Situation of clubs, their admins and leagues is already difficult for years, has become worse in 2023 and more worse with the release of club redesign twelve days ago. Here is some updated information about their structural problems:
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A Notifications
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Theoretically Chess.com creates automated notifications e.g. about new daily matches, vote chess games or upcoming live events: These notifications are unreliable, incomplete and susceptible to faults.
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Early in 2023 notifications for matches with rating ranges disappeared for two months: So far this was the longest (and probably one of only few intentional) perturbations. Very often notifications are delayed or finally missing in arbitrary looking cases. As some of them are really important for club events, this unreliable situation makes these events difficult to manage.
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From a user point of view it's difficult to determine, what's wrong with their code and how this could be done better: Looks, that Chess.com doesn't have e.g. a procedure to check by their own initiative, if notifications work as expected. Looks, that they are regularly waiting for input about perturbations, which creates a very slow and unstable process to fix something which is expected to come in reliable, immediate and automatically.
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In addition a few notifications are simply missing: Club admins don't receive a notifications, if their club is challenged to a Multi Club Arena, club members don't receive them for upcoming Multi Club Arenas. Both make managing these Arenas relatively difficult. App users don't receive notifications for newly created forums and don't have an option to follow announcements, forums or match notes.
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B Club communication
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Based on experience the most efficient tool for club admins is sending personal messages to active club members while preparing club events: Unfortunately they risk to get muted for this part of their usual activities.
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Basically clubs have communication tool like announcements, forums and notes. For an unknown reason (except the part which is based on unreliable notifications) these tools aren't as efficient as needed to prepare club events. Already for a long time and in many active clubs it's quite usual to rely communication on many individual messages to club members.
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During the last two years active club admins had an increasing risk to get muted after sending some of these messages. In 2023 this has become an important problem, which looks to arrive arbitrary. Some admins get muted after just a few messages, others don't feel limited and have often sent hundreds of messages within a few hours.
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Once muted, club admins need individually finding a way to get heard: In most cases, Chess.com’s consisted of some friendly words about a „false positive” and they got unmuted. This procedure is unequal, inappropriate and unworthy. It would be by far better to get a general confirmation from Chess.com, that these mutings aren't intended by them, offering all club admins an equal access to someone in charge to unmute them in the shortest possible delay.
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The most important consequence of muting club admins is that all their content (announcements, forums, notes, personal messages) disappear, which may easily interrupt all ongoing club activities. It would be very useful to find a solution, that e.g. the content of super admins of clubs does not disappear in these clubs, while being muted and that content never disappears in clubs, which organize competitions between different clubs (as in their particularly case even comments of members are used as evidences in several procedures).
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It's also well known, that App users only have very reduced possibilities to stay in contact with their clubs. They don't get notifications about newly created forums, they can't follow announcements, forums or match notes, they have difficulties with inactive links in personal messages (Chess.com loves deactivating links) and don’t get any additional information about the context of their games in daily matches or of their vote chess games.
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In addition to this clubs deserve better communication tools, which would allow e.g. sending messages to defined groups of members.
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C Multi Club Arenas
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Multi Club Arenas exist since more than two years now: Their code has never been completed and they still can't be used for club competitions.
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Just a few days ago (right at the moment Chess.com was preparing two Multi Club Arenas as part of their own special events in September) the most annoying error disappeared: For the first two years all live server restarts (this happened more than 100 times) have crashed all Multi Club Arenas between creation and start. Now the Arenas themselves survive live server restarts, which „only” let disappear all pending challenges.
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Theoretically Multi Club Arenas have mostly the settings, which are needed for competitive use, e.g. a setting for a number of eligible scorers. In reality this only works until the end of the Arena: Online shown results are probably correctly referring to these settings. Once these results disappear (some minutes after the Arena), they're lost.
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Later there is only access to the offline version of results, which doesn't show clubs for players and sums club results by the results of all players (without taking „eligible scorer” settings into account). This may even include accounts, which have been closed for FPV during the Arena. These results are not, what is needed to run competitions.
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If you want to run a competition e.g. with several divisions you would like to copy and paste (or drag and drop) participating clubs by their results in one Arena to the corresponding next Arena. Until now on Chess.com you have to manage a separate list to place your clubs, then you retype their names to the different divisions and send the challenges. Club admins will not receive a notification about these challenges, that's why you need to inform them separately, that it's their turn now.
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D Vote chess games and Players' home pages
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Vote chess games are the most challenging of all club activities: Members dedicate a lot of time to discuss move, to vote all few days … and all this over months. Unfortunately they don't get support as they deserve.
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Theoretically they have access to the opening explorer, which in reality doesn't work for a long time. Usually they can see provisional vote results after having voted, which allow them to alert team members in the event of irregularities. Practically this isn't reliable. What sounds to be minor issues, impacts directly competitions and their results.
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Vote chess games also show an inappropriate code: It's possible to set the time per move down to ten minutes: Personally did this once for a special event and got a very good one ... despite the fact, that all team members had to refresh their screen again and again. Only this way they could see new comments from their colleagues. It doesn't demand a lot to understand, that if a team only has a few minutes to discuss moves and vote for them, this is too slow and simply inappropriate. Some kind of messenger, which shows new comments automatically, shows who is actually typing and allows up- and downvoting comments would create a better user experience.
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Players' customizable home pages have been voided early in 2023 and aren’t restored until today. They are by far the best tool for club members as they show them e.g. the list of upcoming events in all their clubs and also a list of their clubs, if they want to do something more detailed, like asking a question in a forum. Easy to understand, that voiding these home pages decrease efficiently participation in clubs and their events.
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E Club redesign
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In addition to all previous problems Chess.com has decided to release a club redesign twelve days ago: None of the above problems is addressed in this dubious project. It looks to be based on a misleading input, which led to a wrong orientation, followed by a series of astonishing decisions far away from reality and needs in the most active clubs.
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Until now and for an unknown reason it’s simply impossible to get some general information about this project, which mix up thousands of clubs and their usual activities. Nothing has been communicated by Chess.com's own initiative and no answers to general questions about it are known.
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Remarks about tiny issues, which are easy to be „fixed” have best chances to be „ticketed” and solved. As more important remarks are as less are their changes to be read and answered. The two biggest forums about redesign(„Early release” and „Five questions”) exist since more than two months, have more than 2,000 mostly negative comments about many elements of the project, one second one even updates regularly a list of unanswered questions.
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„Known problems, which club redesign should solve” counts 18 difficulties introduced by club redesign and only five (small) ameliorations for club admins. Normally one would assume, that such a project is intended to introduce several new features, some novelties and is based on known and reliable feedback from club admins and members about long lasting difficulties. Reality is far away from this.
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Just one example: Clubs had several options to customize their start pages, to prioritize their communication tools and to decide about private and public elements. Now they have lost all options for customizing and got all the same rigid structure, they have lost nearly all of their options for prioritizing (e.g. notes and/or chat or nothing) and also nearly all of their options for a mix of private and public content. Would someone imagine, that active clubs might have asked for such an attack on the diversity of their clubs?
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F Summary
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Situation of clubs, their admins and leagues is already difficult for years, has become worse in 2023 and more worse with the release of club redesign twelve days ago.
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Chess.com needs to change fundamentally their attitude towards clubs, their admins and leagues: They should finally start working on solving the issues described above.
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Clubs, their admins and leagues deserve protection, help and support: Today's reality is far away from what they need and should receive as soon as any possible.
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One of the author's projects on Chess.com is the ONE WORLD League (1WL), which has normally more than 3,000 daily matches and a few hundreds vote chess games and live events per year. Due to decreasing conditions for clubs, their admins and leagues 1WL has decided end of May to stop starting new tournaments for the time being: Six of their annual tournaments didn't start since then.
Nothing has become better in the meantime, even after Danny Rensch's announcement in the last „State of Chess.com” show, that he wants to know more about club difficulties. He asked the author for additional information, which he has received immediately … without any answer or other known further action until today.