I have always been mesmorized by the newcomers that give up in a few moves, say within 10 moves or less when playing a game.

Reasons for this event is usually time outs and resign.

I have tried to find out why they resign, by asking for a feedback, to no avail, never any response yet after 50+ games abandonned by newcomers.

So, here is the deal, what do you have to suggest to retain new members?

I do have a few suggestions and I am sure that you all have many more.

Do we want to have this membership site grow or become stagnant?

Even if Erik puts all of the efforts and developmental resources to make it better, somewhere down the road insufficient funds will fold this site.

So how do we all attract new members to become premium membership?

I have only 3 ideas in mind:

1. Offer a free premium membership for one month to all new comers, say gold level and make sure that chess.com explains the benefits of this membership level and expand on other additional membership levelbenefits . Do not put a simple short sentence as : you will get mentoring, but explain what mentoring brings to you the new member as well as the new benefits. You are here trying to entice newcomers to become paid or premium members as this site calls it.

2. Have a comprehensive video and text welcome page.

Have a navigation or site map to guide newcomers, with lots of topics and FAQ's.

3. To foreign countries, new players where their dollar exchange vs US dollar is very expensive. Do offer a 3 months membership at their country  currency.

This is in my book called an investment, as most 90% + of the newcomers quit.

What do you suggest to retain new members?

The reason why newcomers leave their game after making probably around one or two moves is that:

1. They may not understand the rules of correspondance chess (aka, they do not read the thing that is automatically sent into the chat box in a greeter vs newcomer game!), and gets annoyed, because they are used to instant live chess. They are confused on why that their opponent has not made a move after a few hours or so! So, they leave the site and never come back.

2. They were just wandering randomly around the internet, searching for a site to play chess on. They really had no intention, and were just checking out the waters (or perhaps, they alrady play on a chess site, and want to see if there are any other good chess sites out there. They stumble onto chess.com, but they decided chess.com is not good enough('crazy' is the word I use to call those people)).

paul211, your ideas are interesting, but my opinions are that:

Idea NO.1. I don't think that would hardly be fair to players who are already playing on this site, and are not yet member. And instead of explaining to them what benefits members get, why not just send them the link to the 'subscribing' page? I dunno, perhaps this idea is worth a try...

Idea NO.2. There is already a welcome message (automatically sent to the greeter vs newcomer game chat box), and a welcome video is also already existing (Erik thought of everything didn't he?). The welcome, FAQs, and the Site map, can all be accessed by going to the bottom of the page.

Idea NO.3. I do not clearly get what you're saying. From what I comprehend of it, you are saying offering a three month premieum membership deal at the price of one? Could you please elaborate that a bit more - for example, which countries are you offering this deal to?

In my mind, if they leave the site, they wouldn't be a regular member anyways.  This would also make people just use different accounts to become a premium member and would rob chess.com out of money.

 No 1: Offer to all non paid membership and for all participating members, newcomers and others the same deal, a free 3 month membership gold level.

No 2. The welcome message may not target properly the newcomers. I do not know how to do it better, I leave it  to Erik and his team.

No 3. I am saying offer to all newcomers and non premium members, those that do not pay for a membership, a free 3 months gold membership and explain what they get for it.

The cost of a premium or paid membership in some countries is errandous. I live in Canada and paid $10 more because of the currency exchange and in some countries it is a lot more.

What I am suggesting is to offer a free gold membership for 3 months and explain the benefits. Perhaps this aproach will get new memberships.

In my class at school there are 5 people on this site and somone who didn't like chess wanted to get on this site becaue we were all talking about it and I said to him he would probably get on once and never want to play on the site again and he said yeah.

So that is a reason that people might get on the site and never go on again.

Don't bother. People will just make accounts for 3 months and then quit. Chess.com would lose a lot of revenue.

Be that as it may, Paul has a very valid point on how we can help to grow the membership base on this fantastic site. I think the ways of encouraging newcomers to stay and eventually become paying members - if they want to - can always be discussed and worked out. Nothing wrong with that and it's worth trying.

For me, one reason new members scooted soon after joining could be that they are overwhelmed by such a feature-rich site and don't quite know how to make their way round it. They are unable to see the full benefits. The greeters' programme is a wonderful idea but there is only so much the individual greeters can do.

Our group Praxis aims to help in this regard, by taking the greeter's programme a step further. We've started a project to actively take likely candidates from among the newcomers under our wing and mentor them. We hope to acquaint them with the superb features of chess.com, help them improve game skills and encourage them to develop their own set of socialising skills through chats and forum postings. Towards this end, we may need help to organise unrated games and tournaments for this group. Perhaps we can tap on your expertise for this, Paul? And anyone else willing to help out .

Why don't we display the chess.com video to anyone who signs up?  That would help the members a lot.

That's a good idea. But there may be those who need the human touch to encourage them ..