Use of the Announcement function

On Thursday or Friday, in every week that we have Club matches versus other international clubs, I use the Announcement function to notify all of our members of the weekend schedule. I do this so that our members will have the time to arrange their schedules and to encourage them to participate. This Announcement goes out to all of our members.

Currently, in the hour before each of our Club matches versus other international clubs, I access Club settings to change the Chat function to the Notes function. I use this function to post reminders to all US Chess members of our upcoming match. These reminders go out to every member as a Message.

Recently it has been brought to my attention that the Reminder Notifications do not generate an alert for our mobile users, but the Announcement function does and, as a result, they do not get the notification. The suggestion was made that the Announcement function should be used instead.

There is a risk for me personally if I do this. The Announcement function does not have a character limit bandwidth, the Notes do. As a result, chess.com monitors and limits the use of it. If I use it too often, I risk being muted. Additionally, not everyone appreciates the Announcements and I get some unkind responses.

The purpose of these Announcements and Reminders is to generate interest among our members. If our mobile users are not getting these reminders, perhaps if there are enough of them, it is worth the risk. So, I am soliciting responses from our members to see if there are enough mobile users who would like to participate. I will monitor this Forum Topic for one week to get a feel for that interest.

Tell me what you think. 

Thank You

Personally, I prefer the message as I check chess.com often enough to catch them. Perhaps something you could do is send a short note reminding people to check their announcements to circumvent the charcter limit?

I'm usually on mobile to get messages

Personally, I like the announcements a couple days in advance, because it gives me time to add the matches to the calendar! I think ideally, we could have one announcement a couple days in advance, and then another announcement the day of the tournament, but that might be a lot.

Alternately, we could set up a Discord server or something, with pingable roles so that players who want to opt-in to pings can get pinged when a match is about to start. We would have to make sure enough people are opting in to make that worthwhile, though.

We used to have one I think.

Yeah, I remember we had one unofficially. Unfortunately, the owner of the server went inactive, and they never passed ownership on to any admins... so that kind of killed it.