Structural problems for clubs on Chess.com

Chess.com could easily be a fantastic site to manage clubs, their activities and participation in competitions. Unfortunately their programmers create more and more difficulties for club admins instead of supporting them.

Clubs have a starting page, which include an internal description, a list of upcoming events, notes and/or chat and a list of previous activities. Their admins have two menus to manage their clubs. That’s a very good start …, isn't it?

Players have a starting page as well: While using a browser they had an easy access to their clubs, their friends, upcoming events and statistics. On the pic of Chess.com's server problems these start pages have been voided some months ago and the above mentioned options are still missing.

Just an example: Last year every player could easily check, if there will be live tournaments within their clubs, Arenas with several other clubs or live matches with another club, e.g. today. Now, they need to go manually to each of their clubs to check this same situation.

Club admins have a lot of options to create activities for their clubs: They can start daily matches, live matches, vote chess games, internal live tournaments, Multi Club Arenas; they can initiate a lot of other activities e.g. within forums and can inform all members with announcements. That's a very good second step …, isn't it?

Well, once an activity has been created, players need alerts about newly arriving offers. Unfortunately these alerts aren't always reliable (matches with rating limits e.g stayed without alerts for several months) and they're regularly incomplete: Multi Club Arenas get the lowest level of support from Chess.com. There isn't any alert at all …, neither if they're created, once registrations will open or how to join them after their start.

Club admins can also try attracting new members for their clubs: They can invite them or offer them e.g. individual daily tournaments. Sounds attempting …, doesn't it? Unfortunately only those players, who're using a browser will ever have a chance to notice these offers. While using the App, club invitations and information about newly opened individual daily tournaments will not be delivered.

Multi Club Arenas are the most particular case of programmers' fail. Implemented in September 2021 their code never has been completed. What could be a very good tool for live competitions between clubs (on "the other" chess site and since three years there is a competition with 500 clubs in 45 simultaneously played divisions and 4,000 to 5,000 players twice a week), here they still can’t be used in a stable way to create some first steps towards something similar. 

Just three examples: Only club admins, who’re using Chess.com in a browser and on a computer can find and accept challenges to their club. It’s still impossible to create them one or two weeks in advance as live server restarts destroy them during preparation. After a Multi Club Arena is completed, club results aren’t shown in a reliable way and can be checked only after downloading them.

Many active clubs on Chess.com start very soon participating in competitions. Most of these competitions have a regular structure, e.g. with monthly daily matches. To show the full strength of their clubs in these competitions, club admins tested the best way to combine all the communication tools within their clubs during preparation.

Experience shows, that two of them are regularly working very well: Chess.com's automated alerts at the start of registrations and personal messages to club members (e.g. to those, who don't react on alerts, but regularly on personal messages or to a few missing players with a specific rating). As clubs and their admins are very different, efficient communication between admins and members is as well.

Completely independent from club activities and already since long time Chess.com has an important problem with spamming accounts. Spamming accounts are sending many, often similar messages one after the other (as they always risk to be muted and closed after a short period). Unfortunately active club admins do something which looks to be similar while managing their clubs.

Imagine the following situation: Your club has an increasing number of members who are using the App; they get less information about club activities. It happens, that they got too many alerts in a short period or some alerts were missing. You're preparing an important match or a live event like a Multi Club Arena and your club doesn't have enough players. Your best choice is sending personal messages to members, who are actually online. Club admins do so since years with success and in accordance with the members of their clubs (they joined these clubs by their own decision and can easily quit them). During the last months more and more club admins got muted for "club spamming" … while doing exactly the same as they did in previous months.

As a consequence many admins have reduced their activities or stopped them completely. GM Thorsten Michael Haub (@DJ_Haubi) is most prominent among them. For years he made his France-Deutschland Group an exemplary and one of the strongest clubs on Chess.com. Some weeks ago he got muted for a two weeks period for his usual activities. As he was aware, that there’re many other cases and that the level to get muted goes lower and lower again, he decided the same day to end all his activities here. 

Personally I've got already muted several times. It started back in 2019 for typing the club name "El Rey Negro" in several messages to other club admins and again for "club spamming" twice in 2022. As a consequence I’ve stopped managing all my clubs in the usual way and shared my concerns in several public forums and private messages to Staff and moderators – without any amelioration until now.

As far as I can see, Chess.com's programmers create more and more difficulties for club admins instead of supporting them. Which looks to be pity, as Chess.com could easily be a fantastic site to manage clubs, their activities and participation in competitions.