Comments on the club members endpoint

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Avatar of skelos

Two teams I help administer have substantial "dead wood".

My first place to look to identify it was via the club members endpoint, which splits club members into three groups:

  1. Those active in the club in the last week
  2. Those active in the club in the last month
  3. Those members ever active in the club.

Now that's all well and good, but if I have a smaller team and value players who participate in "important" team matches (e.g. TMCL) they may spend a lot of the year in #3 ("all_time") if:

  1. They don't post to notes
  2. The club has infrequent news postings.

I assume here that making a move in a team match game does not count as activity; it would be good to have more explicit documentation of exactly what does (and does not) count as "activity" but it is practically a side issue, as my hypothetical "important" match player will sometimes have an opponent who doesn't actually play (closes account or times out).

I still value my "important match" player so to find if they are active or not, I need to:

  1. Check their profile for last_online (which is also rather vaguely defined). If they have not been online for X(*) months then they're "dead wood"
  2. If they have been online, then to know if they're playing I need to look back through team matches to find when they played, and vote chess games which I don't think have endpoints yet.

It is clearly possible to do both #1 and #2 immediately above, with #1 being trivial and #2 requiring some programming (or work with the JSON capable utilities perhaps).

If all_time/monthly/weekly were better defined it would have some value, perhaps.

am interested in what was the last time an administrator did something, when people post to forums and even when people post notes, which is one thing which is documented to bump their activity level. Especially as there are no endpoints to such non-public data as clubs' forums when a club has made those forums private, as most do.

 

I started out writing this post thinking I would propose that the division of weekly/monthly/all_time be scrapped. Instead I am thinking I would like it to stay (even if it is only updated each 24 hours or on some specific events) as I can work out without api.ches.com if I can't find matches they have played in what someone has been doing, by asking them if necessary. happy.png

 

*I have seen members purged from clubs for not being active on chess.com (the easiest measure until recently) from as little as one month to as much as eighteen months, with the justification for the latter being a one year sabbatical with some time either side.

Avatar of skelos

 Re-reading the above I'm tempted to delete it and start again, but who knows, someone may have read it. Let me simplify a little:

1. What is the idea behind weekly/monthly/all_time division of members?

2. Precisely what actions cause a member to be promoted to weekly?

3. Can the "up to 24 hours" delay be removed please (if the divisions are retained) since anyone going to rely on the divisions can easily force an update by banning some random non-member (Erik is the usual example wink.png) and un-banning him afterward, which will force a second (and unnecessary) update

4. I would like at least the following to constitute activity:

• Being registered for a team match when it begins
• Casting a vote in a vote chess game
• Making a forum post
• Sending an invitation or any other activity restricted to administrators only down to and including editing the club's profile
5. While I'm wishing, I'll wish that posting a note be recorded separately; for some teams that is significant and for social chatty teams it may not be. Indeed, in one club it makes one nuisance look active whom the club would be better without. (So why not kick or ban him? Because while I would never invite that person to a club, arbitrarily kicking people out of your club is a very fast way to destroy morale. A medium fast way is to let nuisance chatter take over your notes. Tricky. Dealing with people is always tricky.)
Avatar of skelos

Following up to my own posts is a bad habit.

I am aware that if the documentation is made more specific there is more chance that performance or other requirements will require changing it later, and that code relying on anything that changes will have to update.

I'm willing to take that chance in the instance of club activity certainly, and expect a few more incompatible changes to the endpoints overall as we all gain more experience with them.

Avatar of skelos

New comment:

Everyone I get via this endpoint gives me a higher number of players than the website shows.

I'll dig in; I imagine "all_time" is including basically irrelevant people like closed accounts, but I am wondering what "Sync account numbers" or whatever it is in the "Manage Club" pane really does. I don't want to try it until I know, and it's a SA function too and my most convenient test group I'm only an admin in.

Avatar of skelos
skelos wrote:

New comment:

Everyone I get via this endpoint gives me a higher number of players than the website shows.

...

Sorry, false alarm. Bug in my code.

You may now say, "Typical developer!" happy.png