Club Redesign: Five questions to @jdcannon

All in all it seems to be back. And since I fussed more about its absence than most anybody, I am happy to say thank you to chess.com for bringing it back. Jim

I’d like it back in every club please.

Ultimately there's going to need to be database and code optimizations for the leaderboards.

Before it was a general timeout for all clubs showing inconsistent data, now it's only timing out (probably) for clubs with too many matched in history or too many players, it's unclear. But when failing, it fails to display rather than showing wrong data, so I a sense it's an improvement... I guess? But it shows efforts have been made to work on it.

The clubs I am talking about don’t have it even as an option to select.

Some do and some don’t.

Mentioned already in comment #1440 that I've lost access to all our current and upcoming live events. Tried to find the blocking element.

As there was a "clocking" upcoming Arena, I've asked someone for assistance. Without success. The "clocking" Arena was just replaced by another "clocking" one.

Remembered that I've needed to "cancel" always the last one of a series of outgoing challenges. All others were repeated and I could cancel the last one again. Checked the list of outgoing challenges and found all of them still in the list.

Asked someone for assistance (cancelling these outgoing challenges). Surprising result: The newly promoted admin of the hosting club can "view" the outgoing challenges with the only fictive option to "accept" them. The "cancel" button doesn't exist.

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Just again: I've a "cancel" button which doesn't allow cancelling challenges. Other admins of the same hosting club have a senseless "accept" button which also doesn't allow cancelling challenges. Most likely one of them is creating unwanted redirections, which finally block everything.

Still don't have access to our current and upcoming Arenas. Still can't continue managing them. Probably don't have a chance to solve this by my own initiative. Can't know, how long I will have to wait until the blocking element will disappear. Spend my time with explications to club admins, who demand challenges, which I can't send them ...

Normally I should create right now one and within the next days several others. Not sure, if this will be possible.

Don't know, how often I've had to explain during the last few months, that incomplete parameters are part of Chess.com's innovations with their redesigned challenges to daily matches ... and that everyone needs to replace "daily-team/seek" with "clubs/match_challenge" in the URL to get the only reliable presentation of a daily match challenge by switching to the good, old clubs design.

It's still like this today ... after more than six months of post development process.

Last time I've had to do regularly something similar was probably back in the 90s.

10 competitions and 170 clubs have signed an "Open letter to Danny Rensch: Please make 2024 a better year for clubs"

Public forum for your comments: https://www.chess.com/forum/view/clubs-and-teams/open-letter-to-danny-rensch-please-make-2024-a-better-year-for-clubs

Just an example about the limits of "toasted" notifications.

A spammer has challenged many of my clubs – without any sign of interest on our side – unwanted to a Multi Club Arena. Have seen at least 15 of these "challenges". As described in a previous post, there is no way to check these challenge by the list of incoming challenges.

There were already 30 steps to make to decline seven unwanted challenges. This time there are least twice of them: Either I'll spend at least 30 minutes to reproduce the way to "view" them one by one and to delete them or I will wait until the start of the Arena ... hoping, that they will disappear. Luckily in the given case this will be in 80 minutes. Only after this I will have a chance to check, which other notificiations got "toasted".

Imagine the same spammer would create challenges to a Multi Club Arena in a few months. One would really need to go through this nonsense as often as it will happen. How does amplifying the annoyance of spamming create a better user experience?

I've just repeated testing notifications for daily matches with a set of 14 matches between my clubs. For four of these 14 matches I've got all three notifications (one for the challenge, one for the open match in both clubs each). For ten other matches notifications to the challenged club were missing (71%).

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Update: It's surely positive, that I've got mails with friendly words from Danny Rensch and Jonathan Cannon confirming that they "are working to address all of these things".

It stays extremely negative, that this is the first positive element after four months of persistent silence: Jonathan Cannon stopped commentating in the three biggest forums about clubs related issues during September. 1350 comments have been posted since then ... without any reaction from the responsible for "all these clubs related issues".

Update to comment #1457: 29 of my clubs have received unwanted challenges to a Multi Club Arena. Tried to ignore the spam: Arena was scheduled to played on Wednesday. As it is Friday now, it should be over. Challenges are still there:

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To calm down Chess.com's spammer friendly "toaster" I probably don't have any other chance than declining them one by one with app. 120 steps to go until this will be done. That's just one example of Chess.com's improved user experience.

Incredible: Now I've declined all these unwanted challenges ...

... and three of them still get "re-toasted":

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What can I do now to see them disappearing? What will be most appropriate: A bug report? A mail to support@chess.com? Creating a fresh forum? Or ... clearing browser cache? 

Or should I resign and choose your "toaster" as my avatar?

Who is the GE-winner?

@Kookaburrra: Just a club to avoid ...

Looks like it.

What's this? Is this a new Chess.com limit? Really?

Just as a feedback: Today Chess.com has crashed six from fifteen upcoming ONE WORLD League Multi Club Arenas. As there is an uncommunicated limit for pending challenges (if you've more you'll loose access to all kind of live activities) it will be a very particular fun to recreate all of them in time.

The six broken Arenas are still shown in all participating clubs, they will continue creating confusion and they can't be deleted. Ever heard about similar code curiosities on other online chess sites?

The TD probably set that as the minimum.