Upcoming Changes To Vacation Time

Hi chess community! After requesting feedback on vacation time, we received nearly 1,000 survey responses with great observations and notes.

The primary feedback we got is that the community does value vacation time but wants changes to the system (read about the current system here) and does want vacation time to be more limited.

This is consistent with our own observations that in some cases, the availability of months of vacation time (currently as much as 90 days) is greatly prolonging games and tournaments and leading to a bad experience. While option 1 with the least amount of vacation time was the most popular, we saw sufficient respondents favor options 2 and 3, thus we feel a compromise that offers a bit more vacation time than option 1 will be the fairest solution.

In light of these considerations and the community feedback, we intend to make the following changes to vacation time:

• Premium members will gain 2 days of vacation time per month and can accumulate up to 30 days.
• Non-premium members will gain 1 day of vacation time per month and can accumulate up to 14 days.
  

These changes will go into effect on January 1st, 2026. However, members who currently have more than the new vacation time limits of 30 days and 14 days will retain it, being able to use their exceeding vacation time until July 1, 2026. On July 1st, the new limits will take effect on all accounts and any excess vacation time will expire.

We believe these changes will better serve the majority of our members with a vacation time system that still provides plenty of opportunity to take valuably needed breaks while preventing cases of vacation abuse or extremely long tournament delays.

As always, we greatly value your feedback. Thank you to everyone who responded to the survey, and please share any further feedback, concerns, or questions in the comments!