Hey, chess lovers! October is upon us and with that, a chance to pause and review what kept our Product Development, Support, and Fair Play teams hopping last month. Here's a quick look back at September 2021...

Web

• Improving the usability of modal forms, including pop-up settings for Puzzles and Analysis.
• Made Search more visible in the navigation bar and updated the logic used to display matching streamers, top players, and other members in results.
• In Events, active games are now displayed at the top.
• Also in Events, we made the cross-table display more friendly.
• Reactions to posts in Comments and Forums went to beta, allowing users to up/down-vote posts and respond with emoji. Sorting by Relevance brings the posts with the most votes to the top!

• Added a couple of new actions to the bottom of the Analysis side-panel, including Game Review and Add to Library.
• Cleaned up and clarified a few of our Puzzle Themes (for instance, as seen in Custom Puzzles). 
• Hitting the play (▶️) button on a finished game in Events will now re-play it from the start.
• Adjusted side-panel data on game Stats pages to discount unrated games. 
• Made other cosmetic and UI improvements to Stats—in some cases, to address issues on small screens / mobile browsers
• A huge amount of work on a soon-to-be-released new tool for coaching and discussing games! Stay tuned for that!
• In Play, you can now see the Chat when you're looking at the Open Games tab.
• Probably most exciting of all, the Players League feature went into the beta-testing phase—they will soon be ready for all players! (Check out the Beta news here to learn more.)
  
  

Android

Team Android released three updates in September, including the following enhancements and new functionality:

• A redesign of the Vision feature.
• Stats improvements and a new player-comparison view!
• Improvements to the recently added Practice feature.

iOS

Team iOS released three new versions in September, including the following new features, in addition to various small improvements and fixes:

• A new and improved Quick Chat feature to use during games, including common phrases (auto-translated), a ton of standard and special chess emoji - and new animated emoji!
• The Lessons feature got a huge update, making it easier to find interesting new Courses to improve your game!

Fair Play & Sportsmanship

• 19,293 accounts closed for fair play (including 9 titled players).
• 1,105,648 abuse reports were received.
• 54,814 mute actions were taken.
• 46,217 individual accounts muted.
• 33,457 accounts closed for abuse.

Member Support

Average time to response: 22 hours, 44 mins.
Total support responses: 38,885.
Average quality by member rating: 92% "Great" or better.
Total ratings: 3,262.

Such was September! As always, our thanks for taking the time to read and letting us know what you think. See you here next month for a review of October. Enjoy your chess!

⏮ July & August 2021・ 🗓・October 2021 ⏭