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I like the new GUI and improvements.
However, unless I am missing something obvious, I do not see FEN for every game position. This is a standard feature on Lichess and Chessable.
If this feature is truly missing, could it be added?

Its an easy way to not allow 2019- games to be manly blitz. It makes the database since 2019 useless if trying to see stats for non blitz games.

Thank you Richard for taking the time to provide such a detailed answer, well appreciated!

No, but it is a todo list item, and not too hard to implement, so hopefully something we get to sooner rather than later.

Yes, puzzles can be underrated depending on your definition of underrated. After they've been in the system for a while puzzle ratings fairly accurately reflect how hard they are on average to get right.

However 'getting right' and 'completely understanding before you start the move sequence' are sometimes different things, and where there is room to say a puzzle might be underrated.

Also, puzzles where the opponent doesn't play the most challenging line because it would end up giving up more material in the long run (or getting mated too quickly) can also have a disconnect between rating and difficulty of completely understanding. In this case, I'd think a lot of incremental solving is occurring. It is fairly easy to come up with the correct moves for the first 3 moves, and once you are there , the calculation is quite a bit easier. You can see the vast majority of fails are occurring on black's 4th move, so even with the incremental solving, creating a shorter calculation from the most challenging position, people are still having trouble finding the right 4th move, but the guessability of the first few moves are certainly helping keep the rating down. It has quite a high blitz rating , coupled with quite a high average solve time in blitz compared to other blitz problems, so your intuitition that is is a challenging position I think is warranted. Blitz mode partly factors out incremental moving strategies by penalising the time after first move.

It is rarer to find puzzles you could argue are objectively overrated. In general if you think a puzzle is overrated it is more likely you haven't noticed a tempting alternative move that others have picked, and takes a lot of calculation to refute. If you don't even consider that move out of luck rather than calculation, then the problem can feel easier than the rating suggests.

Ultimately ratings are an average of the 'difficulty in getting right' across all solvers, and even ignoring structural issues such as 'opponent gave up early' there will be individual differences on how easy different people will find it to get the correct sequence on a problem, based on differences in thinking strategies (incremental solving vs up-front calculation, long think vs short think etc), some luck on choosing the right candidate move to start with, individual difference in pattern awareness, some people find some types of motifs easier (or harder) than others, or just how the player was feeling on the day (e.g. how well they'd slept, how distracted they were etc). It is impossible to factor in all these differences into a single number, so you'll sometimes come across problems that don't gel with your own feeling of difficulty. Some improvements could be made to try to factor out some kinds of sub-optimal solving strategies that provide short term rating advantage (like blitz mode does with time-after-first-move penalty), but there are pros and cons to these type of thing, as incremental solving is sometimes a valid strategy in some positions where it can be easy to verify that a move is safe without doing the full calculation to the end of the sequence.

Hello,

During my session, I had to solve this puzzle: https://chesstempo.com/chess-tactics/38046596

You have to sacrifice a piece, put a check, improve your queen with tempo (but without gaining back your sacrified material yet) + you need to consider the resource Rb7, threatening mate, then you have to decide between 4 different possible checks, get your queen back to defend your weakness, and finally it is done!

While I was solving the puzzle, my feeling was that the puzzle was at least rated 2200/2250+ on CT. But in fact, it is only 1962.

Is the puzzle so low-rated because people find it by guessing move-by-move instead of trying to visualize the whole solution from start to end in their head without moving the pieces? Or are players really capable to visualize the whole line at this level? I'm around 2100 and the more I'm working on my calculation skills, the most I have confidence issues about my skills 

hi, is it possible to autoplay the entire repertoire?

R flips the board? Very unintuitive. In chessbase it's ctrl + f. On lichess it's f.

R rotates the board, it seems to be somewhat arbitrary which character achieves what you want once you know which key to use. When we added a key binding for flipping, we'd already been using 'f' for something else, so 'f' wasn't available.

I want the board to be in the center. Why do I need to look to the left? The board is too small. I want it as big as possible but still be able to see the opening book and the scoresheet.

The larger the board , the less move list, opening explorer and game search results you get so there are tradeoffs in having a larger board. If you're happy with those tradeoffs the board is resizable using the resize handle on the right edge of the board. We've chosen a default we believe offers a compromise between a reasonable sized board, and still providing enough screen left for the other UI elements, while still leaving you with the option to choose your own board size.

In any case, I don't think any of this relates to 'ugly' as it is functionality issues you are describing, not form, and it sounds like there are reasonable workarounds for the functionality issues you've described (3 different ways of rotating the board, and a resizable board). I'm sorry you're not happy with the new UI. Given you were one of our first users, I'm sure you've gotten very used to the old DB UI, but hopefully you'll find the new UI less objectionable over time.  We may offer some options for more control over UI layout in the future where the move list could be optionally shown on the left, but this is probably not going to be a short term priority at the moment.

R flips the board? Very unintuitive. In chessbase it's ctrl + f. On lichess it's f. I want the board to be in the center. Why do I need to look to the left? The board is too small. I want it as big as possible but still be able to see the opening book and the scoresheet.

Hi,
thanks for your first answer.
I found another bug:

The elo filter for the opening results only works once: please find attached gif that describes it best

https://imgur.com/G6yc7Gn

Thanks for the report! Turns out the under 2000 and 2000+ selectors were not working. The rest of it appears to have been working, although the caching we do may have confused things if bad results were being cached. I've deployed a new version which should fix both of those rating range subset choices, and should also create a new opening explorer cache to avoid reusing any bad results that might be sitting in the cache.

Please let me know if this new version appears to fix the problem for you.

EDIT: Sorry, I posted before the new upload had completed, if you read this just after I posted, please reload the database page and try again, as you may have still been looking at the old version if you read my reply immediately after I posted. It is definitely live now.

Regards,
Richard.