It's a well known problem, which exist since the start of Multi Club Arenas two years ago. Every single live server restart has crashed all Multi Club Arenas in preparation.
Chess.com has announced to solve this soon: We've to wait and hope for the best.
Yes, my important tournament had been cancelled like this. I hope chess.com can have an announcement earlier than 24h
The solution to this issue has been released as of last Friday. Since we only have one scheduled server restart per week, It hasn't been tested on prod, but we'll be able to confirm the fix this week.
My tournament started at 8:00 17/08/2023 and we expected that this finish at 8:00 18/08/2023 (Friday) (UTC).
The solution to this issue has been released as of last Friday. Since we only have one scheduled server restart per week, It hasn't been tested on prod, but we'll be able to confirm the fix this week.
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Let's hope for the best: What about all the rest?
How long will it app. still take to make Multi Club Arenas a tool for competitions? Which new limits are you planning for simultaneously running Multi Club Arenas or for the number of participating clubs per Arena? Will players finally be allowed to register at any moment (starting with the creation of the Arena)? How will club and individual results become presented in a reliable and durable manner? Will you reduce needed efforts, e.g. allowing copying participating clubs from one week's event to the next one? Will Arena settings become rectifiable?
All this exists for years already ... on the famous other chess site.
Just to add an element of improvement: Will members of participating clubs finally get notifications (as for all other live tournaments)?
Which new limits are you planning for simultaneously running Multi Club Arenas or for the number of participating clubs per Arena?
-- currently 2000 player cap. Will be greatly increased once some underlying tech is updated.
Will players finally be allowed to register at any moment (starting with the creation of the Arena)?
-- Currently will have the same join time frame as other live events. Its intended that we will open that up in the future, but appear relies on another underlying tech to be finished but we are getting quite close. However its a massive undertaking and I do not have an concrete deliver date.
How will club and individual results become presented in a reliable and durable manner?
-- We've completed an update to the archive page; but not yet released; Will check on it.
Will you reduce needed efforts, e.g. allowing copying participating clubs from one week's event to the next one?
-- I intend to have a reoccurring event feature built but need to first address the existing club related issues.
Will Arena settings become rectifiable?
-- I am not sure this means. Can you tell me which settings you are having issues with? In the mean time I will do some testing and see what I can find.
@jdcannon: Thanks for your answers.
My question about limits for simultaneously run Arenas and the number of participating clubs has another background: Until now you'll have serious difficulties while creating a third arena or while challenging more than 100 clubs. That's by far not enough to run competitions.
Concerning results: What will be new with the update to the archive page? Until now results aren't reliable, because limits like "max. scorers" aren't used for the offline club standings in the downloadable spreadsheet ... and clubs aren't communicated in the list of participating players in the spreadsheet. To get a result for an Arena with e.g. 5 scorers, you need to print the spreadsheet, pick the clubs from the shown player standings and add them up manually.
Concerning rectifiable settings: It's quite easy (and happens from time to time) to overlook an inaccuracy (e.g. start time, time control) in the settings of the Arena or having e.g. invited a club by error. Until now, you need to cancel the Arena and reopen another one.
What about notifications?
My question about limits for simultaneously run Arenas and the number of participating clubs has another background: Until now you'll serious difficulties while creating a third arena or while challenging more than 100 clubs. That's by far not enough to run competitions.
-- 100 clubs is the current cap. Will be possible to increase that when the player cap increases. There shouldn't be any issues with creating 3 or more separate multi club arenas. What sort of difficulties are you having aside from events being lost during server restarts?
Sending 100+ challenges for a mutli club arena sounds like a nightmare. I want to see arenas this big and bigger, but there needs to be a better way to do it than for some poor club admin to manually send challenges.
Concerning results: What will be new with the update to the archive page? Until now results aren't reliable, because limits like "max. scorers" aren't used for the offline club standings in the downloadable spreadsheet ... and clubs are communicated in the list of participating players. To get a result for an Arena with 5 scorers, you need to print the spreadsheet, pick the clubs from the shown player standings and add them up manually.
-- Primarily makes available the club standings beyond 3rd place which is not currently the case. I may be misunderstanding your manual work, but I think what we are releasing should address your need.
Concerning rectifiable settings: It's quite easy to have inaccuracy (e.g. start time, time control) in the settings of the Arena or having invited a club by error. Until now, you need to cancel the Arena and reopen another one.
-- Something we'd like to offer; but unlikely we'll be able to offer it soon.
What about notifications?
-- We are starting to plan a project to expand notifications for all live club events and later plan to revisit club notifications across the board. I am curious what kind of notifications you'd like to see? Our data suggests that any notifications for live events sent more than a few minutes before the start of the event are overwhelming ignored and do not contribute to event participation in a meaningful way. Given that, my current intention is to increase the notifications 10 minutes prior to live event and include mobile push notifications but am of course open to other ideas. Its a goal of mine to see club events become much larger without any effort from club admins.
@jdcannon: There isn't a problem with 100 clubs/2,000 players per Arena. There looks to be a funny limit, that your access to the live server becomes instable after sending more than a total of 100 challenges, which normally happens for me latest with the third created Arena.
Will impatiently wait for the update for archive pages: In general the problem is, that different settings are correctly used in the online club standings only and disappear with them. The tinkering in the offline spreadsheet always count all players (it may even include already closed accounts for FPV). On the famous other chess site it's easy to see better solutions (in all needed details).
First, please find a way to make notifications more reliable as they are the most efficient element to bring club members to events (if usual notifications don't come in, all kind of events are immediately suffering). Imagine you would have a list of upcoming events on your players' page, will get a notification once a new event is created, can "pre-register" to see this event appearing in your individual list of upcoming events and will receive following notifications, e.g. one hour before their start as it is already for all live events (except Multi Club Arenas, which urgently should be included). As far as I can see, this should enlarge participation significantly, shouldn't it? A ten minutes reminder would probably be better than the current one (for other live events), which appears one or two minutes before the start.
That's what I need to do to prepare weekly events on Lichess:
This takes less than 25 minutes per week to manage seven weekly events.
That's what I need to do on Chess.com to run a weekly Multi Club Arena:
This takes at least 30 minutes per week to run a single Multi Club Arena.
What would help running Multi Club Arenas?
Here's a simple example for one of the usual problems (and a just added one as well):
I've joined a Multi Club Arena and played two games.
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During my second game a club has accepted a challenge to another Multi Club Arena, which is scheduled to start in a few days. As a "consequence" I loose contact to the Arena I'm playing in and get the other one shown.
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This also reopens a tab to one of the challenges, which I've sent several hours ago to this second arena:
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Now, I've to clean up a bit, find my way back to the first Arena ..., well knowing, that the same is likely to happen again in a few minutes as more clubs will accept their challenges.
Switching between Arenas is an annoyance, which lasts for two years now.
Opening irrelevant challenges tabs is one, which has been newly added.
Something reliable to manage competitions should be more stable, shouldn't it?
As expected the same happened during my third game again:
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"Learned" coincidentally that refreshing the tab brings the initial arena back, while the tab with the challenge remains. Will add this to my list of "bug arounds".
Appreciate the report; Will look into it and find a solution.
What do you expect to happen when a club accepts your challenge while playing in an arena?
@jdcannon: Thanks.
As both activities are unrelated, accepted challenges in one of my Arenas shouldn't have any influence on my situation in another Arena: Would like to play in one and like to check ongoing registrations in another one at the moment, which fits best for me.
I've made these screenshots and the detailed description to show, that after two years the code still isn't prepared to handle bigger events. Just imagine a weekly competition with some simultaneously played divisions. Would this work with the given code? Don't think so.
Was underway to create a Multi Club Arena as a challenge has been accepted to another Arena. Connection was reset to this one and my next five invitations are gone to wrong Arena. Five of the six last clubs should be on this list:
Bye the way: What about my descriptions and the suggestions in comment #11?
Part II: Just another observation: While sending challenges to a Multi Club Arena under the conditions of redesign, several clubs were not found. Until now they needed to activate "play team matches" to get eligible being challenged to these Arenas. Those clubs, which I couldn't challenge all are set up like this: Might there be something new and more restrictive?
Do I need to assume, that the list of outgoing challenges could be incomplete?
I'm preparing three Multi Club Arenas and I can only see one pending challenge: Sounds not very likely, does it?
Or do I need to assume, that today's live server restart has allowed the Multi Club Arena itself to survive, but has crashed all pending challenges: The above challenge is the only one I've created after the last live server restart.
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There is a very annoying bug that we keep encountering with multi-club arenas.
The arena gets scheduled, the clubs I challenge join the arena, and then all of a sudden, all of the clubs get removed.
The arena remains on the homepage of all the clubs who accepted the challenge, but when you go to the arena there are no clubs in the arena. There isn't even a "Club Standings" tab.
Because all the clubs got removed, once registration opens, everyone who tries to join will get an error saying "Chess group required for multi-group arena."
Now I have to try to reschedule the arena and challenge all the clubs again. It is very annoying. Will anyone ever fix this?