Site Review - Chess Downloads
Mark Weeks
bookmarks, is for Chess Downloads by Klaus Wrba. The site is at
address...
http://home.t-online.de/home/wrba.klaus/download.htm
...and is a directory of sites which offer files of game scores for
download. Many chessplayers like to collect files of chess games, where
the game scores are usually in PGN or Chessbase format. I don't really
understand why they like to do this, although I'm certainly glad that
they do. I collect files which correspond to the chess events documented
on my own site, because the events are more meaningful when taken
together with the games.
Wrba classifies download sites into seven categories...
A - International Databases
B - Chess sites with games
C - National Databases
D - Tournaments
E - Correspondence Chess International
F - Correspondence Chess National
G - Email Associations
...Each link is decorated with a flag showing the nationality of the
owner. The links also have the title of the site, plus a rating and a
description in German. For some reason, the domain of the home page is
not the same as the linked pages, which are in www.games-of-chess.de.
While looking at the linked sites I found the 'Homepage of Lars Balzer'
at address...
http://www.rhrk.uni-kl.de/~balzer/index.html
...which has 'links to downloadable chessgames around the internet', and
which is very similar to the Wrba site. The Balzer list is organized as
a single table, where each link is classified by country, with a brief
description the linked site.
I decided to look at both sites for this article. I considered two
different approaches: I could limit the review to just these two sites
-or- I could review the most interesting of the linked sites. I decided
to concentrate on the two master lists, to determine whether one has any
advantage over the other, and to defer reviews of interesting linked
sites to another time.
It is a whale of a job to find all Internet sites with game scores and
to classify them. It as an even bigger job to maintain the links. The
archive sections of the general chess directories, like Chessopolis,
don't even come close to the number of sites linked by the Balzer & Wrba
directories. Having said that, it is straightforward to create a starter
set of links. The process is:-
1) Locate lists that other people have assembled.
2) Merge the lists & eliminate duplicates.
3) Publish the new list on the Web.
I decided to try my hand at building a list of links to game scores. It
took me about an hour to reduce the Balzer & Wrba lists, to eliminate
the duplicates, and to upload the results to...
http://www.mark-weeks.com/sit-0e15.htm
...Although I learned some things about directories while doing the job,
my new list is not particularly useful. The links need to be annotated
to guide visitors to those sites which are most likely to deliver the
sought-after files. The real added value comes in classifying the linked
sites. Both Balzer & Wrba have attempted to classify sites
geographically, which may be the best approach.
The most popular methods of classifying chess games are by event, by
player, & by opening. I prefer classification by event because it is the
cleanest -- it's an easy call whether a game was played in a particular
event or not. Once an event is fully documented, it becomes stable.
Geographical classification is one level higher. Events, whether local
or international, which were played in Spanish towns & cities can
logically be included in a collection of Spanish games. Some problems
occur when national boundaries change -- as in the breakups of
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union -- but these are easily handled by
convention. Games played by correspondence, by email, or over the
Internet may also need to be classified by convention.
Classification by player is a second reasonable option, but it has at
least two disadvantages. The first is that every game has at least two
players (some have more than two!), which means that many games end up
in two collections. The second is that collections for active players
are out of date as soon as the player competes in another event. Even
collections for inactive players are subject to change when new game
scores from exhibitions are unearthed from forgotten periodicals.
My least favorite system of classification is by opening. Game files
constructed around a popular opening are out of date as soon as they are
assembled. Some opening sequences are difficult to classify due to
transposition. I've often seen the same game in two sources where the
annotators classified the game in different sections of ECO. Resources
like Chesslab are a more efficient way to classify & research opening
theory.
Another question which confronts everyone who collects game scores is,
'Where do I draw the line?' Should any game by any player be collected
-or- should the collection be limited to strong players only? If limited
to strong players, how should 'strong' be defined? Should games between
computers be included? Where one draws the line is largely a matter of
personal taste.
I have two overriding general questions for any Web directory -- 1) Are
the links correct & operational? 2) Are they useful? While examining the
linked sites on my combined Balzer/Wrba list, I encountered some other
issues. Different Web addresses frequently point to the same page -- a
common example is an 'index.htm' address which serves as a default page.
The addresses written with 'index.htm' deliver the same page as those
written without. How can these duplicates be eliminated efficiently?
Another issue is which page to indicate when there are several good
candidates on the same site. There are many sites where Balzer and Wrba
have chosen to link different pages.
New problems arrive afterwards when the list of links has to be
maintained. One approach is to provide a mechanism where visitors can
give feedback on changes. This is haphazard at best. Many people will
take the time to suggest a new site, especially when it is their own
creation, but not many will take the time to flag a broken link. This
means that broken links need to be monitored constantly, which can be a
tedious job for even a small set of links.
Fortunately, there are a few Web based tools which check links on a page
or on an entire site. I had previously bookmarked three addresses which
perform link checking, so I went back to each in order to take a closer
look. The three tools are similar -- given a Web address, they try to
access each link on the page to determine if the target is active or
not. After checking all links they issue a summary of their findings.
1) Web Site Garage at http://websitegarage.netscape.com/ is a
Netscape/AOL service. It is limited to 25 links, which is not a lot for
a links page, so I couldn't use it.
2) Site Check at http://siteowner.bcentral.com/sitecheck.cfm is a
Microsoft Network (MSN) service. I discovered that it doesn't handle FTP
addresses or local links correctly. In fact, it repeatedly reported a
large number of active links as 'Fail', but didn't say why. I assumed
that it simply didn't wait long enough. Since it also 'times out' on the
Balzer page & offers no option to send its report to an email address, I
couldn't use it.
3) NetMechanic at http://www.netmechanic.com/ is the best of the trio,
although it doesn't handle FTP addresses. NetMechanic returned the
following statistics for the Balzer list...
126 ok
21 file not found
4 no such domain name
1 no response from host
... which indicates that 17.1% of the links have a problem. It returned
the following for the Wrba list...
186 ok
35 file not found
12 no such domain name
3 no response from host
2 access denied for robots
1 access forbidden
...which is 22.2% with a problem. Although the Balzer page seems to be a
little more accurate, I doubt that the difference is significant. It
turns out that Wrba doesn't remove inactive links from his pages, which
may also account for the higher percentage. I found a few other errors
in the Wrba links...
'A' page:-
- the link for the TWIC archive is completely incorrect
- the link for the S. Mayer Chessbase is mistyped
'B' page:-
- the link for Chesscity is missing the address entirely
...which led me to believe that these links have never been properly
checked.
On the positive side, Wrba rates each of his links with up to five
stars, which makes it easy to determine which sites are the most
promising. I made a quick check to determine the number of sites in each
category, and came up with the following counts...
34 ***** [five stars]
23 ****
30 ***
66 **
27 *
14 [no stars]
...Some sites are listed on more than page with a different number of
stars, so the rating system is highly subjective. Along with the stars,
Wrba classifies sites with a colored ball...
141 Blue : OK
27 Yellow : No longer updated
18 Red : No longer active
...The 'C' page also lists 8 sites with a blinking red ball, but I'm not
sure what this means. At first I was mystified as to why he would leave
inactive sites on his lists -- most people try to cull these. When I saw
that he is offering a set of CDs containing all the files that he has
ever discovered on the Web, I understood. The CDs include files from
sites which have disappeared.
---
There are many interesting sites linked from the two lists which
document a piece of chess history. If you're looking for a specific game
or file, you'll probably find it on one of the sites linked from the
Balzer & Wrba lists, assuming that it exists somewhere on the Web.
Balzer's site appears to be maintained somewhat better, perhaps because
Wrba's objective is to sell CDs rather than to maintain an online
directory. For this reason, I'm going to change the Chess History
bookmark to point to the Balzer site.
Bye for now,
Mark Weeks
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Mark Weeks
Mark Weeks <10004...@compuserve.com> wrote:
> I'm going to change the Chess History
> bookmark to point to the Balzer site.
The Deja software accepted the change without complaint, but continued
to show the old info. I had to add the new site & delete the old site.
Anyway, it's done. - MW