Two feature suggestions

Hi,

I think the lichess website and app are close to perfect, but there are two features I'm missing a lot:

1) In the app, I think setting up a position is very tedious in the Board editor. DroidFish Chess implemented this in a smoother way: you can select a piece and place it any number of times on the board. If you click twice, it changes colour. As a comparison, I've measured the time to set up the starting position fom a clear board: Lichess: 33.1s, DroidFish: 15.9s - more than twice as fast.
It makes a big difference if one reads a book and repeatedly needs to set up positions.

2) I love the Arena and Swiss tournament modes, but especially during Corona times it becomes apparent that a (Double) Round Robin Tournaments are missing. We often like to play with a small private group, e.g. 4 players. The Swiss Tournament always stops if 3 rounds are played, but we'd like to play each other twice or X times.
If a new tournament mode is too much effort, maybe an option can be added to the Swiss Tournament that allows the same pairings if everyone has played everyone already.

Thanks for considering!

1) To be honest, if you're reading a book and repeatedly setting up a position it might be worthwhile to use an actual board and pieces to move around. In any case if you think it would really make a difference and improve the app you can try posting the suggestion as an "issue" at github.com/veloce/lichobile.

2) This has been discussed on GitHub before, and several reasons were raised why it's not a great idea. If I recall correctly, the main arguments are that the number of use cases (where existing solutions don't suffice) is too small to do the extra work and to expand the codebase; that people constantly join and leave online tournaments which does not work well with RRs; and that there's already the Lichess API to implement these things yourself if you really want this. (I think some people might even regret having added swiss tournaments to lichess, seeing how most people are still only using arenas now.)

#1 it should be possible to convert a scanned image to FEN.

You can also try this - www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~abhishek/putz/
It has an image to FEN and a link to directly open the FEN on lichess.

Hi,
thanks both for your feedback!

1) the disadvantage of the physical board is that it doesn't support Stockfish. :-) And that it's impractical while travelling.
Great idea with the FEN. This page didn't recognise any positions I tried, but the app Chessify worked well. Scanning and copying it back to Lichess took 18s in total, analyzing directly in Chessify was quickest with 12s.
I'll still mention the improved interface of DroidFish in github.

2) I understand the reasoning. In a private group the risk of people leaving is small though, and currently neither Arena nor Swiss can be used for the purpose.
If it's too much effort, I still think just adding the option of allowing a second pairing in Swiss Tournaments could be a compromise.
I'll take a look at the API, but probably my programming skills don't suffice.

Cheers