When sending messages, V3 behaves inconsistently with the privacy settings.

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Avatar of LegoPirateSenior

To reproduce the difference in behaviors, set the privacy preferences to the followng:

V2 setting: <Only my friends> can share messages with me

V3 setting: Send and Receive Messages <Only my friends>

With the above settings, in V2, trying to send a message to someone who accepts all messages, like I do, will produce this (completely incorrect) alert:

Oops?! We noticed the following errors in your form:
This user only accepts messages from friend...:

In V3, the message goes through. Note that the setting implies that messages can be sent  only to friends.

Several problems:

  • V2 message is highly misleading and causes unnecessary aggravation to the sender. While I understand that no bug fixing is being done in V2, replacing the outright lie with accurate information should be a quick and safe fix.
  • V3 behavior is inconsistent with what the setting text promises.
  • Bundling setting/receiving to be controlled with the same switch makes no sense. People should be able to send messages to staff and moderators without 'friending' them.

I think the V3 behavior is actually correct, and all it needs is to change the text in the https://www.chess.com/settings/privacy screen to something like "Receive Messages From <Only my friends>. I see no reason why one would want to restrict their own ability to send messages, even this is what V2 has been doing.

If this is done, then replacing the misleading message in V2 with something like "you set privacy setting so that you can send messages only to your friends. This is a bug in V2; please use V3 to communicate with that person." should be considered. It should take about a minute to fix it...

Avatar of jdcannon

If I understand correctly, you are saying that the only thing that should change in v3 is:

 

 

As far as v2; its no longer supported and the code there won't be updated. 

Avatar of LegoPirateSenior

Yup, exactly that simple change is needed in V3.

BTW, I am really not buying the argument that code in V2 is untouchable. In my day job, I still get to fix issues affecting users of Linux RedHat 4, even though it is vastly more obsolete than V2. And the change I suggested affects only one text constant; the actual executable code would remains intact.

Avatar of ijgeoffrey

@LPS, I think what he means is that they aren't going to update V2 because they have scheduled to shut V2 down on 9/30 (tomorrow).

Avatar of LegoPirateSenior
ijgeoffrey wrote:

@LPS, I think what he means is that they aren't going to update V2 because they have scheduled to shut V2 down on 9/30 (tomorrow).

The shutdown has been postponed; see the V2 End Date Update (No Date Set) thread.

I have switched to V2 for forum posts, since V3 fails to update the 'last post' date, even though the counter of posts seems to work.

Avatar of ijgeoffrey

Oh, I didn't know that. Probably for the best.