Russ, I Can't get my PGNs anymore

I know I haven't been playing as much recently, so I'm not real sure when this change was implemented. I know I was getting PGNs until moderately recently.

Background: I decided that I'd rather analyze my games using Winboard instead of the analysis window, so I wrote a little Perl script to download the PGNs of my active games. I'd been using that for a year or so when it recently stopped downloading them for me. The script checks my active games as found in
http://www.redhotpawn.com/core/viewpublicgames.php?p1name=prn&p2name=&showgamescode=I
extracts the game IDs and then tries to download the PGNs from, e.g.,
http://www.redhotpawn.com/gameanalysis/pgncutandpaste.php?gameid=1318755

The problem appears to be that recently Russ must have instituted some sort of fubar browser checking that messes things up. Now my attempts to download game data get redirected. I had trouble telling what was happening until I tried to see what wget would do (i.e. another non-browser based tool) The result was:

$ wget http://www.redhotpawn.com/gameanalysis/pgncutandpaste.
php?gameid=1318755
--14:14:57-- http://www.redhotpawn.com/gameanalysis/pgncutandpaste.php?gameid=1
318755
=> `pgncutandpaste.php?gameid=1318755'
Resolving www.redhotpawn.com... 207.97.221.50
Connecting to www.redhotpawn.com[207.97.221.50]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: /index.php?cookiewarning=true&gameid=1318755 [following]
--14:14:58-- http://www.redhotpawn.com/index.php?cookiewarning=true&gameid=1318
755
=> `index.php?cookiewarning=true&gameid=1318755'
Connecting to www.redhotpawn.com[207.97.221.50]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]

[ <=> ] 17,282 96.18K/s

14:14:59 (96.02 KB/s) - `index.php?cookiewarning=true&gameid=1318755' saved [17,
282]

IOW, it looks like RHP now expects to be able to set cookies in a browser, regardless of whether that makes sense or not and redirects my http queries when it can't set the stupid cookie.

Russ, can I please have my PGNs back?

Thanks,
Paul

Originally posted by prn
I know I haven't been playing as much recently, so I'm not real sure when this change was implemented. I know I was getting PGNs until moderately recently.

Background: I decided that I'd rather analyze my games using Winboard instead of the analysis window, so I wrote a little Perl script to download the PGNs of my active games. I'd been using that for a ...[text shortened]... when it can't set the stupid cookie.

Russ, can I please have my PGNs back?

Thanks,
Paul

Russ has changed the way My Games works. Don't know how.

Having said that, why all the bother? THere is a perfectly good Email My Games feature on the site.

D

Because "Email my games" cannot be set to send only games in progress. Therefore, it is not "perfectly good" for my purposes. 🙁

Paul

Originally posted by prn
Because "Email my games" cannot be set to send only games in progress. Therefore, it is not "perfectly good" for my purposes. 🙁

Paul

Well said.

Originally posted by prn
Because "Email my games" cannot be set to send only games in progress. Therefore, it is not "perfectly good" for my purposes. 🙁

Paul

Why do you need to send PGNs during a game...unless you are exporting them to your engine?

The analysis board here isn't very good - I don't blame him for wanting to work in WinBoard or some other chess emulation software to do his analysis. One where you can actually go forward and backward through the lines you are analyzing, that sort of thing.

Originally posted by Freddie2004
Why do you need to send PGNs during a game...unless you are exporting them to your engine?

Come on, he said in his post that he was using a different analysis board. We can't go around accusing everyone of cheating. And with a 1650 rating, and two games in progress, he hardly seems the cheating type to me.

Originally posted by ark13
Come on, he said in his post that he was using a different analysis board. We can't go around accusing everyone of cheating. And with a 1650 rating, and two games in progress, he hardly seems the cheating type to me.

*cough*dominic0987*cough*

and anyway I was taking the mick!

Originally posted by Freddie2004
*cough*dominic0987*cough*

and anyway I was taking the mick!

Good point, but still... 😉

Originally posted by prn
I know I haven't been playing as much recently, so I'm not real sure when this change was implemented. I know I was getting PGNs until moderately recently.

Background: I decided that I'd rather analyze my games using Winboard instead of the analysis window, so I wrote a little Perl script to download the PGNs of my active games. I'd been using that for a ...[text shortened]... when it can't set the stupid cookie.

Russ, can I please have my PGNs back?

Thanks,
Paul

Russ has said before he doesn't want people doing this kind of thing because it increases server load. Hence the changes.

Use the various tools he has provided in the Developers forum.

http://www.chessatwork.com/xml/simple/gamefens_xml.php?gameid=382050

May work for what you want.

Originally posted by prn
Because "Email my games" cannot be set to send only games in progress. Therefore, it is not "perfectly good" for my purposes. 🙁

Paul

Applying a hundreth of the brainpower that you put into writing your scripts into figuring out the Email My Games function might have allowed you to use it so that it is "perfectly good" for your purposes.

You have 2 games in progress. The most recent finished game was about a month ago (not double checked, but it was a long time ago), why not use Email My Games stipulating only games moved in the past 20 (or 10, or 5) days: Only Games in Progress will be sent to you.

Also, what difference if you get finished games? Only look at the ones which are in progress.

D

You now have to be logged in to export your games, so you are getting redirected when you access that page using wget.

-Russ

Originally posted by ark13
Come on, he said in his post that he was using a different analysis board. We can't go around accusing everyone of cheating. And with a 1650 rating, and two games in progress, he hardly seems the cheating type to me.

He isn't a cheat! He's a good player and a nice guy damn it!!

Originally posted by marinakatomb
He isn't a cheat! He's a good player and a nice guy damn it!!

Thank you, James. I appreciate your support. I hope you have been able to play more lately. I recall that when we last played you were feeling some severe time crunch.

As it happens, I have also been unable to play much lately, but I am still playing a couple of games just to keep going at all. I get to log in here only irregularly and don't have much time recently. I'm hoping to get a chance to play more again in the future and one of the things I have liked most about RHP is the fact that the HTML interfaces have been so friendly and standard.

My primary email account (which is what RHP uses) is my work account. This is the one I check regularly and using another would be a bit of a pain. Unfortunately, I am forced to use Microsoft Outlook at work and one of the little joys of MS is that they have some quite stupid limits on what you can easily do. For example, I cannot set up a rule to extract a mail message to a text file. If I could, then it would be pretty straightforward to pull out the PGN content from that. As it is, it takes manual intervention to handle it. Right now, when I am playing only a couple of games, this is not too bad. A few months ago, when I tended to play on the order of 20 games at a time (and I know, that is not a huge number by RHP standards, but it's what I felt comfortable with) I would not have wanted to extract 20 PGNs manually and individually. As it was, all I had to do was fire off my script to get a file with only and exactly the PGNs of my games in progress. I could do that every day or two and then analyze all my games using Winboard. Frankly, I don't think doing that placed a huge load on the RHP server. In fact, since I did without all the graphics, etc., I didn't need to hit the server nearly as much as I would have done for nearly any manual operation. Certainly, I hit the server a lot harder when I was using the RHP forums a lot.

In any case, it appears that Russ has made a conscious decision to prevent people from using a script to get their game data. I'll have to see whether I can live with that. As I say, I obviously can handle it at my current game load. OTOH, I doubt that I would find it comfortable to do the same in order to look at my games offline if I were playing 20 games. And, frankly, I doubt that I will renew my subscription just to play 2 or 3 games at a time. When my subscription comes up for renewal again in a few months, either I will have figured out a better way to deal with my games, or I will let it drop.

Best Regards,
Paul

Hmmm! That's very odd. I mentioned my subscription being up for renewal again "in a few months" but then noticed my star is missing. I know I paid Russ for the year back in February. But now I'm listed as not being a subscriber.

Looks like a PM to Russ is in order.

Paul