Club Redesign: Five questions to @jdcannon

Was that the rush? To get that Kings Clash whatever it is in by September. I mostly mix with serious OTB players who really mostly play standard chess which should be interesting enough for anyone. 960 is ok also. Who needs gimmicks?

Just created 3 matches and sent 9 challenges using the previous club design and reported them all in the relevant forum. As I'm slow and feel tired today, it took 13 minutes to do so:

Would be curious to know, what your experiences are about the advantages created by the modified club design. Does it work faster now? Are less steps necessary? Is it more intuitive? Any guess, what redesigning tasks might have been formulated for daily match challenges?

As far as I can see, the advantages of the previous club design are as follows:

• Match name is autofilled and I only need to add tournament's part.
• Once the first challenge has been created and the link has been copied for reporting it, I can step back and have all previous settings except the start date for the next challenge.
• Now I only need to replace the names of clubs, add the tournament's part of the match name and the start date, which reduces the risk of errors in other parameters.
• After having created a challenge I report its link in another tab, copy the tournament's part of the match name and go on with the few remaining steps for the next challenge ...

Would someone be so kind and let me know, which advantages the modified design offers?

A Known problems, which a redesign should solve

1. Clubs depend on reliable notifications about new und upcoming activities. In the past there were often and sometimes long lasting difficulties with notifications. As notifications are the most efficient way to bring members to events, they should be regularly checked by Chess.com's own initiative and fixed with priority, if broken.
2. Clubs need additional tools for a better club communication: For an unknown reason, announcements aren't really efficient, new forums are only shown in browsers, neither announcements, nor forums or match comments can be followed by App users. As many members use the App, all elements of club communication need to be included there. 
3. Multi Club Arenas could be one of the best offers for competitions between clubs. Two years after their release their code still isn't completed and does not allow League play. Challenges to clubs can't be copied from one event to another, Arenas don't have some kind of description, results are incomplete and presented in an unreliable way ... More details here In addition admins should get notifications about challenges and members about upcoming Multi Club Arenas.
4. Vote chess games are suffering since a very long time and do not get appropriate updates: Members, who participate in them, invest a lot of time. They are e.g. worth to receive notifications x hours before voting periods end (to be determined by their club admins) and should get better support e.g. to access explorer and current vote results.
5. Club admins should be able to pin e.g. two upcoming, current and past events to highlight the most important ones of them. 
6. Top players list has been destroyed months ago and needs to be restored.
7. Members start pages have been voided months ago and need to be restored: Given situation is a relevant reason for decreasing participation in many clubs.

B Difficulties for admins (introduced through redesign)

1. Private descriptions are mostly destroyed and need to be restored.
2. Country and location are suppressed and should be restored.
3. Options for club settings have been reduced and need to be restored.
4. Privacy settings have been reduced, which is a rude attack on the diversity of our clubs.
5. Challenges to daily matches are more difficult and less intuitive as they used to be.
6. Results in current matches are more difficult to be checked ... for an unknown reason.
7. Multi Club Arenas are still disturbing other Multi Club Arenas.
8. Last challenge to Multi Club Arenas push itself penetratingly into the foreground.

C Difficulties for members (introduced through redesign)

1. Usual help from private descriptions is more difficult to be found and used.
2. Notes are hidden, which makes passing temporarily relevant information more difficult.
3. Forums are less readable than before: No reason is known, why they are different now.
4. Vote chess games are more difficult to be found and followed: Sounds like a no go.
5. Information about upcoming daily matches is incomplete and needs individual checking.
6. Members should have separate lists for different types of current and past events back.
7. Ranking list for clubs is less relevant than before. What about restoring?

D Ameliorations (introduced through redesign)

1. It's by far easier now to check all kinds of past live events.
2. Additional information is available for announcements and forums (like # of views).
3. There is a new tool to edit announcements.

(to be continued)

This is a helpful summary, Berndt.

I feel like we should also consolidate the list of known bugs in the redesign and ensure they are all ticketed for a fix. I don't have a complete list in my head. Here's some

• Daily match challenge issue page doesn't autofill the match name based on the two clubs.
• Daily Match Challenge confirmation page is missing information (min number of boards, description, and hyperlinks for the two teams)
• Club home page wastes too much space on events that are non existent or not used by the club. Meanwhile the club private description area is too small.
• Sort order for club members is no longer by current daily chess rating.
• Cannot view list of matches (or events, if you must) for another team with any private setting. 
• Club privacy settings consolidated into all our nothing

@ImperfectAge: Surely we can do both. Probably you'll find some more bugs mentioned in my previous list with unanswered questions and announcement without known follow-up.

Would be lucky about some input from other active members, club and league admins to complete my draft about wrong priorities and results as I'm thinking about writing another blog post about this important, long lasting and non-rollback able looking deterioration.

From time to time I could update the list, perhaps you like to do the same for all these bugs: No reason to believe, that we're already near to an end of this unpleasant story.

That is a good summary @Tournamentix, I support everything on the list

As an admin who has created thousands of team matches, it is imperative that I be able to view a potential opponent’s matches when I want to send a match challenge: I need to know if that team is still active (many are not), I need to know if they usually get out 5 or 100 players for a match, are they going to field too may 2000s for my team to handle, might they like a U1000 match for their weaker players….With that information I create thousands of fun matches for hundred of thousands of chess.com’s customers. Without it I cannot serve those customers.

@surfsnook: You're completely right: The approach making even club events "private" came out of the blue and is really difficult to understand.

It's at least imaginable, that designers simply have taken the task "all private" for serious. They depend on precise information about what they should do, don't they?

Probably @jdcannon has posted a comment about this issue in one of the other forums (there are too many ..., a link or a quote would be great): As far as I remember, he assured, that club events will become public again. Until this will happen one day, we can't to better than checking them with "chess.com/clubs/matches/[club-name]".

Events are still public, is just the link on the homepage is hidden if the club is private. That is supposed to be coming back.

I doubt the programmer(s) working on this 'redesign' are doing so of their own volition. It would be nice to see one tell publicly (hard to find in these treads if it exists) what the true endgame is. Perhaps they could report to their supervisors - whomever gave the direction to 'make it better'  (we haven't actually heard from them, have we? - that....whatever it is, it's (if some here are to be believed) killing the very thing they are trying to improve and going to take far to long, creating too many problems and ill will along the way to get to that endgame given current programming resources.
Sometimes it's advisable to just ditch whatever one has done, .re-access your goals (endgame) regardless of the effort already put into it and streamline a new approach to get to this endgame if it is that important and desirable.

Kind of sounds like maybe this should be taken into consideration at this point.
Just my 2 cents.

@Martin_Stahl: You're right, that's fine. Just checked it: That's the link to current events in one of my clubs: https://www.chess.com/clubs/events/earthlings-united You should be able to see them this way. This workaround is better ... as it is relatively unlikely to disappear.

Seen all the situation after seven months: Should we perhaps create and update a public list with these workarounds to stay less uncomfortable for the time being?

@Cornfed: I'm with you. As far as I can see, the topic of this forum "Five questions to @jdcannon" was pointing in the same direction (assuming, that he is the responsible product manager). Unfortunately, as more important questions looks to be, as less was their chance to be answered ... from the early release – nine weeks ago – until now.

Latest bug …. Rating adjustment. I just checked to see what effect it would have on my rating if I played a repetition draw against a lower rated opponent, and it said minus 147 for a draw and minus 357 for a defeat . At that rate I’ll have a rating of zero by next week.

If it's on a 960 game it's not a bug. Anyhow I doubt it's related to the club redesign in any way.

It’s just normal daily chess, and I’ve played thousands of games, and one of my fellow SA’s in my team has had the same thing.

Wow, that is weird.

Check any of your games, click on info , then see rating adjustment.

Oh my....

Yes, you are right!

Mine says -2 for a draw. Is it only new games started since this new software. My games have been vacating.