Today’s situation of clubs, their admins and leagues

I am also pleased some issues have been resolved and we have discussion of further enhancements.
I guess I don’t understand where the imagined new club redesign I had in my head which was going to help make my admin and club member role easier ended up such a nightmare and time waster. So please keep fixing things so we can at least have some thing workable like we had before.

Reposted for this page:

I think to make this actionable for staff, we should be very precise on what was wrong in the past and may work now, what has broken recently and suggestions for improvements (new feature requests). Please help make a concise list, below is just a start:

A Notifications

Defects: I know there has been issues in past but is any notification not firing at present?
Feature suggestions: Club admins don't receive a notifications, if their club is challenged to a Multi Club Arena, club members don't receive them for upcoming Multi Club Arenas. Question: "App users don't receive notifications for newly created forums and don't have an option to follow announcements, forums or match notes." Is this true? Did it break at some point?

B Club communication

Defects: Admin used to be routinly auto-muted by the spam filter and would have to contact staff to be un-muted. In my experience this is much rarer now and instead most often an admin is merely prevented from sending PMs for a few hours.
Now, you can still be auto-muted in open forums if you spell out certain words, say, "h*m* sapiens". This could be improved slightly though not at the expense of controlling legitimate spam and abuse.

C Multi Club Arenas

It appears some supporting features was never implemented. "Multi Club Arenas exist since more than two years now: Their code has never been completed and they still can't be used for club competitions." See OP (post #1) for details.

D Vote chess games

Feature suggestions: A widget on the player's home page should show each vote chess they are part of and whether it is his team's turn to move.

Feature suggestions: Solution for very fast vote chess (say 10 min per move) so players do not have to constantly refresh.

E Club redesign

Defects: discussed in a seperate forum https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/known-problems-which-club-redesign-should-solve

Thanks for reposting on this page, so we can see easily what you said.

Joakim, do I see this right: You've reposted your comment #19 newly as comment #22? How does this help?

Here's my condensed list, as proposed by @VirtualKnightJoakim:

Notifications need to be completed (MCA challenges to club admins, MCA information to members, new forums and all comments/notes to App users). They need to be reliable (e.g. by showing the first new comment and first unread message) and immediately arriving. Chess.com should regularly check, that they work as expected. In the event of irregularities these should be solved with priority. More details? Comment #1.

Club communication: Club admins shouldn't be muted for their club activities. If muted, they should have an equal access to someone in charge, who will unmute them asap. Their content shouldn't disappear in their clubs and never in competitions. Clubs deserve better tools, which allow admins e.g. sending messages to defined groups of members (to be discussed later). More details? Comment #1.

Multi Club Arenas: Code needs to be completed to make competitive use possible. More details? Comment #1 and this forum.

Vote chess games: Lost functionality needs to restored. Conditions for fast time controls should see ameliorations. More details? Comment #1.

Players' home pages: Customization needs to be restored to make them as comfortable as any possible to stay in contact with clubs. More details? Comment #1.

Club redesign: Assuming, that rolling back isn't an option, all wrong decisions (rigid structure, taking away options for club customization and private/public settings, depriving private descriptions from their functionality, suppressing information about country and location) and introduced difficulties need to be rectified. More details? "Five questions?", "Known problems" and comment #1.

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Great summary, curious if there will be an answer.

No passing the buck happening; it just takes time to write code. I take responsibility for all these clubs related issues.

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What about letting us know, which issues you're already working on, what solutions we can expect and which problem has best chances to be solved first?

• Will Chess.com complete notifications and auto check them in future?
• Will club admins get an equal access to be unmuted asap, if needed?
• Will there be a solution avoiding hiding content in our clubs and competitions?
• How long will it take to complete Multi Club Arena code?
• Do you need additional information to bring vote chess functionality back?
• What's the blocking element in restoring customizable players' home pages?
• Will you finally start answering general questions about club redesign?
• Which of the wrong decisions concerning club redesign will be rectified first?

It was so we did not have to go back a page, so we could more easily to read what he had to say.

In fact, he very much seems to respect what YOU have to say, which mostly makes a lot of sense.

Also, it seems that jdc also respects what you have to say, which comes as a pleasant surprise, and I feel that it is not only me who thinks so.

Strange to relate, I think Chess.com has woken up to the sad fact that things are not going well, but that they are now making every effort to fix them.

That will take time.

I hope I am right in what I have said.

Happy to hear it, and I'm very pleased to see such a quick response from you. Even though you didn't actually answer the question.
We recognize that it takes time to write code, but we've been waiting for months or years, only to find out that your code-writing has been focused on entirely wrong things. There's been a profound disconnect between chesscom decision makers and the club admin community, and we've all suffered for it.
Since you're now officially the point person on this, it's your responsibility to improve this communication. For my part, I'd like to see regular updates on what you're doing to address the concerns that Tournamentix (and others) have raised repeatedly.

One of our Team Scotland members had this recent experience:

“Recently in Team Scotland vs Team USA Southeast match, Vacation was not triggered by chess.com, and as a result I lost the matches. When I reached out to chess.com, got a response that "Due to a technical flaw Vacation was not triggered , chess.com developers are working on the fix" Got the elo points back but the match points are not. Thought of highlighting for awareness.”

That’s another bug.

@Jules64: Thanks a lot for passing this message. Probably you're talking about this match, which belongs to a competition: https://www.chess.com/club/matches/team-scotland/1519651/games

Looks, that Chess.com's Support still has relevant difficulties to understand, what leagues are about. Think it would fine, ...

• if your member would send a second message to Support highlighting, that these games are played in a league and that restarting them is important to avoid impairment of equal chances for clubs in this competition and
• if we can find other examples of such a reduced understanding, what "Support" should be.

One of my members had the exact same thing happened to them a couple months ago. It took a bit of back and forth with chess.com support via email to get the game reinstated back to the position it was at. I believe that game is still playing right now.

Yesterday @jdcannon has posted a first Club Progress Update.

Please place the problems with the messaging near the top. I am unable to use the browser nor the app in any efficient way to message.

It has been a problem for such a long time, and I don't think it has ever been on the front burner. The impossible scrolling, not being able to read what you wrote on the app, etci...it's just simple things it seems to me. But without these simple things working, my motivation to do any admin work is zilch.

I use a browser on my smart phone. I do not see these problems. Is it only if you use the app? Could someone take a screenshot from the phone that indicate the problem(s)?

Sure VJ, I took a screenshot of the top of the messaging with a friend of mine who I communicate with quite often. It took me literally 3 minutes to try to scroll through all the messaging to get to the top in the browser. That is just to get to see the notifications and the top of the screen. That is a ridiculous amount of time.

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It has been reported months ago and is confirmed by several active admins: Messaging in mobile browsers has become near to impossible, if you have a lot of older messages. Since a few months it looks, that the messaging tool tries to load all previous messages: Active club admins have received e.g. hundreds or thousands of messages about challenges, open matches etc. just from @chesscom.

Just opened the messaging tool on my phone and choose "chesscom". After eight minutes it's still flickering and back to messages in April (five months). This will continue another eleven minutes to complete one year and roundabout fourty more minutes for the previous two years ... and this nonsense happens already for months.

@Comando-Poppins description about the reduced functionality of writing a message in the App is also right: Since I need to do this several time per base, I'm wondering, how something uncomfortable like this can stay unticketed and without a solution already for very long time.

Update: Thanks for the screenshot, Scotty.