Muting of admins

Can you give details?

No details at this stage. Ill post here as soon as I have anything more to report.

I've received the following message from chess.com admin Bert:

Hello Fantasto, 

I'm Bert from the Chess.com support team. I'm reaching out regarding a report you recently filed on the site. 

I would like to apologize for the delay in my response. We have been receiving an extraordinary amount of inquiries. The bug reports are dealt with daily but it can take some time for the support team to reach out to users where an answer is required; but no worries, I’m here for you now!

We do recommend that whenever an admin is muted, please let them contact us so that we can check the reason of being muted.

There might be different reason why it's muted and the team does not automatically mute the account just because of spamming messages to join a certain club.

Which is why we do recommend that the muted users contact us instead so we can unmute the account or let them know the reason.

Kind Regards,

And Ive replied to him as follows:

If we are to get anywhere on this, I strongly advise other adimns to raise their voice directly with chess.com in protest about the way in which we are being treated as second class citizens!

Doesn’t really stop it happening. It seems their remedy is when it happens is contact them for unmuting. What if it is in the run up to an important match and how are we supposed to feel being kicked constantly by an unsupportive site.
Thanks for your efforts Fantasto. Doesn’t seem there is an answer for this which helps us. Don’t forget when we get muted all our forums and notes disappear.
Most of the mutes are for this message of club members reason. That I know of anyway.

Here's another exchange between me and Bert of chess.com:

It’s crucial for platforms like chess.com to strike a balance between preventing spam and enabling effective club management. Hopefully, this will lead to a resolution that respects both the need for spam control and the role of club admins.

I don’t see how me sending a message to club members about club activities even gets classed as spam. If you don’t want messages from your club admins turn off your messages or leave the club. I think their definition of spam needs changing. 
I think of spam as advertising like the emails you get from a company where they send out hundreds or thousands or millions. Me sending some messages here isn’t anything like that. Just because someone reports them as spam - why is this believed by the site. They aren’t spam.

Exactly.

I got a spam warning two weeks ago, I'm now in a mail exchange with support to try to understand what I did. Spoiler alert: I don't think they know either. I'll post the extract here when I have more time.

https://www.chess.com/article/view/chesscom-update-april-2024

So here's my current exchange with support. Emphasis mine, text in color are my in-line comments. Time tags are in western Europe time, begins as UTC+1, ends at UTC+2.

[21/03/2024 21:13 UTC+1]

I got this mail from account@chess.com, that was sent straight to the spam box by gmail. Luckily, it was also sent by the chess.com account in PM, and I saw it (I could easily have missed it due to all challenges notifications and other things we get from that account).

Hello Ximoon
We have received reports of spamming on some of your recent posts either in game chat or in comment sections within our community. [I almost never use game chat, when I do it's to answer to salutations of other players, to say I misclicked or to say good game. I probably don't use in-game chat more than a couple times a month. My activity on community is restricted to support, admin, occasionally API clubs, plus a couple messages not even every day in two or three teams, plus of course the notes and forums I post in my own team, that are not even too many. What is not listed here, is whishing good games to players in the team matches I setup (once per match), welcoming messages in my own team and another I administrate, limited to once per member, and a couple members per day on good days. Not listed are also legitimate invites to tournaments and team, using the invite function] We want to remind you that such activity is prohibited by our Community Policy and will not be tolerated. If you are unsure what "Spamming" is, please proceed to our help article here: What is spamming? [Funny thing: this link was working at the time, but brings to a 404 error page now. Editing the address brings to the correct page: https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8615342-what-is-spamming maybe it was a 1-time link making sure I read it? I don't know]

Further complaints of this type will result in your account being muted or closed completely. We would ask you to help us make Chess.com as friendly and pleasant a place as possible to be.

Thank you very much,
Chess.‌com Support
support@chess.com

I replied to support@chess.com

[21/03/2024 21:59]

Hello,

I'm very surprised about the content of this email, as I'm basically almost never talking in game chat and I certainly not spam in comments. I'm always kind and my messages are always relevant. I'm only active in the club I own, in support and admin clubs for supporting other members and in team matches I organise to wish good games to players.
Could I have better details on what I did wrong in chat or comment section, as written below?

Ximoon.

I paused my admin and club activities, waiting for an answer, that came about 24h later from a support staff, I'll cut the intro and salutations.

[22/03/2024 21:03]

[...]

I looked into your account and I noticed that it was warned for Spamming. As you may have known, normal messages can sometimes trigger the spam filter [here they talk about the spam filter. The original message could have been interpreted in the way that actual members reported me] on the site and warn your account. The common reason this happens is when:

1. The system finds a pattern in the messages you send
2. Sending messages to people who are not your friends
3. Sending messages too many messages without a reply
4. Spamming friend invites
5. Spamming game requests

[the three first conditions can easily be met by normal club admin duties (e.g. welcoming messages), without even asking to join matches, which I don't do unless a member explicitly gave consent. I have a list of such members, but never had to use it as of today]

But don't worry, we understand that most of your messages are related to invitations/things related to the club. Because of that it was just a warning. So don't worry, we know that club notifications/invitations are the reason for this messages, but just please take care about large and consecutive messages.

Thank you for your understanding and your patience, and I want to apologize again for this inconvenience.

[...]

My answer, removing pieces with names

[22/03/2024 23:21]

[...]

Thanks for your answer. It's very helpful but still a bit confusing on the process.

The message I received says I've been reported, implying some users reported me, not an algorithm. It also talks about game chat and community forums, not private message.

The only repetitive messages I send by PM are welcoming messages to my clubs. I hope the algo doesn't flag invitations to the team or tournaments which are identical by nature.

Could you extract what message have been flagged exactly to know what I should be careful about?

Also how long will I stay flagged and at risk of being muted? If I don't know what was wrong I will just fear being muted for my nominal activities.

Thanks a lot.

[...]

No answer. I pinged them more than a week later

[30/03/2024 15:18]

[...]

I've been waiting for an answer since more than a week now. I had to pause my admin activities out of fear of being muted, and I still don't know what I did wrong, meaning I don't know what I need to adapt not to risk being muted.
I need to take care of my club. Please answer my questions.

[...]

Answer from them:

[01/04/2024 19:43 now UTC+2]

[...]

There is no some special message which has been flagged, just please be careful about this:

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8615342-what-is-spamming [same link as in the spam warning]

In addition to this I've already leave a note into your profile so you won't have inconveniences by sending welcoming messages to your clubs. [good to know!]

[...]

My last response to date, still without answer:

[05/04/2024 09:15]

[...]

I'm sorry to say that's not nearly good enough. I know the policy, I've read the article. 
I still don't know what I did to get the spam warning, and I don't know what I need to change to be sure not to get muted. I'm paying for a service I can't use fully and that's very irritating.

Also the exchange we have is contradicting the original warning I got. The warning tells about messages being reported either in community comments or game chats, which is not possible based on my lack of usage of those.

Your original answer tends to say it might have been for other reasons, and that might have been automatic.

I need to know.

Was this an automatic detection, or was it due to other users reporting me? 
Don you know what message and don't want to tell me, or don't you have access to the information?

I also learn you can leave notes on people's profiles without them knowing. I believe it has to be in compliance to EU's GRDP act, so can you please tell me how to request an extract of such data, just in case? [starting to be nasty, but I was a bit irritated at that point]

You might also want to know the link in the original spam warning (in this email list history) brings to a 404 error page

Here I am, three days since last message, more than two weeks after the warning, still not knowing what I did wrong according to the mighty spam filter/bot/something.

I agree. I’ve found it all very vague. Which leaves you wondering if support understand the process. Thanks for sharing.
They tell you that you’ve done something wrong but who can work out exactly what.

Can confirm, that the vague information is an important part of the problem. Like @Ximoon now, I've tried to understand, which part of my activities caused mutings and warnings in 2022 and 2023: It was simply impossible to get some concrete information, what really the problem was ... and still is. Finally I've stopped managing my clubs, radically reduced exchanging DMs with others than friends and (mostly) stopped creating individual tournaments.

Nothing relevant has happened since then and Chess.com did not change their discouraging attitude: Read this article and try to imagine, what an algorithm, an unlucky correspondent or a Support member might have thought could be wrong with your activities ...

Reducing the risk of repetition without having any concrete information can best be done by reducing as many activities as possible: That's, how I can assist making "Chess.com as friendly and pleasant a place as possible to be" ... at least for some others. Personally I don't feel comfortable for a long time already and from my point of view, Chess.com is far away from doing their best to make their site "as friendly and pleasant a place as possible to be".

Dosen't surprise me. The logical thought process used to implement these actions and the detection of true spamming is virtually non existent by the devs. Also the 2 day support turn-a-round quoted in the monthly report is a joke. It is always 4/5 days plus for any specific answer and always starts 'Sorry, we are very busy. Extra volume' ect.

I understand your frustration with the situation. I myself have been warned and followed up with a one week mute, simply for posting an announcement about an important match. There’s an extreme lack of clarity and communication from the support team regarding the exact reasons for the warnings. It’s been a few days since your last message, so it might be worth sending another follow-up email to the support team.You might also consider reaching out to other club admins or members of the chess.com community to see if they’ve had similar experiences and how they handled them. I hope this helps, and I hope your issue gets resolved soon!

You have to be kidding?!

Surely there was something else that resulted in that warning and muting?

I can't believe an announcement results in a mute, even if I don't trust their spam filter, it has to be something else... I post announcements for matches all the time. This is a safe thing.

Nope, it's real, the event occurred a few months back. Since then, there have been some noticeable improvements. The club was large, yet dead, which likely led to members annoyed to get a notification. Generic warnings are issued in response to widespread reporting. Then the first mute comes. Given my limited activity at the time, this is the plausible reason for my muting.