Club Redesign: Five questions to @jdcannon

Just have read this message in the notes of a league:

If this is right (and I'm afraid it is) Chess.com is really very inventive to create new obstacles.

By the way: Already noticed and reported an increasing number of newly opened matches without corresponding notifications.

I just had someone report that also. Trying to join a match. Just minutes ago.

Sounds like a very efficient bug ...: It discourages club members and admins, looks to be perfect to disturb league results and can surely be extended to other devices.

Let's see, how long it will take to see this fixed. Does anyone want to guess?

I was told to tell them to go to the main club page and then find the match to join. As the link doesn’t work.

They are not interested, they don’t care, teams and leagues are just an annoyance to chess.com , because we don’t generate revenue. They are more interested in their gimmicks and silly cartoons.

@Kookaburrra: And does this still work?

More general: As far as I know, notifications manage a very important percentage of participation in matches. If they are missing or dysfunctional this will descrease participation and impact their results.

The new season of the KTML started yesterday, eight matches which in the past would all easily reach the 30 a side limit. This time they reached 10, 10 , 12 , 14 , 16 and 23 a side , and two didn’t even get the minimum of 10 a side. This is entirely down to the lack of notifications for matches. The amount of hours that competition organisers and team administrators put in for no reward surely deserves a better service than this.

Just tested it on my phone via the app messages page. Clicked on a link to a match that I’d sent this afternoon and it goes here.

That’s not the match that someone wants to join.

I’ve been having that notification link bug on my iPhone for weeks now. Just another in a long series of bugs, but this one is reducing our signups considerably and is very poor testing of a new update.

Testing? Sorry, what gives you the idea that the devs here have any clue about testing or QA?

There's a bug on the iOS app in regards to tournament links not working. My understanding is it should be fixed in the next version of the app.

Another example how unreliable notifications are: I've just created fourteen matches between my clubs. Normally I should get an alert for the incoming challenge and two others for the newly open matches (for both participating clubs).

This happened correctly in seven out of fourteen cases.

For fifty percent of the matches there were missing notifications: For six matches there was no notification for the challenge, only two for the open match and in one case there wasn't a notification at all. Got finally 33 out of 42 notifications: More than 20% of notifications were not delivered.

The 1 million dollars question: given a notification, is it missing for all team members, or do different members get different notifications? Is it another resource limitation issue, e.g. database request timeout or something?

I noticed this also and found it shocking --- especially because of the roster of clubs competing in this competition. Most of them have a historical track record of being very active in the chess.com community.

I am messaging people with links and I don’t think many of these links in the app are working. Most people won’t tell you. One person said as it didn’t go to the match he assumed he was already there. This needs fixing.

After checkmating my opponent, I've got this screen: "Game cancelled"

Fits suboptimal with reality, doesn't it?

I got that a couple of times, but even before the redesign. Get out of the match, access it again from the archive, it'll be fine.

Here is just an example of a match which opened without notification. Both clubs are unlikely to have any problem to play on 10+ boards: https://www.chess.com/club/matches/1554375

After some hours only the managing admins have joined the match ... There are many notifications missing and this becomes an increasing problem for competitions.

Things like this one are really annoying: Variants are the best is a regular participant in our Multi Club Arenas. It happens from time to time, that they don't get their challenge. If so, their admins asks for another one. In the last fifteen minutes I've sent ten challenges to the club, their admin was waiting to accept them and couldn't do so. After a few seconds the challenge gets "declined" by ... whomever.

This creates a lot of unnecessary work for admins without any result and risks to end in every single case in a demotivating situation for club members as they cannot participate in a 24 hour Arena, which will start in 30 minutes.

It's already very particular, that I need to send manually again and again challenges to the same regular participants, it's even more particular, that they need to accept them one by one and it's finally absurd, that Chess.com still interferes with club agreements about common activities, which creates uncomfortable situations for clubs, their admins and leagues.