CHANGELOG

In this forum topic, Chess.com Staff will share a weekly update on bugfixes, new API endpoints, documentation updates, and other changes. Other posts or discussion may be deleted, to keep this topic relevant. You are invited to start from the last post to see the most recent changes.

2017-07-21

New

• Published-Data Documentation and README posted in the Developer Community Club forums
• Player Profile endpoint active
• Game Archive endpoint active

Fixed

• Server security updates
• Optimizations for initial response times

Queued

• Game Archive: data refreshes for Live Chess games
• Active Daily Chess Games endpoints
• Clubs-related endpoints to be determined

2017-07-22 – 2017-07-31

New

• Game Archive: data refreshes for Live Chess games
• Active Daily Chess Games endpoints: current games, and to-move list
• Several enhancements to prepare the Interactive API for internationalization and opt-in backwards compatibility promises
• Service stability monitors integrated (errors, performance, service degradation alerts)
• New draft JSON-LD contexts for Games list, Game, and Player

Fixed

• New README text to clarify data retention restrictions, based on developer feedback
• Current Game "move_by" value now an integer
• Corrected certain cases of invalid MixedCase usernames in URLs overwriting the data on valid URLs, resulting in blank responses or infinite redirects

Queued

• Addition of player ID that will not change if the username changes
• Removal of "starting rating" from current-games list (the data is not demonstrably accurate)
• Improved linkage between games and players
• Revision of JSON-LD contexts for greater accuracy and standard compliance
• Additional data-use clarity in the README
• Clubs-related endpoints to be determined
• Player Stats endpoints to be determined
• Clubs Stats endpoints to be determined

2017-08-01 – 2017-08-07

New

• Player Profile: added player_id as our internal non-changing ID, self-referencing @id URL for JSON-LD compliance
• Current Games: link to players by ID (no rating)
• Revision of JSON-LD contexts for greater accuracy and standard compliance

Fixed

• More Interactive API backwards-compatibility upgrades
• Fixed cases of a missing FEN in new games

Queued

• Clubs-related endpoints to be determined
• Player Stats endpoints to be determined
• Clubs Stats endpoints to be determined
• If-Modified-Since caching
• PGN availability for completed games to be determined

2017-08-08 – 2017-08-14

Vacations and a few sick days reduced the amount of work on the API this week.

New

• Data handling optimizations for daily chess games; response times improved by 25%

Fixed

• Corrected rare cases where a player's avatar URL was missing if the most recent player action adjusted the follower count

Queued

• Player Profile: add account status
• Clubs-related endpoints to be determined
• Player Stats endpoints to be determined
• Clubs Stats endpoints to be determined
• If-Modified-Since caching
• PGN availability for completed games to be determined
• Standard ECO lookup endpoint

2017-08-15 – 2017-09-04

August was slow for releasing new features, due to vacations and reworking some supporting code that should allow for faster new development.

New

• Vastly improved code organization that really you shouldn't notice.
• Preparation for interactive-API development
• Support for Last-Modified / If-Modified-Since caching headers

Fixed

• Archived Game player block now includes the username, like it used to (reported by AManMothEater)
• Jumbled player data: when many profiles are compiled in rapid succession, some data from one would be injected into the data result of the next (reported by Dale00007)
• Aborted games now properly update the "current games" and "to-move" lists
• Improved handling of avatar changes for Player Profiles
• Properly 404 on URLs that are very creative, but wrong

Queued

• Player Profile: add account status (requested by Dale00007)
• Games: add time-control, standardize time-class and rules for rating correlation
• Clubs-related endpoints to be determined
• Country-related player-lookup endpoints; RFC published (requested by Dale00007 and mattchess)
• Player Stats endpoints to be determined
• PGN availability for completed games; expect end of September

Apologies to all of you developers, because I haven't been publishing the changes as they happened. I recognize that this makes it difficult to tell why your scripts and tools break, and we will communicate these changes more promptly in the future. Below, I'll post each week's update for the past month.

2017-09-05 – 2017-09-11

New

• Introduced country-related endpoints for country data and a list of players per country; some player-lists were long enough to make our cache unstable, and through the week we adjusted the results to fit (RFC has a conversation of the changes)
• New game-archives list of each month the player has games available in the archive (requested by @ewizz614 in the documentation comments)

Fixed

• Fixed cache timing to improve data accuracy for large lists and reduce chances of requests timing out

2017-09-12 – 2017-09-18

New

• New Club-related endpoints: club data, and membership list (read the RFC for basic info ; requested by @Dale00007 and @mattchess in the Club forum)
• Added "status" to player profiles, indicating if the account is: closed, basic, premium, mod, staff (requested by @Dale00007 in the Club forum)
• Introduced "time control" info to game data, and standardized the "time class" values to reflect ratings groupings (read this for a discussion of the breaking change)
• Added "last activity" timestamp to current games, to represent the time of the last data change (so you don't need to scan all fields to see if a change happened; requested internally — yes, we're dogfooding!)

Fixed

• Corrected some cases of malformed URLs of one type were being matched as correctly-formed URLs of another type; now bad URLs should be called bad right away with much less fuss
• Fixed cases where a player profile's count of followers was not always updated when a follower stopped following

2017-09-19 – 2017-09-25

New

• New per-Country Club lists released

Fixed

• The correction for malformed URLs last week broke the new game-archives list; we unbroke it
• Corrected the data format for time controls in live chess time classes; the format was the human-readable form used on the website, and is now the PGN standard format (was "10|5" and now "600+5"; discussed in this forum post)

2017-09-26 – 2017-10-02

New

• New list of Clubs per Player

Fixed

• Convinced the computers that the 13th month of 2015 is not the same as the 1st month of 2016.

2017-10-03 – 2017-10-09

FINALLY. Big new about PGNs! Documentation will be updated shortly.

New

• Game data now include if a draw offer has been made; game-to-move lists also include games where it is not the player's turn to move, but the player has received a draw offer that they can act on (internally requested)
• PGNs added to game data, and game archives allow bulk PGN downloads (pretty much requested by everyone, everywhere, from the beginning).

Fixed

• Country code for Curacao corrected based on the ISO standard (reported by @LegoPirateSenior in the Country RFC)
• No longer escape the solidus (forward-slash) in normal JSON strings in such things as URLs and FENs (pointed out by @edpratomo in the documentation comments)
• Time control data in daily chess time classes fixed to reflect the PGN standard (was "1 in 3 days" and now "1/259200")

Queued

• Titled Player data (requested by @walidmujahid in a Club forum post)
• Tournaments endpoints to be determined
• Team-Match endpoints to be determined (@Dale00007 is eager for this)
• Player Stats endpoints to be determined
• Investigation of historic ratings endpoint
• Investigation into providing Club member lists based on how recently the player interacted with the Club home, forum, and news.

2017-10-16 – 2017-11-06

New

• Club members data is now listing users grouped by their activity level: "weekly", "monthly", "all_time" (see the announcement), 
• We added the player stats endpoint , and we already found and solved some bugs,

Fixed

• An unexpected club's name was causing the USA Country Clubs list to respond with an error, now it has been fixed,
• There was some inconsistency on the Game's "time_control" shown in PGN's data and Game's data, now it has been normalized to the same notation,
• Blitz ratings were missing from player's stats, now you should be able to see them,
• GlickoRD was also missing from player's live stats, now it is displayed for all type of games  

Queued

• We are actively investigating why for some game archives the PGN data is empty (as reported by @walidmujahid in a Club forum post),
• We will soon post a RFC for Tournaments endpoints,
• and and RFC for Team-Match endpoints to be determined 

2017-11-06 – 2017-11-13

New

• Club's data now includes also a field with the "url" of the Club itself.

Fixed

• The PGN service is now more stable and you can expect that almost all of your requests will get the correct PGNs (see this thread for more information), 
• Some Json-Ld contexts' links were wrong, now they have been fixed.

Queued

• We are still open to suggestions for Tournaments endpoints

2017-11-13 – 2017-11-20

New

• We have published a JSON file that contains a collection of all our endpoints that can be downloaded and used with your favorite client, such as Postman and Insomnia.

Fixed

• The PGN service is even more stable and empty responses are reduced to a minimum.

Queued

• Expect in the next few days the "RFC: Match endpoints", where you will be able to share your ideas on which data you would love to see in our Match endpoints,
• We will publish soon a "Player's friend endpoint", we hope you will find this little addition useful.

2017-11-20 – 2017-11-27

New

• We have published a new endpoint that helps you retrieve the list of an user's friends.

Queued

• Expect in the next few days the first version of the "Tournaments endpoints",
• We have started to work on your requests about Matches, a first draft is expected next week

2017-11-27 – 2017-12-04

New

• We have instructed our CDN to not block BOTs that are requesting endpoints with "suspicious" "User-Agent" header,
• Now Player statuses (for example Player profile endpoint) will tell if a Player's account has been closed for fair play violations.

Fixed

• We have removed the "user's friend" endpoint because it didn't comply with privacy settings (thanks to @ijgeoffrey and @walidmujahid for reporting this).

Queued

• We are working on the cache invalidation of "Tournaments data endpoints" before we publish the full specifications and documentation,
• We are working on "Matches data endpoints" that should be ready early next week,
• Lots of small improvements to all of our current endpoints that will be published in the upcoming weeks, after collecting you valuable feedback.

2017-12-04 – 2017-12-11

New

• The tournament's information endpoint has been added,
• The tournament round information endpoint has been added,
• The tournament round's group information endpoint has been added,
• The Player related tournament endpoint has been added

Fixed

• The "Location" header was missing the protocol and domain for the redirect due to a trimmed trailing slash, now it has been fixed.

Queued

• The "Matches data endpoints" are almost ready, stay tuned for the documentation in the next days.

2017-12-11 – 2017-12-19

New

• Player's team Matches endpoint has been added,
• Club's Team Matches endpoint has been added,
• Team Match endpoint has been added,
• Team Match board endpoint has been added,
• Daily puzzle has been added.
• Rate limits have changed: 3 simultaneous non-cached requests are permitted (was 1 at a time)

Fixed

• Some months were missing from the Player's Available Archives endpoint, now they should be listed as expected.

Queued

• More information about games will be added to endpoints that show games details: team match link, tournament link, and link to opening book.

2017-12-19 – 2018-01-02

New

• If you have missed it take a look on how we used Daily puzzle PubAPI to create an App for Slack.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug that prevented some Team Match information to show up.

Queued

• In the past week we have collected all your requests about Team Matches for new features and issues. In the next few days we will start rolling out improvements and fixes. Thank you for all your support.

2018-01-02 – 2018-01-08

New

• We haver reworked the Team Match in order to provide more data about the settings of the match.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug that caused wrongs timeout percentages to be displayed in the Player Stats endpoint (thanks to @Dale00007 and @Guendulain),
• Fixed a bug that caused wrongs timeout percentages to be displayed in the Team Match endpoint (thanks to @Dale00007 and @Guendulain).
• Fixed a bug that caused some months (with games played only the first day of the month) to be empty (thanks to @skelos ) in player's monthly game archives endpoint ,
• Fixed an issue that was causing Team Match Team Match endpoint to not refresh properly (thanks to @Dale00007).

Queued

• Team matches will show players' point without the need to check the single board,
• More infos in game endpoints (link to ECO opening, link to tournament URL, link to match URL)