Clubs related issues 2023
If you would have asked active club admins twelve months ago about their expectations for their clubs and competitions in 2023, one likely answer would have been: „Not so much. We know, that Chess.com doesn't listen to us, that this site isn't friendly, helpful or supportive.″ If one would have told us, that conditions for clubs, their admins and leagues would become as worse as they are today, probably no one of us would have agreed and accepted to imagine this.
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Early in 2023 Chess.com had relevant server issues. During weeks they took a lot of measures in order to manage these issues. Live server restarts happened relatively often: Every single one of them crashed all Multi Club Arenas during preparation and aborted many instead of starting them as scheduled. I remember a weekend with two 24 hours Arenas, which were ready to start and simply disappeared.
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Until these server issues all site members had customizable start pages, which included e.g. a list of their clubs and of upcoming events in all of them. These start pages were the most efficient tool for members to stay in contact with their clubs and to participate in their events. Customization and these elements disappeared and didn't come back until today.
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In February 2023 Chess.com announced a clubs redesign. Product manager Jonathan Cannon: „We are looking to rework how clubs work and feel. Honestly, the UX kind of sucks and we want to make it better.″
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A few weeks later notifications, which were already known for being very unreliable, disappeared for all matches with rating limits. For two months they were missing. Competitions with rating limits very soon had to decide, whether pausing for the spirit of competition or accepting irregular results for offering at least some matches.
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During spring 2023 club admins faced a peak of mutings and account closures for „club spamming″. Their messages to club members about upcoming activities were considered as unwanted. Perhaps their number had slightly increased due to missing start pages for players, unreliable and missing notifications and other inconveniences: Several very active admins resigned at this point and abandoned their clubs.
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A few other active club admins started some actions with the intention to wake Chess.com up about these increasing difficulties which the site was creating one after another. On June 29 Chess.com’s CCO Danny Rensch was surprised to hear about difficulties for clubs, their admins and leagues during his „State of Chess.com″ show. He asked for some additional information and got them immediately.
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At the same time Clubs redesign was presented in Chess.com's Beta testers club. What was announced creating a better user experience was something completely unexpected, unrelated to all described long lasting difficulties and nearly without any content behind its facade. Many club admins tried to explain that this will only add an additional problem and is far away from being part of a solution.
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For an unknown reason (there was a rumor about „another project″, which needed some clubs code and might have forced this premature release) there was no chance to stop this new element in clubs' downhill race. Two months later clubs redesign was forced to everyone. In the meantime some content was added, but the entire redesign contained (and still contains) more errors than features.
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On September 13 Jonathan Cannon took „responsibility for all these clubs related issues″. Some of us thought, this might finally be a good news and announces some concrete activities. They soon got disappointed. The newly introduced „Clubs Progress Update″ (Jonathan Cannon: „I wanted to provide a high level weekly summary of what we‘ve finished in the last week and what is currently in progress.″) appeared three times, took a three week pause, appeared two times more and wasn’t seen again for five weeks now.
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Its content mainly showed that Chess.com's activities are mostly around repairing a few of newly introduced inconveniences (by launching clubs redesign). None of the main and long lasting problems for clubs, their admins and leagues has been solved during 2023. In a previous blog post I've tried to give an overview: Nearly the only amelioration during the last few months are some steps towards completing code for Multi Club Arenas (which exist for 28 months already).
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Just some examples of today's situation: Notifications are still incomplete and unreliable. By setting up fourteen daily matches between my clubs I've had to notice, that only for half of them notifications were completely delivered. More than 20% of notifications (9 out of 42) were missing. The iOS App is dysfunctional for weeks already: Links bring players to their homepage instead e.g. to the upcoming match. On Android phones messaging with mobile browsers is near to impossible due to some kind of „flickering″ and messaging with the App is partially dysfunctional.
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Or, just to give your another approach: What were club admins discussing twelve months ago? Things like these: Should settings for a minimum number of games be used in competitions? How can we deal best with FPV closures in Multi Club Arenas? How can we stay in contact with members, who are using Chess.com's Apps? … What are they discussing today? Should we reduce our Multi Club Arenas to make our daily matches a bit more visible (due to clubs redesign)? Should we really continue sending personal messages (while risking being muted)? What are the most annoying things, which we should once more report to Chess.com?
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If you would ask active club admins about their expectation for their clubs and competitions in 2024, one likely answer would still be: „Not so much. We know, that Chess.com doesn’t listen to us, that the site isn’t friendly, helpful or supportive.″
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There may be some risk, that we haven’t already reached the bottom edge.
And Danny Rensch? He never answered … for more than five months now.
