The project schach.in/deutschland

What is schach.in?

How do I find a chess club near me? This is a question that is often asked at trade fairs, on our chess tour or at regional sports festivals and other events. The answer is: At schach.in/Görlitz or schach.in/Flensburg. Simply enter schach.in + the name of the place and the clubs will be displayed.

Or you search via the post code: schach.in/28 for the whole area with 28 in front, or the full code schach.in/52070 to find clubs within 15 kilometers of the postcode. Or as a combination of several postcode areas: schach.in/78+79.

Where does the data come from?

The club data (membership numbers, rating list, average age) are automatically updated once a week with the Rating database of the German Chess Federation. New clubs and clubs that have left the federation are compared manually by us, this happens about every two to three months. Awards such as the Green Ribbon of the German Olympic Sports Confederation are maintained by the board of the German Chess Youth.

Each club can change its own data: venue(s), description of the activities and weekly or monthly appointments. You can do this without registering, then it can take a few days until we have checked the changes and activated them. With a login, everyone can change the data of their own club directly, it can be found online immediately.

Tips and Tricks

  • Individual clubs can also be reached via the club code of the German Chess Federation: schach.in/zps/C0131 redirects directly to the club.

  • The German Chess Youth has issued a postcard that you can distribute at events. Inquiries to the Office of the German Chess Youth – small quantities are available for postage, larger quantities at cost price plus postage.

Information postcard schach.in/deutschland

Technical background

Originally the club database schach.in ran on a node.js server, the data came from the MySQL database of the German Chess Youth. In order to get a direct connection of the data including the possibility to change them directly, everything now runs in the Zugzwang Project-Content Management System, which also is in use for the event and tournament calendar and the administration of the German Youth Chess Championships. This system is based on PHP as scripting language, MySQL as the database and an Apache web server.

The map is displayed using the free JavaScript library leaflet.js with a self-designed map from the commercial provider MapBox based on OpenStreetMap data.

Addresses are converted into coordinates using the freely accessible service Nominatim.

History

  • Jacob Roggon, Falco Nogatz and Gustaf Mossakowski had ideas for a club search back in the mid-noughties.
  • The first Chessys for the project have been around since 2008, but the club map first saw the light of day on the weekend 27–29 August 2011 as part of the “Node.js Knockout” as a project by Falco Nogatz.
  • On the website of the German Chess Youth, the club database started displaying on Google Maps under vereine.deutsche-schachjugend.de on 27 February 2014 with 1492 venues from 2487 clubs in total.
  • At 3 March 2016 the new version by Gustaf Mossakowski with maps from MapBox / OpenStreetMap was put online, which was then presented by Carsten Karthaus at the 2016 youth meeting.
  • The change to the easily rememberable domain schach.in took place on 29 October 2016. That day, Gustaf Mossakowski presented the database to the main committee of the German Chess Federation.

2239 clubs and numerous schools as well as individual chess kindergartens are currently in the database. Over 98% of the clubs are registered with their venue.

Contact

We are happy to answer further questions using the contact form.

For current information (German language only): visit our Twitter account @schach_in!