Six tiny suggestions to support clubs, their admins and leagues
While opening Chess.com's new help menu the incoming question is (in German): „Hi Tournamentix: How can we help?″ As I really like this good and very friendly question, here are six tiny suggestions to support clubs, their admins and leagues. Sure, that Chess.com's Support will have an idea to whom they should forward them best.
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„Remind me″ option for players
Three examples: My club has a daily match, which will start on Sunday. On Saturday I like to decide whether or not I will play in this match. Until now I only have the option to join the match now or later. Would like to have a „Remind me″ button, which allows me to add date and time for a reminder to this event (e.g. „Saturday, 09:00″ or „8 hours before the start″), best with a link to the match. This would really help players to manage their participation, wouldn't it?
I'm participating in a vote chess game and my team agreed to discuss as long as any possible and to vote only within the last few hours per move. Until now someone of the team has to post a comment, that it's time to vote now. Would like to have a „Remind me″ button, which allows me to add date and time for a first reminder and „all x days/hours″ for following ones as long as the vote chess game will last, best with a link to the game. This would really help to avoid vote chess games, which are accidentally lost on time, wouldn't it?
I want to participate every Friday evening in a Multi-Club Arena. Some minutes before these Arenas will start I want to get a reminder. Would like to have a „Remind me″ button, which allows me to get this „x minutes before the start″, best with a link to the next upcoming events. Would also like to have a general „Remind me″ button, which allows me to get a reminder all Fridays at 18:45 with an option to add some text.
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„Club Blog″
For some good reasons content in most clubs is private. Their only public element is a public description, which is nearly invisible for their members (they would need to lock out to read it).
Would be advantageous, if clubs would have a public element of communication like a „Club Blog″. Admins could manage blog posts with the same tool, which is used for personal blogs. Blogs would appear with the club's name.
This would simplify some kind of regular public communication about club activities and their results.
Until now only one admin can do the job (best by creating a second account) by running this part of club communication as a fictive personal one. That's better than nothing, but content rests disconnected from the club itself. It would be by far better, if such blog posts would be part of club's public content, which can be checked e.g. by potential members before joining or by admins of other clubs, right?
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„Team tool″ for club admins
Team competitions between real chess clubs are usually played on a fixed number of boards. As clubs tend to have a heterogeneous membership they regularly play with several teams on different levels. Until now there is no way for clubs on Chess.com to do the same. If club admins could create „sub clubs″ like „Team 1″, „Team 2″ … they could sustainably improve their club activities.
Two examples: My club wants to run an internal competition, e.g. between members from different regions. A club admin puts members in different teams and can now create daily matches, vote chess games or Multi-Club Arenas inside their clubs, like „Club xy Team 1″ vs „Club xy Team 2″. Same could of course be done to create events with other clubs.
My club participates in competitions. Some players only want to play, if they are really needed, others want to play as often as any possible. If I could bring the last group together in an „Endurance″ team, I could register them to additional competitions and could create e.g. another team for only a few events with just some of the top players.
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„Scorer″ option for daily matches
In Multi-Club Arenas many club members can participate and it's possible to manage competition between clubs with a scorer setting. Would be great to have the same for daily chess matches.
Two examples: My club intends to offer all members to play as many matches as they want for the club. To make results in competitions comparable a scorer setting would help for the same reasons as it does in Multi-Club Arenas.
A scorer setting could also help in the event of missing players for daily matches: If there are eight scorers and only one of both clubs has at least eight players, with a scorer setting the match could start with less players and „empty″ boards would be counted as won by the club, which had enough players in their team.
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„Autofill parameters″ for events
As my club participates in competitions daily matches/vote chess games/Multi-Club Arenas will have several times nearly identical parameters.
Three examples: My club wants to create a new match for the next round. If our match from the previous round would have „autofill parameters″ as an admin tool I could pick all parameters there. Now I only would have to change the name of our opponent, the round number and the start date.
Or, the organizer of the competition provides a „sample match″: With an „autofill parameters″ button I only have to replace both club names and all is done.
I'm organizing a weekly Multi-Club Arena: With an „autofill parameters″ button I only need to change the date of the Arena and perhaps an element in Arena's name. If such a button would have an option to include, to exclude or to modify the list of previously challenged clubs, this would start to become luxurious.
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„Multi-Club″ Swiss-system tournaments
This would be a great addition and a challenging competition format: With a scorer setting for club results it would be easily possible to allow competitions between very heterogeneous clubs and with challenging games for all participants.
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How are our chances to see one of these suggestions become reality on Chess.com?
