The idea of creating an email chess server began early in 2001. A few lines of codes were written to see if it is possible to make email chess easier. Could we establish a club where people can play chess simply by email? I know what huge efforts are needed to maintain an email chess club, but what are the computers for if not to take the hard and regular work from humans?
The club was founded in the middle of 2001, when a few obsessed and curious players were trying to use the system's first facilities. It had no name, and a lot of very useful things were still unsupported. But at least we could make moves. :-)
At the beginning of 2002 the club was deemed ready for the Internet public, most of the basic facilities needed to start and play games were working.
By the end of 2002 much work had been done and the following facilities were supported: the pairing system, PGN and FEN support, time controls, vacation policy, the reminder system, and a lot of other stuff were ready, such as starting games with standard openings, assigning colour during a challenge, friendly games, and the chess problem system, to mention only the major things.
On November 20, 2002 the club got it's final name, E4EC, which stands for E4 Emailchess Club, and e4ec.org became the club's Internet domain.
A few things remain to be completed in 2004. The biggest challenge is to support more types of tournaments.
Hutton pairing is a system of matching many teams while demanding only one game from each player taking part. It was devised in 1921 by a Scottish clergyman, George Dickson Hutton (1866 - 1929), and has been used regularly for correspondence team events and for matches where many teams assemble on one day, for this reason it is sometimes called "jamboree pairing".
The players in each team are ranked in order of strength and each player meets someone of similar ranking. When the number of teams is one more than the number of boards, each team meets every other team on one board only. Organisers use pairing tables which enable them to cope with any number of teams and any number of boards.
To provide the widest compatibility with email clients the server uses this format by default to communicate with the players.
If their email clients are able to display graphic and html messages, they usually turn on the html message format, which is really friendlier than the plain text format.
Of course, it often happens, that the two players of the same game uses different message formats, and the same game displays differently for them.
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