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. Thanks to everybody who makes it attainable – 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.

Right here’s a recap of a number of the work we’ve performed over the course of the yr.

New Options

Puzzles by Openings

The ever-expanding puzzle set is now additionally organized by the openings that gave rise to the techniques. Search for your favourite openings on the overview web page or observe the suggestions instantly from the evaluation board.

Notifications

A brand new desire web page provides you granular management over notification sorts and the way they’re delivered. Streamers going stay, research invitations, and discussion board point out notifications at the moment are obtainable for gadgets & push to your browser. It’s also possible to as soon as once more discover the choice to obtain a day by 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 stay notifications to 1000’s of on-line subscribers. We’ve plans for added multicast notifications sooner or later.

Opening explorer

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

Extra

A brand new PGN viewer makes for higher embedded video games in discussion board posts and is obtainable as a standalone widget for third-party tasks. The coordinate coach now has a reverse mode the place you may follow 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 lots of smaller enhancements. We’ve been slacking on holding the changelog in sync (sorry, examine again quickly!), however till then, or if you wish to observe every thing stay, take a look at the commit go browsing 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 Huge Tech Day 2022. It provides an ideal overview of the newest state of our backend structure.

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

Scala 3 and the JVM

One of many 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 operating extra effectively than ever!

Nonetheless it was not all a easy trip, and the migration surfaced some long-standing points! Within the first up to date variations we began to note erratic CPU spikes after 24 hours of uptime.

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

After a name for assist, and due to the superb neighborhood specialists and discussions on boards throughout the net, we nailed it to unhealthy JVM code cache tuning.

As disturbing as this was, we’re finally fortunate it occurred, as a result of we discovered so much about profiling the JVM and bought helpful hints alongside the way in which. Utilizing 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 neighborhood 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 all the way down to 2 minutes for a clear construct. A brand new customized construct script provides far more handy watching builds for and throughout the frontend packages.

Extra

Different 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 underneath improvement),  tweaks to lag compensation (now additionally taking into consideration low-level WebSocket pings), and a fishnet replace bringing the newest Stockfish 15.1 for server-side evaluation.

Moderation

We’re sometimes pretty quiet on specifics round moderation, however this yr we now have determined to tug again the curtain just a little on complete exercise, to spotlight the massive contribution that our moderation group makes to holding Lichess a enjoyable place to be. In 2022, our group closed over 650,000 experiences, together with 91,000 experiences of dishonest, virtually 340,000 experiences of communication infractions, 82,000 experiences of sandbagging or boosting, and 138,000 miscellaneous experiences for different disallowed behaviors. Many of those experiences had been created routinely by Lichess itself, however an enormous quantity additionally come from you, the customers of Lichess. We’ve many techniques in place however your experiences actually do assist us maintain Lichess enjoyable for all. This is extra about reporting, truthful play, and communications tips.

Reviews should not the one mechanism we use to determine the place actions must be taken, however in complete, 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 varied infractions, eliminated chat permissions from 60,000 accounts, and communicated with customers over 33,000 occasions by means of our appeals system.

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

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

Organisation

The Lichess group is at all times rising, which is each nice basically, and vital with the ever-growing measurement, complexity, and choices of our website, cell app, and different software program. You’ll be able to examine 25 of our contributors in our Creation Calendar publish!

In addition to rising in measurement, we’ve additionally been placing an enormous quantity of effort into updating our organisational construction and processes, to make sure we maintain providing an ideal platform to all our customers (and contributors) for the longer term.

A few of the organisational highlights this yr embrace:

• Hiring @veloce as a full-time cell developer! Given we rely virtually totally on small neighborhood 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.
• Moreover, over this yr we’ve considerably elevated the variety of expert and skilled members of the group we repeatedly contract to work for us. Slightly below 20 folks (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 supply extra help to our customers, extra enhancements, and extra effectivity total. Plus, to extend skilled alternatives inside chess.
• Guaranteeing our workers and group have the liberty to be taught and check out new abilities to proceed creating professionally is de facto necessary to us. The liberty to strive new issues and fail with no expectations or dangers is significant in studying. So we arrange a small price range to permit anybody within the group to ask for assist in any books, coaching programs, or software program they may must be taught new abilities or develop present ones.
• Over 500 folks bought in contact with us to help our work in transferring to an affiliation d’interet normal and investigating choices in different international locations, together with the US. Groups inside Lichess have begun reaching out to a number of the folks prepared to volunteer with essentially the most related abilities we want proper now.
• Working with conventional print media to implement DMCA procedures. 
• We’ve established and arrange a number of “councils” (like committees throughout the charity organisation) to assist us handle and deal with a number of 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 among our most important 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 at this time and sooner or later, contemplating future dangers, making projections, holding our books updated, and speaking with our unbiased accountants and auditors. 

Talking of books, we consider 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 may see our 2021 accounts. 

For the oddballs who don’t get pleasure from studying French charity accounts, we’ve summarised the necessary numbers beneath.

Our 2022 numbers will in all probability be revealed within the spring (or June on the very newest). At this level, we consider they need to present a smaller surplus than the earlier yr, as a result of larger bills, however nonetheless a surplus, that means that our revenue exceeded our bills, permitting us to avoid wasting for unhealthy months. A surplus is at all times higher than a deficit, however with the worldwide inflation we anticipate a big improve of our bills in 2023.

Some attention-grabbing information:

• 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 material & Group

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.

Due to the neighborhood which placed on nice tournaments and occasions on Lichess! Right here’s a number of the larger 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 grew to become 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 neighborhood as an entire.
• In complete, 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’s greater than 1,500 youngsters who took half in these nationwide occasions performed on Lichess. 
• The Lichess Swiss group hosted over 8,000 tournaments within the Swiss match format, breaking over 250,000 members within the group! 
• Candidates protection together with video recaps
• The Lichess Twitch and Youtube channels did 119 stay streams, largely utilizing the “Lichess Performs” format the place viewers play in opposition to robust titled gamers like IM John Bartholomew, IM Eric Rosen, WGM Sabina Foisor and extra.
• Broadcasts development, added standings function.
• Grassroots match organizing continues to be robust on Lichess. The Lichess Bundesliga had virtually half 1,000,000 contributors in 2022, with greater than 500 lively groups. New groups could be registered at no cost by contacting the league supervisor.
• One other grassroots occasion, the Mega Workforce Battle, occurs each different Friday. It’s a big area, typically with greater than 300 groups and 1000’s of contributors.

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

We additionally labored with a lot of different organisations on varied tasks:

• Over the course of the yr, we supplied technical help and customized assist to over 400 colleges or instructional establishments, aiding the supply of free, accessible chess training to instructional establishments all all over the world. Assuming the typical scholar inhabitants of public colleges, this may very well be estimated to positively impression 200,000 schoolkids and college students! 
• We donated content material we commissioned and produced for the Candidates Event to the Kelantan Chess Affiliation for the Disabled, to supply a restricted version ebook. All revenue from the sale of this ebook went in direction of supporting the disabled chess neighborhood in Malaysia.
• Members of the Lichess group met with the French Ministry of Schooling, to debate tasks and initiatives associated to the supply of chess training, tech training and FOSS throughout the French training system.
• We provided free recommendation and help to over a dozen personal firms or different organisations – some exterior of chess, trying to get lively inside it, others inside chess counting on code and software program we had produced.
• Lichess continued to help Free Open Supply Software program (FOSS) throughout the chess ecosystem. In a milestone for chess, in 2022 we welcomed FIDE into the FOSS neighborhood, with their sport viewer utilizing Lichess AGPL code. 
• A number of firms inside chess started utilizing, or continued to make use of Lichess FOSS code, licensed underneath the AGPL, to be able to develop their merchandise (similar to FIDE On-line Enviornment, GChess, Clono, and lots of others). Lichess is completely happy that our FOSS code helps personal trade and innovation inside chess, the place these firms respect the license of the code, the contributions and work of the neighborhood, 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!