Often I don't get on to chess.com every 3 days, so as a premium member, I get put on auto-vacation time. And usually when I get back, the time displayed shows something low; such as 31 minutes. But then, when I click the button that says "Click Here to come off Vacation and continue playing!" and return to my homepage, something weird happens. Then the time goes way back up, to, say, 22 hours.

My question is: Why does this happen, and is there a way to prevent it?

It's a bug.  For some reason unused vacation time gets turned into game time since they implemented the 24-hour-minimum.

Vacation time and game time should not be interchangeable like this.

That's weird.....

Yeah, I'm really surprised it hasn't been fixed.  It's been broken like this for quite some time now.

It's plain... well, same as last post.

I don't like the way vacation works here.

In my ideal setup I'd have something like this:

1) Once activated you're on vacation a minimum of 48 hours.
2) Vacation affects all games.  You can't move while on vacation.
3) After returning you can't go on vacation again for 7 days.
4) No such thing as auto-vacation for anyone.
5) Time cap of 24 days vacation every 6 months.

I agree with 1 & 2, and 3 is ok, but the rest seem a bit extreme. How about a cap of 2 weeks (14 days) per month, instead? Also, I don't see why auto-vacation is such a bad thing.

I've always been a proponent of eliminating the unfair need for non-premium members to make a move in all of their games before going on vacation in exchange for a requirement that everyone advance all of their games at least one move prior to going on vacation twice in a row (at which point they can turn vacation on regardless of whether it's their move again or not).

And yes, this should apply to auto-vacation.

I'm sure a lot of people would have problems with it if this was actually the way it was :)

But if it were totally up to me... :D

I think 14 days a month for one month is fine.  14 days a month for every month is nuts!

You have to make a move before you can go on vacation?  What happens if the opponent has used the conditional move feature?  This seems really unfair.

Yeah, which is why I propose the rule change.

+1

 how about 2 months of auto vaca a year?