Muting of admins

I'm opening this forum so people can have their say on what I regard as the very heavy-handed and unfriendly actions of chess.com staff in punishing  by muting club admins when a small number of members just push the spam button in response to receiving a message from an admin asking them to join one of their club's matches.

To start the discussion, here's the text of a message I've recently sent to chess.com. to which I've not yet received a reply:

"I’m aware that admins in a number of clubs have been muted recently, as a result of a small number of unidentified members complaining that they were being spammed, when in fact all the admins were doing was asking them to join one of their club’s matches.  This seems a very bizarre situation, especially as the bone fides of the complainants may be questionable: they may, for instance, have a grudge against that particular admin or the club itself, as otherwise why wouldn’t they just ignore the message?

In the case of Team Australia, when messaging a member our admins always add a rider that if they do not wish to receive messages they should consider either turning them off or leaving the club, although neither of these would seem to be in the best interests of the member or the club.

It is hard to understand why chess.com is taking such a severe line against admins who are just doing their job in seeking entries to team events. If they are to be muted for this, then how do you suggest they go about filling the often large number of places in league and other international matches? It seems quite unrealistic, for instance, to post notes needing to be read by almost 10,000 members when the event in question has a potential range of just a few hundred eligible participants.

May I respectfully suggest that chess.com policy in this matter be reviewed, so as not to penalise by muting admins who are just trying to do their best on behalf of their clubs. I know I am not the first person to raise this vexing issue and I hope chess.com will listen to us and move quickly to resolve it."

Agree with you 100%. The "spam button" option is absurd. Although I am an SA in a few groups, I seldom send out invites and the "spam button" is therefore not a threat to me; however, I am sure that other SAs have been victimized by this unnecessary and absurd option. Perhaps there should be a "block invites" option instead. Muting of devoted earnest admins is a stupid and counterintuitive idea. Fix this now!

Good idea

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/chess-com-policy-in-private-groups

One other thing. I am using my phone for Internet and I scroll through messages and forums by using my finger as a cursor and I believe that I have accidentally tapped the "spam" button by mistake in several instances. And there is no way to rescind that mistake.

I agree @fantasto. I am a person who has been muted for messaging club members. It feels like I am treated badly for doing something I’ve done for 5 years to help people here. So many admins have quit over this. We need to feel secure and supported by the site.
 
It has affected me emotionally and how friendly I am here and now I hesitate to contact club members and do my job properly.
 
Every week someone I know seems to get muted. This never used to happen.
Sad really.

Text "To stop receiving messages from this club, you can adjust your notification settings here" need bigger or make a button

That exists. That said, many people don't mind some invites but dislike excessive or repetitive ones

They can just block the sender then. No need to take the guy down altogether.

How do we know which people mind if they either don’t tell us or turn off their messages. We aren’t mind readers. Most people we message WANT the messages and rely on them so we can indicate which matches are important for them to join.

I may have misread the post I quoted. That may have been a suggestion for a block event invites option, which doesn't exist 🤔

No they don't. New policy has just been implemented that prevents copy/paste of mutiple member names into invite utility. So each member name has now to be typed / pasted individually. Block invites no longer an option.

I hope I've misunderstood this but are you seriously saying that the facility for inviting multiple people to join a club in a single invite has been withdrawn after how many years?

I agre with everything you and other club admins are saying but we have to face a simple fact - the people who run this site regard messages from the admins of a club that ask their own members to join a match, however politely written, as nothing more than spam.

That's the reality, so if you're unlucky enough to pick a club member who's in a bad mood, or has some grudge against you, don't be surprised if you get muted.

Distributing a general appeal via a club announcement or forum topic is fine but via messages is not.

It's still here. But you can't copy/paste all names at once, you need to either type or copy one by one, select from a dropdown, and continue. Then you send them all at once. Which kills the purpose. I've been told by support it's a security improvement. Same for tournaments btw.

So if we have lists of people we invite regularly to tournaments. They are now not able to be used. How is that a security problem. It’s inefficient. They make our job harder and more time consuming with every change here. And don’t even tell us when they do it. We thought this was a new bug.

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I've made the count and posted its result in another forum: As a Platinum member I bought the option to create 75 tournaments simultaneously with up to 750 invites each. This is a total of 56,000 invites. For me copying and confirming them one by one, takes roughly 7.5 seconds instead of having copied and pasted groups of 20 players in five seconds before. Now it would take 120 hours, what could have been done in four hours before.

Tiny corrections like this one are very efficient to reduce activity.

Oh you very much can use them. I'm in the process right now of copy/pasting one by one 750 names to the invite box. It's an interesting way to spend my time.

Fortunately I found a way to speed things up that doesn't require to click on the dropdown, that helps a tiny bit.

Why are club admins being treated as if they're a 'problem' that needs solving/fixing?

Does anyone know because that's exactly how I'm starting to feel!

But we're all fighting against the machine here. If we have a list of 30 members, why can't we paste them into the box in one go to invite. We're told the invite tool is the preferred method.

When the new club communication tool arrives (supposed to avoid the problems we have with general PMs) will that also require pasting in names one-by-one?

Is there ever going to be any improvement in the ability for club admins to contact existing members or try to recruit new members? Managing clubs is instead being made progressively more difficult, each week it seems.

I don't use the spam button out of pity, because I'm an Admin myself, but the actual situation is absolutely absurd. 😡

Although I perfectly know, which events come next, I'm spammed with superfluous informations about coming events, mostly events, in which I couldn't take part anyway, because of rating limits and I am not able to defend against invitations to formats, in which I am not interested.

Admins don't listen to my protests: "Please never invite me to an Arena, I don't like them". They keep inviting me. And blocking such Admins doesn't help, this regards only private messages, not the messages, that they send in the name of a club. 🤔