core UI framework mostly ready, unfortunately still undocumented but most components should be ready for production [1]
- Some core structures, like a Hierarchical State Machine implementation I made, should be good enough [2]
- I've implemented some games like tic-tac-toe and chess, but focusing mostly on the logic of the game rather than the UI or anything else really for now. I have a usable chessboard component but it's not really any good for production use.
- Database-wise pretty much everything still needs to be developed.
- The server/cloud infrastructure still needs to be developed.
- I still haven't quite figured out what the best way to push updates to the app is, given that you don't want to disrupt current games almost at all but you still want to push bug fixes to everyone.
I once got banned because my cell phone lost connectivity as I passed a subway tunnel and in the meantime the other user “reported” me for abandoning the game.
This resulted in my account being frozen out from playing games for several hours. I wrote to the support email address and got no response.
This then happened two or three more times in the same month.
Furious with the ridiculous policy, I only will play in “anonymous” mode now, usually at chess.com with frequently changed accounts, sometimes still at lichess with no registration.
A few hours ban is a slap on the wrist from a moderation perspective, and it seems... odd... that they’d even hit you with that unless you regularly leave games.
Sounds like they do it pretty regularly :/
If your experience of internet chess can possibly be affected by intermittent disconnections or move delays by your opponent, then you are being the drama queen. That would be incredibly unreasonable.
If you agree to play a game against someone, you are implicitly accepting that one thing they may do is become disconnected / idle. That’s simply unavoidable. You’re always free to resign and leave the game if you don’t prefer to wait around, but locking the other player out when there’s no evidence they did something malicious is horrible.
> “If you're disconnects are significantly higher than that, you're probably not the target market for on-line blitz chess.”
It’s not very common and it’s not predictable or uniform (not even in subway tunnels). But if someone reports you for disconnecting, it autonatically locks you out from playing and emailing to the support email gets no response to unlock in false positive cases.
Also, just in the basic rules of chess, your opponent can do whatever they want with their clock time. You’ve agreed to abide by that rule by agreeing to play. If they want to take 4:00 to think about their sixth move in a 5/0 game, they are perfectly allowed, and may even still win if you blunder.
There’s no time limit per move beyond the first move and the overall clock time. Disconnections (when the player might return) are no different.
This is incorrect. At this point I'd like to point out that I was (and soon will be again) a USCF certified TD [1], and have run my own correspondence site for about 20 years [2]. Abandoning a game has the unique distinction of being mentioned three times in the USCF rulebook, and carries with it the most severe penalty specifically mentioned which is ejection from the tournament (with more severe penalties are up to the TD and USCF). FIDE has a similar rule, though they don't mention abandoment directly where a player has stopped trying to win under the "normal means". Not all rule violations have to be intentional, specifically similar to your case is "annoying behavior". When you fail to finish a game, for whatever reason, it's annoying and an inconvenience to your opponent, and some punitive measure is warranted.
You’re obviously not going to get punished if the “abandonment” is revealed to have been because you get accidentally locked out of the tournament hall through no fault of your own, which is the right comparison for something like online chess disconnection.
I don’t see a reason to feel that your comment is applicable.
This is the part that does not seem to be true. The way this works for federation-operated tournaments is not the same thing at all as basic rules of chess, and instead is highly specific to that physical format of chess. Moreover, the physical constraints of an in-person tournament would make its rules about abandonment less relevant for comparison with internet disconnections, not more.
On the point of “annoying behavior” — still, you’re not addressing the fact that disconnections are not the fault of that player and often are not anticipateable or controllable.
For things that happen in federation-operated tournaments that also are not intentional or controlled by the player, it would clearly be mitigating circumstances such that the rules you’re trying to cite would not be relevant anyway.
Separately from this, I personally actually think it’s totally backwards and unreasonable to ever, for any reason, care that an opponent disconnects. I don’t care at all if my opponent disconnects for any reason, whether because they are frustrated, their cell connection dropped, whatever. They have zero obligation to move fast, resign from losing positions, or anything else. It is internet chess with literally nothing riding on it, ever, for anyone.
If you click to play a game of length X minutes or whatever, that’s your commitment. It’s not your opponent’s. They might waste X-1 minutes looking at cat pictures before playing a move— that’s well within their rights and you agreed to play, meaning you can quit or disconnect if you don’t wanna wait around for the next move, or you can cede that your opponent can do whatever they want with their allocated clock time, whether that is resigning, disconnecting, or playing nonsense moves, or playing for real.
I think all the frustration that an opponent can degrade your experience by using their clock time to do whatever they want is unreasonable. That’s on you, not on the system or the opponent.