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Like that, 2022 is over! Is it simply us, or does it really feel prefer it has flown by? 2022 has been an unprecedentedly eventful yr for chess, and it’s been no exception for us at Lichess. Thank you to everybody who makes it potential – to all those that volunteer, to all those that share their spare CPU energy, to all those that unfold the phrase about Lichess, and naturally to all those that financially help us.

Here’s a recap of among the work we’ve accomplished over the course of the yr.

New Features

Puzzles by Openings

The ever-expanding puzzle set is now additionally organized by the openings that gave rise to the techniques. Look on your favourite openings on the overview web page or comply with the suggestions immediately from the evaluation board.

Notifications

A brand new choice web page offers you granular management over notification sorts and the way they’re delivered. Streamers going dwell, examine invitations, and discussion board point out notifications at the moment are accessible for gadgets & push to your browser. You can even as soon as once more discover the choice to obtain a each day recap e mail of your correspondence video games we added earlier this yr.

A brand new push-to-many system permits environment friendly supply of streamer dwell notifications to 1000’s of on-line subscribers. We have plans for extra multicast notifications sooner or later.

Opening explorer

We optimized the opening explorer to the purpose that it could actually now serve all rated Lichess video games (slightly than a pattern, as earlier than) with out requiring dearer {hardware}. You can now see what gamers within the decrease ranking brackets are enjoying, extra simply do sound statistics throughout ranking teams, and usually tend to discover helpful numbers and video games deep into your favourite strains. Along the best way, we made small enhancements, like including efficiency rankings to the private opening explorer and including arrows to point strikes in referenced video games.

More

A brand new PGN viewer makes for higher embedded video games in discussion board posts and is accessible as a standalone widget for third-party tasks. The coordinate coach now has a reverse mode the place you possibly can observe notation by naming the highlighted squares and extra choices to customise your coaching.

There’s additionally been numerous bug fixes, progress on deliberate options, and plenty of smaller enhancements. We’ve been slacking on retaining the changelog in sync (sorry, verify again quickly!), however till then, or if you wish to comply with the whole lot dwell, take a look at the commit go online GitHub. The commit messages are sometimes comprehensible even for the non-programmers amongst us.

Technical Updates

Backend

In July, @arex gave a chat on the TNG Big Tech Day 2022. It offers a terrific overview of the most recent state of our backend structure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crKNBSpO2_I

Scala 3 and the JVM

One of the mammoth duties of the previous few months has been upgrading the model of Scala (the programming language that a lot of Lichess makes use of) from model 2 to model 3. Now that we’re out of the woods there, we’re happy to say there have been main efficiency positive aspects throughout the board and that Lichess is working extra effectively than ever!

However it was not all a clean experience, and the migration surfaced some long-standing points! In the primary up to date variations we began to note erratic CPU spikes after 24 hours of uptime.

Red strains point out updates/restarts. Frequent bug repair releases after the preliminary migration masked the difficulty for some time.

After a name for assist, and due to the wonderful group consultants and discussions on boards throughout the online, we nailed it to dangerous JVM code cache tuning.

As tense as this was, we’re finally fortunate it occurred, as a result of we realized quite a bit about profiling the JVM and bought helpful hints alongside the best way. Using jvm-async-profiler we optimized our manufacturing setup and are happy to announce that lila is now utilizing half the CPU in comparison with earlier variations, for related use.

These enhancements had been made with the group on our public discord, the place you will discover (and assist) our builders. A extra in-depth of our JVM points could be discovered on thibault’s weblog, in addition to his opinion on the enhancements Scala 3 brings to Lichess.

Frontend builds

We switched from rollup to esbuild and yarn 1 to pnpm, for main construct time enhancements, on the order of 10 minutes right down to 2 minutes for a clear construct. A brand new customized construct script offers way more handy watching builds for and throughout the frontend packages.

More

Other notable adjustments embrace the addition of a brand new server lila-http (Rust, axum) to offload massive tournaments, the addition of an API that permits utilizing exterior engines on the evaluation board (official suppliers below improvement),  tweaks to lag compensation (now additionally making an allowance for low-level WebSocket pings), and a fishnet replace bringing the most recent Stockfish 15.1 for server-side evaluation.

Moderation

We’re usually pretty quiet on specifics round moderation, however this yr we have now determined to drag again the curtain a bit on whole exercise, to focus on the massive contribution that our moderation staff makes to retaining Lichess a enjoyable place to be. In 2022, our staff closed over 650,000 studies, together with 91,000 studies of dishonest, virtually 340,000 studies of communication infractions, 82,000 studies of sandbagging or boosting, and 138,000 miscellaneous studies for different disallowed behaviors. Many of those studies had been created robotically by Lichess itself, however an enormous quantity additionally come from you, the customers of Lichess. We have many techniques in place however your studies actually do assist us preserve Lichess enjoyable for all. Here’s extra about reporting, honest play, and communications pointers.

Reports will not be the one mechanism we use to determine the place actions have to be taken, however in whole, mixed with our different techniques, Lichess flagged over 61,000 accounts for dishonest utilizing exterior help, flagged over 25,000 accounts for sandbagging or boosting, despatched virtually 200,000 warning messages to customers for numerous infractions, eliminated chat permissions from 60,000 accounts, and communicated with customers over 33,000 occasions by way of our appeals system.

These numbers could appear excessive to some, or low to others. Lichess has many tens of millions of lively customers with tens of millions of video games performed every day. The overwhelming majority of customers comply with the foundations, are well-behaved, and play pretty, so thanks!

We additionally added a brand new AI-based cheat detection instrument, Kaladin, that we spoke about within the mid-year replace.

Organisation

The Lichess staff is at all times rising, which is each nice typically, and vital with the ever-growing dimension, complexity, and choices of our web site, cellular app, and different software program. You can examine 25 of our contributors in our Advent Calendar put up!

As properly as rising in dimension, we’ve additionally been placing an enormous quantity of effort into updating our organisational construction and processes, to make sure we preserve providing a terrific platform to all our customers (and contributors) for the long run.

Some of the organisational highlights this yr embrace:

• Hiring @veloce as a full-time cellular developer! Given we rely virtually completely on small group donations, hiring one other full-time developer is a significant step for us, and one we’re very enthusiastic about. The new app is developed within the open and can begin accepting contributions when the foundations are set.
• Additionally, over this yr we’ve considerably elevated the variety of expert and skilled members of the staff we repeatedly contract to work for us. Just below 20 individuals (from full-time to fairly informal part-time) are employed by us (roughly equal to six full-time positions). We hope to extend this to offer extra help to our customers, extra enhancements, and extra effectivity general. Plus, to extend skilled alternatives inside chess.
• Ensuring our employees and staff have the liberty to study and check out new expertise to proceed growing professionally is absolutely essential to us. The freedom to strive new issues and fail with no expectations or dangers is important in studying. So we arrange a small funds to permit anybody within the staff to ask for assist in any books, coaching programs, or software program they could have to study new expertise or develop current ones.
• Over 500 individuals bought in contact with us to help our work in shifting to an affiliation d’interet normal and investigating choices in different nations, together with the US. Teams inside Lichess have begun reaching out to among the individuals prepared to volunteer with probably the most related expertise we’d like proper now.
• Working with conventional print media to implement DMCA procedures. 
• We’ve established and arrange a number of “councils” (like committees inside the charity organisation) to assist us handle and deal with among the areas inside Lichess. These largely existed informally earlier than, however now have extra construction and organisation round them. We plan to share extra on these quickly!

One of our most crucial councils is the Finance Council, led by a Lichess trustee who’s additionally an economist. The Finance Council ensures Lichess can keep financially viable each right now and sooner or later, contemplating future dangers, making projections, retaining our books updated, and speaking with our unbiased accountants and auditors. 

Speaking of books, we imagine now is an efficient time to share extra particulars about our funds. As talked about in a weblog publish in October, we retain the companies of a French accountancy agency to compile and log off our annual accounts, that are then reviewed by an unbiased auditor. This occurred for the primary time in 2021, and you possibly can see our 2021 accounts. 

For the oddballs who don’t take pleasure in studying French charity accounts, we’ve summarised the essential numbers beneath.

Our 2022 numbers will most likely be revealed within the spring (or June on the very newest). At this level, we imagine they need to present a smaller surplus than the earlier yr, resulting from greater bills, however nonetheless a surplus, that means that our revenue exceeded our bills, permitting us to avoid wasting for dangerous months. A surplus is at all times higher than a deficit, however with the worldwide inflation we count on a big enhance of our bills in 2023.

Some fascinating info:

• Our common donation is of 5.64€ – Lichess is grassroot funded!
• About 0.3% of our lively userbase donate
• Donors from the US and Germany make up over 50% of our donations

Content & Community

At Lichess we cherish freedom in all its types. The current occasions at Twitter reminded us to create a Mastodon account. Mastodon is a FOSS different to Twitter. We encourage all our Twitter followers meet us there.

Thanks to the group which placed on nice tournaments and occasions on Lichess! Here’s among the greater profile occasions that Lichess hosted, supported or organised:

• Lichess despatched two gamers to a chess World Championship! GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov and GM Hikaru Nakamura had been victorious on Lichess over 86,201 entries to win their respective finals and play OTB in Iceland, the place Nakamura turned World Fischer Random Champion 2022. Many because of Charlotte Chess Centre and Offerspill Sjakklubb for his or her co-organisation of this occasion with us. 
• This yr, we organised 25 Titled Arenas, paying out a complete of $25,000 in prize cash to skilled chess gamers, and serving to present extra alternatives and accessible common prize fund occasions to the chess group as a complete.
• In whole, round 95,000 gamers took half throughout all 4 of our seasonal marathons this yr, for an opportunity to win a coveted seasonal trophy!
• Lichess hosted two United States Chess Federation scholastic tournaments, organised by the Charlotte Chess Centre. That is greater than 1,500 youngsters who took half in these nationwide occasions performed on Lichess. 
• The Lichess Swiss staff hosted over 8,000 tournaments within the Swiss event format, breaking over 250,000 members within the staff! 
• Candidates protection together with video recaps
• The Lichess Twitch and Youtube channels did 119 dwell streams, principally utilizing the “Lichess Plays” format the place viewers play in opposition to robust titled gamers like IM John Bartholomew, IM Eric Rosen, WGM Sabina Foisor and extra.
• Broadcasts progress, added standings function.
• Grassroots event organizing continues to be robust on Lichess. The Lichess Bundesliga had virtually half one million members in 2022, with greater than 500 lively groups. New groups could be registered without spending a dime by contacting the league supervisor.
• Another grassroots occasion, the Mega Team Battle, occurs each different Friday. It’s a big enviornment, usually with greater than 300 groups and 1000’s of members.

You might have met a few of us on the Montreal meetup. Thanks for coming!

We additionally labored with numerous different organisations on numerous tasks:

• Over the course of the yr, we supplied technical help and customized assist to over 400 colleges or instructional establishments, aiding the availability of free, accessible chess training to instructional establishments all world wide. Assuming the typical scholar inhabitants of public colleges, this could possibly be estimated to positively impression 200,000 schoolkids and college students! 
• We donated content material we commissioned and produced for the Candidates Tournament to the Kelantan Chess Association for the Disabled, to supply a restricted version e book. All revenue from the sale of this e book went in the direction of supporting the disabled chess group in Malaysia.
• Members of the Lichess staff met with the French Ministry of Education, to debate tasks and initiatives associated to the availability of chess training, tech training and FOSS inside the French training system.
• We supplied free recommendation and help to over a dozen personal firms or different organisations – some exterior of chess, seeking to get lively inside it, others inside chess counting on code and software program we had produced.
• Lichess continued to help Free Open Source Software (FOSS) inside the chess ecosystem. In a milestone for chess, in 2022 we welcomed FIDE into the FOSS group, with their recreation viewer utilizing Lichess AGPL code. 
• Several firms inside chess started utilizing, or continued to make use of Lichess FOSS code, licensed below the AGPL, with the intention to develop their merchandise (similar to FIDE Online Arena, GChess, Clono, and plenty of others). Lichess is completely happy that our FOSS code helps personal business and innovation inside chess, the place these firms respect the license of the code, the contributions and work of the group, and recognise the impression charitable altruism has on their enterprise.

Epilogue

We hope you loved Lichess in 2022 and want you a contented new yr!