42 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
42 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
# Frequently asked questions
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## Why/how did you start building lichess?
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(Answer by Thibault)
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I never intended to make a popular chess server.
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I just happened to start one, at a time when it was needed.
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Out of sheer luck.
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Back then I was learning programming and enthusiastically trying out web technologies.
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I was contributing to many open source projects, and creating lots of them.
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Mostly garbage which I was abandoning after a few days.
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Lichess was one of these throwaway learning projects. I was trying out realtime
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communications between browsers, and after a solid 5 seconds of thinking of
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a dummy project to experiment with, I decided to make a chess board.
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So I hacked it up quickly, to learn about XHR long polling. Then I put it online,
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and then I moved on to the next toy project as usual.
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However someone started using it, to my surprise. So I added a chat to communicate
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with that person. I got scolded by them because the board allowed illegal moves.
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Fine. I fixed that. And then the next bug, and then they must have invited some friends,
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because suddenly there was a few players online. So I kept adding bugs and fixing them.
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You know how it ended. It turned out, there was a real need for a free software chess server.
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One that would treat players as people and not cattle. A chess server without ads, trackers and paywalls.
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So the online chess community jumped on the occasion to build it with me.
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I was extremely fortunate to be the person who was at the right place at the right time.
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Lichess would have happened without me, with another founder and another name.
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It may also have been a lot better then, so I apologize just in case.
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My point is that I did not really create it, the chess community did. All they needed was an initial spark,
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to light the fire, and they picked mine. Thank you!
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## More questions
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Also see the [online lichess FAQ](https://lichess.org/faq)
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