The game pausing feature, for paid members, is getting to be more and more senseless and just plain vexing.

Today, March 24, 2011, after being 2 days away from online chess I see that I have 64 minutes to play my moves against jjeffrey.

Ref:http://www.chess.com/home/view_message.html?id=138585309

The message above says that I have as little as 30 minutes to play my next move. I had twice as much time left to play my move. It seems to me that perhaps more suggestions could help to improve on this situation. A plethora of suggestions have been made over the last few months in 2011 to try to circumvent, and improve the riddle, this situation to the benefit of the paying members.

Suggestions:

1. Put a clock on the online chess page, perhaps next to current games heading, plenty of space available here, showing the coordinates on the exact time for every chess player showing the date, time and time zone.

This would allow any of us to do a print screen and post at chess.com and show the real time when the game was paused and how much time left was left to play move(s) and make our court case with proof in hand. This would avoid any controversy in justifying the time when the event happened.

2. When a move is made in a game and before moving to the next game, either automatically or by selecting the next game to play, a confirmation message should show up saying that you have played this move as White or Black pieces against the opponent, before the next game is shown. A simple confirmation button would need to be pressed to enable the player to move on to the next game and show the move played. Then the responsibility is on the player and not on chess.com.

3. When a game or games are paused saying 30 minutes are left, this message needs to be somewhat more accurate. As I said I had 60+ minutes left to play a move in one game, and if the chess.com computer system capability to inform us of the time left is limited by its reaction time due to the number of players online and may require more time to inform us of the real time left to play a move, so be it. All I ask chess.com is to tell us the real time period left to play the next move(s), and  that there maybe as little as 45 minutes or 1 hour or less before the game(s) are paused and that time has expired. The message says: we have paused your games, precision of the time left is all I ask for and not a very imprecise time left to play the move.

4. The best request that I can come up with is when a person is online playing chess and one or more games are coming to be paused, do not do it, just let the clock run out to zero seconds before the games are paused. After all I am on the site and trying to respond to a move in a game or several moves in several games.

Naturally if I am not on the chess.com site then it is appropriate and commendable to pause game(s) as chess.com does in this instance.

Trying to help and find a solution to the sempiternal riddle of the timing on the 30 minutes time based game(s) paused move riddle to the satisfaction of the paying members.

I am humbly requesting that only my last 1 day lost for vacation be given back to me as I have lost at least 10 days vacation while I was analyzing a move for the next with always more than 30 minutes left to play and up to 90 minutes at times and being on the chess.com site.

The chess.com method from preventing a loss game is certainly commendable and very appropriate, however the parameters of the program application have cost me at least 10 days of vacation in the last few months, that is in less than 3 months.

Any suggestions you can propose to improve the pausing of the games anomalies are more than welcome?

Maybe players should have a maximum number of time losses per game, this way its fair that the opponent recieves the win if it happens twice.

I mean the premium member feature that puts the player on automatic vacation when there is less than 1 hour before the move would be a time loss.

I think the feature should at most only allow 1 time loss per game.

2 lg 2 rd

The precise situation is that one game was paused at 64 minutes left to play when i returned to the board and I allowed myself exactly 90 seconds to reply and when I tried to reply the vacation was on again, unfair that's all.

Thanks for the suggestion and from today on I will go to the link that activated the vacation time, this way I will see how mnuch time is left and can prepare my move before making it.

I just hope that I have a few seconds left, less than 5 is fine, to make my move and to submit it. The vacation time locking is so unpredictable that I could possibly open the game to play my move and before I play it it goes againg on automatic vacation.

So non-premiums cannot go on vacation when it is their move ?

Ha.

The auto-vacation feature activates when it is the premium members move, this is impossible by the normal vacation rules.

I completely agree with some of the OP's suggestions, and would further the suggestion that the 2nd effective time-out should be counted as a time loss, to prevent vacation abuse - clearly premium members have extra time on their games.

Ok, my defense for irrelevant commenting is that the OP had suggestions that I thought I wanted to add to. I agree the term "vacation abuse" usually refers to time wasting in lost positions and slowing down tournaments. I think the use of a vacation to pause an extremely complex set of games is justified by the need for a break from a large number of games caused by inability to calculate sufficiently for all of them.