Hello fellow North Carolinian, basicb!
For some reason I do not receive any emails from chess.com (I am a freebie member).
I did receive a notification saying that chess.com had tried to send an email, it failed, and I need to contact them immediately to solve the problem. That's a bit too much trouble for me to bother with--I set my settings and what comes through to my inbox may...
I receive notification emails daily from a few different websites. I collect many more of them than I do idiot jokes and rubbish from bored friends--in fact, my only application for email is business. This may be because I have few friends, or it may be that I am biased towards perpetually forwarded base humor...
It has been my experience that emails are simply not reliable--not coming regularly, sometimes not at all, often delayed. I don't know wherein the problem lay. It seems to me human technology is and will always be fickle, as is the human--both often getting backed-up and sluggish. Think about how many chess games and how many moves are taking place here. Be glad it is not the USPS we are dealing with anymore in correspondence chess...
My opinion is thus--emails fail as the future's perfect mode of communication. Everything is worse. Many people in this age can not for the life of them construct grammatically correct sentence. Worse, they do not see the importance in doing so. We would be better off retrograding our youth to letters. George Orwell would have plenty to say on this subject, were he alive today.
I am very happy to see that your grammar here is excellent, basicb.
I am so obsessive compulsive that this inconsistent email problem does not hinder my efficiency in any web-work. An extra click of the mouse to favorites is faster than sorting through emails.
God save the King, my friend, and Godspeed in your endeavors!
I just want to preface this by saying that I love the site and think you are doing a great job. However, I think the biggest single failing of the chess.com website and system is the matter of inconsistent email notifications. Whether it be a notification that it is your move, or that you are about to lose on time, or whatever else the site is supposed to notify a player about.
I know that I’ve talked several friends and family members into signing up to play and every one of them has complained to me after beginning a game that they didn’t receive an email that it was their turn, and at least one game was lost by a person for that reason. I do not believe these missed emails are a result of server side email filtering, though I admit I don’t have any means of proving this. I believe the emails simply aren’t sent.
I know I’ve read around here somewhere that if you are “logged in” that you won’t receive an email, and I get the logic, but I think it fails in practice because it doesn’t address common usage. I know that I frequently would just browse away from the site, and I believe that others do this as well. It is my understanding that doing so doesn’t constitute logging out, which requires specifically clicking on the logout link on the top right of the page. I suspect this one policy choice has confused countless members.
However, even if all members learned to properly log in and out I believe the system still doesn’t work correctly. For a time I was using Flock as my browser of choice, and when I would definitively logout I seemed to be getting notifications fairly consistently, but recently I’ve returned to Safari as my browser of choice and since then I don’t believe I’ve received a single notification that it was my move, and I’m pretty sure I have been logging out specifically. Now, this is very unscientific, I realize. I haven’t been tallying all my logins and logouts, nor do I have any idea why switching a browser would make the least bit of difference. To the best of my knowledge it should not have any effect whatsoever, but nonetheless my perception is that switching browsers has impacted the regularity or frequency of my receipt of email notifications. (note: no other changes have been made, such as changing email addresses or settings and there is no server side filtering going on to my knowledge that could be impacting delivery.)
So, a proposal—in my opinion this is the way notifications should work:
First, the default notification setting should be that all notifications should go out all the time, regardless of login status. I understand that there is a vocal collection of users who complain about their volume of email, but I believe that most users capable of learning to play chess are also capable of learning to manage their mail volume, via filters or rules or what have you.
Second, for those users who just aren’t satisfied with having to receive the increased amount of email they should have the option of changing the email settings. Perhaps the option to return the setting to receive notification only when they are logged out as is now the default, or perhaps, for those users who spend very large amounts of time on the site and like to stay on top of things themselves the option to turn off notifications completely. But at any rate, these would be options that could be managed by the players as they chose, while new players who depend on getting the emails to alert them would be satisfied that the system actually worked as described without having to learn about strange exceptions like if a move was made within x number of minutes of logging-out and so forth.
Those are my thoughts, any other opinions? Am I the only one who believes there is a problem with the email notifications?
Thanks!