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Add help/tutorial on how to start with Lichess
I've been playing chess for many years but am a beginner with Lichess. I invested lots of time trying to find a tutorial on how to start with Lichess. Neither searching Google, nor the Lichess FAQ, nor the Lichess forum yielded any results. Also Lichess beginners aren't allowed to post according questions to the Lichess forum (as they're still locked for posting).
I discovered https://github.com/ornicar/lila/issues/3618 which already discussed the topic "Help resources" and seems to have led to the the Lichess FAQ which currently exists.
However there are so many things which are probably totally clear to experienced Lichess users but most probably not clear for most Lichess beginners. Just some example questions:
- How can I view games I already played?
- What do the tabs "Quick pairing", "Correspondence" and "Lobby" mean?
- How will my opponents be chosen if doing a "quick pairing"?
- I discovered that clicking a username in the "Correspodence" tab seems to start a new game instead of watching somebody else playing. (?) How do I end a game if I started it by accident?
- Do the tactical ratings (from puzzles) affect the general Lichess ratings?
- Are the Lichess ratings only based on the results of games I play or also of the quality of moves during the game? (I didn't find an answer on that at https://lichess.org/faq#ratings)
- How does Lichess decide which puzzles I get displayed?
- What's the meaning of upvoting / downvoting a puzzle? Does it mean "I liked / disliked that puzzle" or "This was too easy / too difficult? or "The current rating assigned to that puzzle is too high / too low"
- Why do I see puzzles which have negative votings?
- What is the meaning of the puzzle rating (and how does Lichess calculate it)?
- How does Lichess calculate my tactics score? Does it also consider how long I thought about a puzzle? Does the score only consider whether I won / lost puzzles or does it also consider the strength of my "failed" move? Once I failed in a puzzle with my first move does it downgrade my rating if also my second and third moves in that puzzle are failures?
- What is the meaning of the "correspondence" tab? I know the correspondence chess from the offline chess world and I've also read https://lichess.org/faq#correspondence. Is it correct that "correspondence" in Lichess is a normal Lichess game but with the only difference that it has an extremely long time and allows opening books?
- Having the premove feature activated how do I peform premoves?
- ...
Also I should mention that I started using Lichess on my smartphone. Lateron I realized that if you use the web version there are tooltipps and hints explaining e.g. the up-/downvoting. These hints are missing in the mobile app which might leave a mobile user with even more questions than a desktop user and might also require a separate tutorial / more extended help for the mobile app.
Is there any resource I didn't find which answers these questions? If not so it would be great to add a help document or a tutorial / guide to Lichess which helps with the first steps with Lichess and answers those typical beginner's questions.
To better support beginners it would be great to add an overview page listing all the available help resources to the tabs "Learn" or "Community" in Lichess itself. IMO this overview page should contain links to the following help resources:
- Lichess tutorial for beginners (still to be created)
- Lichess FAQ
- Lichess forum
- Questions tagged 'lichess' on StackOverflow
- Lichess.org discord channel: https://discord.gg/pw6Efvk
- #lichess channel on chat.freenode.net
- Lichess YouTube Channel
@SteveMulchCivic Happy to hear you're willing to help. I'm new here but if noone responds here you might have to try as follows according to the docs:
Communicate with other devs on the #lichess IRC channel on freenode or Discord.
@niklasf Can @SteveMulchCivic simply create his tutorial e.g. at Google Docs and somebody will then integrate it?
I don't think a single document would be effective here. Some are UI issues, some fairly technical questions about a particular component, some are not needed to start out and will naturally be discovered over time.
