FEN always gives the end position?

Hello 
 
New on the site. I want to analyze a position in one of my old games by using an external program and the FEN notes.  
 
But the FEN always give the end position, which is kind of useless.  
Is there someway to fix this?

FEN describes one position. You want the PGN, which include the whole game. (I think the link "Get PGN" shows on all archived games.)

Thanks for the reply. 

The analyze tool that I have uses FEN not PGN.

When viewing an old game, I would like that the FEN gives the current board position, not the end position. This is how all my other chess tools works. 

Yeah, that's actually pretty strange, if I am looking at move 5 for example, I can't get FEN of the position at move 5, only FEN of last position

When is this getting fixed?

I would say never because it doesn't need to be fixed.  

The PGN is much more efficient.  Modern free programs like Arena can input PGN format and and export FEN for any move you want (It is Ctl +F6.) so that you can create diagrams for any position you want here.

Well, it *would* be nice to at least have the option of just grabbing the FEN for any position.

I'm not sure how importing into another program, locating the move and exporting from there is 'much more efficient' than being able to take the FEN from the current position.

I don't think chess.com actually employs programmers anymore though so don't expect any changes.

Neither pgn or fen are formats that chess.com developed. In fact the long pre-date the founding of chess.com. And I'm not really sure what the issue is anyway. they are seperate formats for specific things. There is nothing to "fix" because both formats do exactly what they were intended to do. Might as well demand that chess.com "fix" the jpeg format because it only displays a single image and not an entire video.

You just haven't read his post.

FEN isn't specifically a position at the end of the game. But that's all it is at chess.com

The FEN isn't specifically the end of game position, but rather the current position of the game. And that's all it was ever intended to be, and that's how chess.com utilizes it. FEN (Forsyth-Edwards Notation) was originally developed in the 1800s as a way to have a single string of information to allow a chess game to be resumed later from the current position. There's no fault here on chess.com's part for not trying to make it into something other than what it was meant to be.

But they don't allow it to be used for a legitimate and often asked for use. Which would take very little effort to implement.

There's no point to doing so when PGN serves the same practical purpose and is already implemented.

No, it doesn't.

Sure it does. You ether scroll through a set of move to arrive at the desired position witn PGN. Or you, under this proposed idea, scroll through a series of FEN strings to arrive at the desired position. Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other.

The difference is that some applications e.g.

http://www.shredderchess.com/online-chess/online-databases/endgame-database.html

Do not allow you to import a PGN.

You have to download and install another program, and open it every time you want to convert a PGN into an FEN to use it.

It's like someone complaining there's no bus route and you telling them it doesn't matter because they could walk.

It's incredibly inconvenient and a simple fix.

Just because you don't understand the problem, doesn't mean that it isn't a problem.

I understand the problem fine, and it isn't on chess.com's end. It's much simpler fix for you to find a good chess program that accepts both PGN and FEN.

I think the problem is that considering your rating, you haven't studied, so don't realise that some perfectly good sites only accept PGN.

Ad hominem, the classic refuge of those who have ran out of valid argument.

Your "good chess program" could only do what the Shredderchess online endgame database does if it has a 6-man endgame tablebase installed. Not everybody's hardware has that capability.

Another good example of a specialized program that only accepts FENs and that can do more than a "good chess program" is a program called "Finalgen". (It's a very specialized endgame tablebase program.)