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To Rich:

It seems that what you want and what Fergus wants is fundamentaly
incompatible. It seems you are striving for a situation like exists on
normal Internet Chess Servers, and to which I am used as well: At any time
a large number of games is gong on, and a large variety of opponents is
available for new games. GMs and beginners, commecial engines, dumbed-down
open-source engines, and people trying to test the engines they are
building. People play mostly quick games, like 5'+3' or 12'+5'.
Engines are usualy on line 24/7 and many people play them (providing a
good test bed for their developers.)

This variety makes the typical ICS a thriving community, where everyone
can find what they need (provided they play normal Chess or a very limited
range of 'variants' such as Crazyhouse, Losers/Suicide, normal Chess with
non-standard initial positions, Chess960, and occasionally Shatranj. This
is a situation I would also like to see for variants. Offering one variant
only, without providing engines, is not enough to make a viable ICS, as the
unspeakable server shows.

I would like to see something similar to an ICS like FICS or ICC, but then
for variants. My interest would be to find Human opponents for the engines
I develop. I don't have Zillions, and I do not have the slightest
interest in buying it, as it plays like cr*p. I am not interested in
playing games myself against other Humans, I just want to see how my
engines do, against Humans or other good engines, in fast games, (in order
to play enough of them). So that I can spot their mistakes and correct
them.

Game Courier has a much more limited scope. It is basically a medium for
playing correspondence Chess between Humans-only, and Fergus would like to
keep it this way. What would be interesting to me lies far beyond its
scope.

So I think we should forget about Game Courier, (and Zillions!), and try
to find a medium that is more suitable for interactivegame playing than
the http channel of a web browser. ICS protocol is unfortunately not
variant friendly, nd ven fails to handle Chess960 properly. Something like
the unspeakable server would be a nice start, (using a Java client that
auto-downloads through the browser Java plugin), except that this is also
proprietry software, and is buggy on the server side.