Muting of admins

@Bramblyspam: Thanks for the message. Took notice, that more titled accounts show their real names, while others became surprisingly inactive. It's easier to understand now.

If Chess.com acts in such an unfriendly way towards titled players, it's less surprising, that we aren't worth getting answers ... e.g. from Jonathan Cannon, who is officially our point of contact.

Here's the relevant policy:

• Titled players are permitted to have one anonymous account.
• Use your anonymous account for private training purposes. Do not reveal your name or play in any official events with this account - you risk the chance of being forfeited.
• All social features are disabled on anonymous accounts to prevent them from displaying on the leaderboards. We are looking to separate these functions so that anonymous accounts can chat, and we apologize for any inconvenience in the meantime.

This took place a couple months ago, at the end of January.

I'm sorry to say this is the new reality. Something changed a few years ago when it seemed this site was being steered more in the direction of becoming a social-media one than a place serious about chess - it became a lot more 'gimmicky'.

It was around then I started to notice I had to wade through more and more trashy stuff before being able to get to the things I'm really interested in. I'm being slowed down by irritating dialogue boxes that tell me I can join a club if I want to - WHAT?

I get that all websites have to cover their costs but in trying to maximise income I sense this site is losing sight of some of its most conscientious members.

On any 'normal' website this would be both surprising and shocking but if you've belonged to cdc for more than a year, I'm guessing it's neither to you?

This site has always been dreadful at communicating with its members, so that they would behave in this way doesn't surprise us at all.

I think it mostly changed when chess.com allowed everyone to create a club without a subscription. We started to have thousands of meaningless clubs and I started to get a flood of invites and useless notifications to join this or that. I am sure at least half of chess.com clubs could be closed and no one would notice it.

On one hand, I understand chess.com. No one wants to get spamed, so they have to do something. I also got muted before, multiple times. Mainly because I send a welcome message to the new members or warn them about voting chess rules before I have to put them out of the game. Support always fixed it quickly, but it was still annoying.

In my opinion the solution is not in "Let any admin do what ever they want". That leads nowhere, just to get more spam, more players annoyed, more complains.
(I already get about 20-30 notifications and messages per day, sometimes more. I would not like to have more, thanks...)

What we need is the right tools to help admins.Like we have announcement and the notes or even the useless chat. We need ideas to make existing tools better instead of letting anyone to spam thousands of people because they are admins in a 3 person club.

For example I would like to have an option to set up a message to anyone that joins a club. Where admins can explain the rules, where to find things on the forum, useful links, etc.
It could be a simple text box on the club settings page. Would be really useful and would help admins while users would get less "spam".

Same with the invites to tournaments or to clubs.
Like announcements could be filtered by rating or other parameters.
Tools could be improved a lot to avoid manual messaging and in that case we would not be arguing here and complaining about getting muted.

But what do we have now? We are waiting on future tools. I don’t get many spam messages. Not enough to bother me. I just ignore them. Where is our resilience and tolerance. We have club members complaining about messages detailing club activities.
 
Muting is for trolls and abusive language. Not polite messages from a club you are in giving you the option of an activity which is controllable anyway to be received by each individual. The definition of spam here needs adjustment.

I have often said the other site I have some checker clubs in. I can send up to 10 messages at once. And it’s a smaller site. You just put the 10 usernames in and the message and press enter. Doesn’t seem so difficult to implement but I don’t know software. Everything seem complex here.

Cool I see many familiar faces here.

Crik3t makes some interesting observation, but statements like this a are gross exaggeration which rather undermine his credibility: " instead of letting anyone to spam thousands of people because they are admins in a 3 person club"

I agree. We are talking admins messaging their own club members. Not random people.

Slow and steady works fine. 30 invites a day is plenty. A good trick is make a tournament based on your club theme,then invite the people who play in your tournaments. It's like a filter,and people respond positively,if you give them something first.

We aren’t talking about invites to clubs here. We are talking about club admins messaging the members already in the club about club events and information.

There may be some confusion here. 30 is the daily number for membership invitations but what we're discussing here are messages asking existing members to join in club events, where the member presses the spam button and the admin gets muted.

Yeah, I tried that years ago. It caused bad feelings. I can understand.Lots of people play on there phones. Their trying to work,and keep getting pinged by Laz again.

While every comment is welcome, could people responding kindly stay on topic: as mentioned above , what we're discussing here are messages asking existing members to join in club events, where the member presses the spam button and the admin gets muted.

I see.

Yes, I am talking about more broadly here, as if you read the comments so far, you can see there are multiple things different people talk about too.

Also from chess.com point of view a DM is a DM, invite is an invite. They are not checking if the recipient is in one of the same clubs as the sender and if the sender is an admin and then what the message is about and so on and so on. Their assumption is, if you want to message club members use the announcements.

And my main point is still valid. What we need is better tools to do admin jobs.

Help is on the way! Erik, the owner of chess.com, is now aware of the muting issue and is working on it.

We all hope this is the truth!!!

That sounds good.