As we promised a week ago, here is the second blog post detailing more of the many improvements we made to Lichess over the summer.

Features

User Activity

User profiles have been updated with a new activity feed. You can now see what your family, friends, acquaintances, and other people of interest have been doing on Lichess. Examples:

• https://lichess.org/@/yasser-seirawan
• https://lichess.org/@/opperwezen
• https://lichess.org/@/Lance5500

Zen Mode

Zen Mode makes it easier to focus on chess rather than your opponent by simplifying the user interface and hiding your opponent’s username and rating. You can enable Zen Mode in the user menu during a game or in your game display preferences.

Download the Lichess games database

On https://database.lichess.org you may download over 200 million rated standard games played on Lichess. We publish new games every month. Most chess software is not made for handling a large number of games, so this is mostly useful for data analysts.

Public tournament chat

The tournament chat (including simultaneous exhibition chat) is now available in-game, not just in the tournament lobby. This should facilitate more of a shared tournament experience. If you prefer to not see the chat, you can select the Standings tab instead.

In-line notation layout

For studies and game analysis, we now support a new notation layout that we call "in-line notation". This layout uses more horizontal space and may be easier to work with, especially if you have a lot of annotations. You may toggle the notation layout using Shift+I, or from the right sidebar menu.

Usability

Match Score

Playing the same opponent multiple times consecutively results in a handy match score indicator as seen above.

Other usability improvements

• Users can now change the email registered on their account
• Users can now create tournaments with custom names (if the user fulfills certain basic requirements)
• Links to images in forum posts and study comments will be replaced by the actual images
• User tooltips now also show user latency
• Users now have some additional privacy settings available regarding challenges and study invites
• We have implemented many more translatable strings and the community has provided more translations
• Moderators can now create sticky forum topics, and post with a special moderator icon next to their username

Miscellaneous

• Study chapters can now have pinned comments that are shown no matter which move in the chapter you are on - also works with YouTube links
• It is now possible to give the opponent more time in correspondence games
• We have improved our public API