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If a lot of old legacy stuff the FICS code has always had for people using dumb terminals to log in to the Chess server is disabled when adding variant support, this, I feel, needs to be properly documented.

The help command should summarize the changes done, or point to a help topic that explains stuff like the variant ICS server always using style 12, moves needing to always be entered in c2c4 format, examine being broken, and what not.

There’s a lot of cruft in the FICS client from the days when a lot of people didn’t have chess clients—this was back when a lot of people didn’t have computers at home (a decent computer cost $2000), and installing game software on shared lab computers was problematic. Cleaning up this cruft is understandable but should be documented to reset the expectations of us who do remember the old-school FICS client.