Bringing back from the dead - The Journey to revive the club features

Hello, Choco is here and welcome to another announcement of the club! While with previous announcements a lot of features were added and some features were expanding, we are starting to notice the inactivity in some areas of the club, which are unfortunately quite vital.

I want your help to revive the following features i will talk about, because this is a community based club and every single of you matters, that's why i am making this announcement to wake up all people in this club to revive the forums from the dead!

#3 - Sugarblossom Community Variant

This was one of the very first activities in the club with collaboration of over 10+ people to make their own variant together, and.... at one point everyone just forgot about it. It got buried by other activities and tournaments, and everyone moved on... And this is sad because there was so much work put into it, and with some work the project might be finished soon!

Let's revive this project together in 3 simple steps!

1. Test the current iteration of the variant! (for now it is this one, but you can always find the latest version in this forum)

2. Analyze the the variant, think about the issues it might have and potential to fix them, make a revision of it and test it with someone else if you believe you fixed some issues!

3. Paste the game and comment your opinion in this forum! The more people do that, the better the variant will become and we will be able to polish it to perfection!

#2 - Tournaments and club arenas

This is one of the oldest areas of the club. which also became somewhat forgotten. Most people just forget about the tournament after sign-up, and sometimes admins do too... (There was one giveaway tournament which everyone forgot about and forum got locked 2 months afterward, can't show the screenshot unfortunately because the forum got deleted)

A lot of tournament currently have a very low participation rate, and this is pretty discouraging because previously arenas used to have 30+ games, and now they can barely get 2 in 10+ days. Now, this is mostly our fault because i bet most of you did not know that these arenas existed and are active in the first place, and for this reason I am creating a special forum dedicated to active tournaments!

Let's revive tournaments together, here is how:

1. Go to this forum and make sure the 'follow' checkbox is on to get notifications about tournaments! You can also join SugarBlossom Variants Playing club too as it is often a place where these tournaments take part in.

2. Click on the 'Tournaments Feed' forum when there are new notifications and sign up for available tournaments!

3. When the tournament starts, play a game of it and type its link in it's forum, to get into the leader-board! 

#1 - Testing Variants

This is one of the most vital parts of the club and seeing no testing done is club is understandable, a lot of people have exams right now and they cannot spend a lot of time on chess.com, but it really isn't about quantity of the variants you tested, it's about consistency.

Try to find to to test 1 variants every n amount of time. You can test 1 variant every day, every 3 days or even every week - it's up to you, and you help with this will be reallllllllllly appreciated!

1. Check out this forum to see which variants needs testing! (Also variants testing is done in Variants.Universe club, so please join it if you haven't already)

2. Play a variant with an experienced player, share you thought in game chat and make a vote on your variant (the following description is taken from this forum by @Nyutixbrother):

+1 -> I analyzed the elements of the variant, and thinking that it should get accepted/ it is promising for a Pending Reply.

-1 -> The variant has multiple issues found in testing, and I think it shouldn't get accepted.

=0 -> The variant is unclear to me, for now; I just want to stay neutral there.

+0 -> Not clear for now, but likely a promising variant.

-0 -> Not clear for now, but likely hopeless.

3. Paste the game link and your vote into a forum like shown in the picture above!

And that's it! I hope you will try to help the community and the features of the club i talked about, thank you in advance! Comment 🧪 emoji if you read this to the very end and have a nice day!