Club Redesign: Five questions to @jdcannon

What a nice summary about 2023 on Chess.com.

Fun fact: We're all invited to vote for 2023 Chess.com awards. If you check the lists, they are visibly incomplete and not really neutral. Best detail: Voting for a "Member Of The Year" is announced, but there isn't any candidates list.

Was curious, which members Chess.com would present in this category ... Surprised, that no one looks to be worth to become Chess.com's "Member Of The Year 2023". None of millions of members gets the chance to be honored at the end of a very specially disappointing year.

I think we know who would have garnered "Pain in the A.." of the year.

May they wear that badge with honor and keep up the good fight!!

You liked Warlard's spamming?!?

LOL! No, he was something far FAR beyond a little PITA!

Just an example about Chess.com's particular unfriendly approach: For years there was recommendation to create picture with a 16:9 ratio. From one day to another their presentation in forums is now like this

.

What perfectly worked until last week is now retrospectively destroyed. All pictures with medals given since 2018 are resized and incomplete now.

I noticed my pictures were getting chopped but I didn’t know why.

Even more fun: In the same forum medals with the same format are shown with different "redesigns":

.

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Only some few survived the massacre.

Is it really necessary to continue this way until EVERYTHING on Chess.com will be unreliable?

Regarding forums, I reported an issue with pasting formatted text a few months ago. The formatting in forums has been a struggle for me trying to manage clubs. There's also no option to add tables to forum comments and copy/paste doesn't format them as nicely as I'd like.

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/bug-pasting-formatted-text

One of the reasons I developed a site for this stuff was that it was nearly impossible to share in comments (not to mention the work involved in maintaining sharable spreadsheets ).

The same massacre happened retrospectively to pictures in announcements as well.
It does not affect news, articles and blog posts ... at least until today.

Try a new forum as a test... I've realized formatting is preserved there. For me it's comments that won't work. For course a new forum isn't ideal though.

@MasterMatthew52: Frankly, I'm tired of trying again and again to find workarounds.

The given example with "squared" medals from six seasons for no known reason, simply shows, how unreliable, unpredictable and unfriendly Chess.com treats us all. Should I really spend my time with creating seven new forum and copying hundreds of medals to these forums ... just to hope, that they will have a better future there? Don't think so.

The senseless "squaring pictures" bug simply needs to be fixed ... as all these many others.

Tried your suggestion and created a new forum: The result is just the same kind of reformatted nonsense.

Review 2023 on Chess.com? Thanks for the offer. Review is quite easy ...:

It was by far my worst year

(in a lot of different categories)!

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Never thought, that Chess.com would ever become

as unreliable, dysfunctional and unfriendly

for clubs, their admins and leagues as it is at the end of this year.

.

Never thought, that Chess.com would continue all year long

bringing down conditions for clubs, discouraging club admins

and damaging conditions for league play.

.

Never thought, that Chess.com would ever show

such an extreme level of ignorance, refusing for months all general information

about clubs related issues and finally stopping all exchange about them.

Grinchamentix.

Even on this day you can't help but find something to complain about.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year all the same!

Cornfed: All you do on this thread is attack our admins who post, even telling me that Santa Claus does not exist. That criticism, like all your others, was unnecessary and just mean spirited. We admins are just volunteers who give unselfishly of our time and energy, trying to give our hundreds of thousands of team members a friendly, smoothly functioning team environment. In making our comments, we are expressing the concerns of our teammates. Even today, Christmas, I heard from a teammate who is frustrated with and cannot understand the new team page format. Please stop attacking our volunteer admins.

If you look, those 'attacks' as you call them are heartfelt reminders that one is more likely to catch flies with honey than vinegar. WAY too much vinegar is repeated directed (by one person in particular) at chess.com and ... sadly, one programmer in particular who has, understandably, removed himself from this thread as a result.

The frustration is understandable; but less vinegar, okay? Everyone voicing issues would do well to remember that. This is the best time of year to remember that....IMHO.

A Merry Christmas and Happy New Year goes out to you as well!

You don’t even look like you are a club admin of anything much. Walk a mile in our shoes. Get muted a couple of times for running clubs.

I think if there was some forethought put into the redesign before throwing us into the wastebasket, there wouldn't be so much negative commenting. I think it's more of constructive criticism, but when there is no communication or false communication, then it is not very constructive is it?

Remember the first reason they gave for this redesign? "Server overloads" . I think that had more to do with mittens than it did with Club play. Clubs are thrown on the very back burner, and often times feel like they don't even have a place at the table here.

Many of us have put in thousands of hours volunteering for this site to make it fun and friendly and competitive for tens of thousands of players. It is obvious that we are not their priority.😞

I seriously don't wish to drag this out as I've had my say....but did you (or someone else) seriously get "muted a couple of times for running clubs"? Or...was it maybe for something that was said or the way it was said...or maybe a 'bug' that accidentally cropped up?