Here is an update on the items over the past three months that weren’t the subject of separate posts.
Extra search feature:
Most new games are added to a “Sundry” folder, with a new folder created for each month. A new addition to the search feature allows these “Sundry” folders to be searched individually. To search for February 2013, for example, type “-month2013-02” in the “Search Games” box. This makes it easy to search for new games. The results for the past three months can be found in searches for December (227 games, 15 results without moves, 1 bye/walkover/default), January (11 games), and February (73 games, 15 results without moves, 4 byes/walkovers/defaults).
Games collection:
In addition to the “Sundry” games, we’ve started the process of porting games over from OlimpBase. In addition to the Irish games from Warsaw 1935, the subject of a recent post, the archive also has 8 games and 3 results without moves of C.H.O’D. Alexander’s from the 5th Olympiad in Folkestone, 1933, where he was representing Great Britain. (He played 11 games so all are covered.) The ICU games archive contains 5 of these.
The en passant bug:
In playing through one of the recent games added, I found a strange bug in which the HTML didn’t render some en passant captures correctly: if White captured exf6, say, the pawn on f5 would stay but any piece on d5 would disappear. I tracked the bug down to my misunderstanding of how the javascript file underlying the Palview system works. En passant captures are represented by one of two different symbols (“d” or “t”). I thought one of these was for captures by White and the other for captures by Black. But no: it turns out that one is for captures to the left as White looks at the board (e.g., dxc6 for White or dxc3 for Black), and the other is for captures to the right as White looks at the board, e.g., exf6 or exf3. (!) So captures of the type exf6 or dxc3 are implemented incorrectly.
This has now been corrected on many of the older files in the site, but not yet all.