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I asked this question on Meta Chess.SE. It's basically a proposal to merge that site with this site. For the greater good of both sites, so they can pass beta stage.

I'd like to know what you think about that?

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The chess site (and the poker site, and the go site, and the Magic proposal) were created because vocal proponents for those communities felt that those games were substantively different from other board and card games, and a specialised site for each would be much better. By allowing (most of) those sites to be created, Stack Exchange essentially decided to do the experiments to find out.

A frustrating side-effect of that decision is that although chess questions are on topic here, users tend to ask them on the chess site, because of a perception that they are somehow 'more' on-topic there. This actively hinders the growth of a community of chess experts on this site, since 'serious' players will prefer the other site.

The history of these decisions is summarised in Are we (as the Board and Card Game StackExchange) too broad in defining ourselves?.

Stack Exchange's rationale is explained in Why do chess and poker have separate sites even though they are clearly “board and card games?”.

My opinion is that these sites do not need to be distinct, and that distinction is not helping anyone. I believe both sites have smaller communities as a result of this balkanisation. We also suffer in terms of features and support. For example:

1) No chess board rendering. We have been told in Please implement the chess replayer on Board and Card Games that if we require nice chess board rendering, we would be best served by asking our questions on chess.SE, not here.

2) No support for displaying hands of cards. Despite a large card game following here, including bridge and poker, we do not have support for playing cards. This is standard on poker.SE (see e.g. Hand discussion: QJc vs A8o on A84 T K).

Finally, I suspect that the uncertainty surrounding the future of the other gaming sites, the consequent vague responses from SE, and the continued lack of support and feature commitment to B&CG is part of the reason that we continue to languish in endless Beta. Stack Exchange hasn't decided what to do here. For the forseeable future, the decision continues to be deferred. It's not clear to me how that can or will be resolved.

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    Yeah, this is really depressing to me every time it comes up. It's all well and good for subtopic sites to split off if they're clearly outgrowing their original home, but I feel that we need some official guidance from SE to stop them from preemptively splitting off. It doesn't do anyone any good to have tiny dead-end betas when they could be part of another site.
    – Cascabel
    Feb 28, 2014 at 8:13
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    I have thoughts about the merge that I plan to share on behalf of Stack Exchange, but before I get around to that, I'd like to pointout that your statement about chess board rendering is inaccurate. The sole reason for the lack of support here is that it conflicts with the Go renderer - even if we merged the sites together, that conflict would still exist. Shog9 suggested asking on the Chess site as a venue if the question really benefited from the replayer, not trying to say that it's unimportant to get things fixed for this site.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Feb 28, 2014 at 15:31
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    @Grace Note - I respectfully disagree. A thought experiment: if a chess site didn't exist, would SE have increased the priority of implementing a renderer on this site? I'm afraid I also don't buy the "technical difficulty" line. I have some small facility with programming myself, and, like the problem of apostrophes in MTG names, this simply isn't very hard. At all. Especially not for someone of balpha's calibre. IMO, this looks like a question of priority, not difficulty.
    – ire_and_curses
    Feb 28, 2014 at 16:29
  • @ires_and_curses I'm not going to say that it's top priority for us to fix this, but I will say that its priority is completely unrelated to the existence of the Chess site, and characterizing it as such is inaccurate. There's tons of what one might say are "quick fixes" - just today I had a rather swift thing on Japanese that took less than a minute to fix. We're not trying to spurn the community the attention it deserves, but things do not always get done with haste.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Feb 28, 2014 at 16:36
  • @Grace Note - Fair enough. I've edited my summary to reflect this exchange.
    – ire_and_curses
    Feb 28, 2014 at 16:40
  • @ire_and_curses At least you get more response from SE devs than you do from Wizards about the legal-murky-waters regarding third-party card rendering. I've put in so many requests to get clarification on that I bet they just autoblock my IP now.
    – corsiKa
    Feb 28, 2014 at 19:25
  • Sorry, to be clear, I was trying to generalize about the general issue of subtopic sites, not whether chess itself should exist - it's not a dead-end beta, but some subtopic sites I've seen were. What's really sad is when you see a couple dozen diehard fans of a topic pouring effort into a site that'll never work, when there's a site they could already join. Chess is bigger than that.
    – Cascabel
    Feb 28, 2014 at 20:25
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Since chess is already on-topic here, I doubt that many users of Board & Card Games would have a problem with that merge (I certainly don't). The ones most likely to oppose it would be the users of Chess.

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  • yes i think so, since they voted down the user who agreed with me on that point
    – Lynob
    Feb 27, 2014 at 15:18

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