Open letter to Danny Rensch: Please make 2024 a better year for clubs

Open letter to Danny Rensch:

Please make 2024 a better year for clubs

.

Hey Danny,

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it's more than six months now, that you were surprised hearing about Chess.com causing difficulties for clubs, their admins and leagues.

It's more than three months now, that product manager Jonathan Cannon took

„responsibility for all these clubs related issues″.

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Unfortunately nothing relevant is better today than it was six months ago. On the contrary: our situation still continues to deteriorate.

With all our patience, with all our experience of dealing with and working around obstacles, with all our motivation to continue managing clubs and leagues, it becomes increasingly unpleasant, difficult and discouraging to continue with our hobby on Chess.com.

 . 

Please take a second look at the situation of clubs, their admins and leagues: There are several detailed descriptions about the major problems (1️⃣, 2️⃣), there are public forums with thousands of comments … listing many unanswered questions, describing several of the difficulties in great detail and making suggestions for improvements (3️⃣, 4️⃣). So far, none of this has led to measurable success (5️⃣, 6️⃣).

 . 

Please do whatever it takes to make 2024 a better year for clubs, their admins and leagues on Chess.com. 

. 

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A_Lielvalodis • Andrea • artauduck • NM Bramblyspam • CenturioneRomanoxxx • Chambro1970 • Chess_Star88 • chuottom2008 • Commando-Poppins • DavidGaming08 • ELMOREJAMES • EthanJojy • Garbeyes • gbrown057 • hohes_cs • Honor_Leslie • kineticpower • Ikeepminehidden • ImperfectAge • Jules64 • kcbarnes • knetfan • KotMat12 • Libra_64 • Lilith2090 • lvali40 • martinhind3 • MindlessDirt • msultan71 • N8Sun • Obifunk-Kenobi • Qoiuoiuoiuoiu • PEDROJGC10 • phantomisback • Pomb 113 • racine 6 • richmarsh • Shalla-21 • tjanus71 • Tournamentix • uglyork • Warnefrit • weeding45 • YankoBerriosV

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for 10 competitions

1WL LIVE tournaments

County Championship Council UK & Ireland

Deutsche Mannschaftsmeisterschaft

Dragon Lovers VC League

European InterRegio Championship

ONE WORLD League

TCMAC

US Team Chess League

Vote Chess League - VCL

World Chess League - WCL

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and 170 clubs

1 day per move club • 3 CHECK FUN • Ab Imo Pectore • Adlerauge Brandenburg • Adriana Nikolov FANCLUB • Ajedrez Alegría • Anna Muzychuk Fan Club • ANTI NAZI LEAGUE • Art Of Chess • Asher’s Children of the Revolution • Asian Chess Masters • Ayrshire BDG • Battle For Victory • BEAUTIFUL ROMANIA • Bedfordshire-Northamptonshire • Berliner Schachbären • ᛒᛊᚱᛇᛊᚱᛕᛊᚱᛇ • Big Game Hunters • BLACK KNIGHT CHESS • Blue. • Boris Spassky Chess Club • Bremer Schachartisten • Catholic Chess Club • Cefn Gwald Cymru • Cevennes Chess Club • Chess. com - Arabic • Chess for All • Chess is Fun Club • Chess Champions Legion • Chess House of All Nations and Peoples • Chess Team Europe • Chess Smarties • Chess Tourists • ChessAjedrezz • Chexx Pistols • Cloud 8 • Club of Custom Chess Players and Creators • club yankee • Colors of the Rainbow • Deutsche Meisterschaften • Devon Chess • Dhaka Warriors • Die Baden-Württemberger • Die Rheinländer • Earth Air Fire Water • Earthlings United • Edinburgh-Lothian • EGYPT CHESS CLUB • Eternals-Superheroes • European Chess Players • Exercitatio Artem Parat • Fetch Everyone Chess • FanatikClub • Franchesco Chess Club • Friends of Femme Fatales • Friends Uniting Against Mental Illness Chess Club • Girl’s Storm House • Glasgow • Good chess players club • G.U.A.R.D.I.A.N.S. • Glory of Red Green • Green. • Hawaii Chess Federation • Hertfordshire County Chess • InterAjedrez • Inverness Chess Club • Intergalatic Chess • J. R. R. Tolkien Chess Team • King Of The Hill • Kingdom of Red Flowers Chess Club • Lanarkshire • LEGIO I ITALICA • Little Big Pawn • LIVE Chess Club • Los amigos de Chanquete • Magnus Carlsen’s fan club • Mateiści i Drwale • Mecklenburg-Vorpommern • Munster • NAMASTÉ • Nicaragua • NO PASARAN • ONE WORLD League PLAYERS’ LOUNGE • Oracles • Orange. • Oxford Ospreys • Pasión por el chess • Peace for Ukraine • PLATENSE • Powder Monkeys • PURPLE HAZE • Queens and Kings Chess Club • Red. • Rochade Südbayern • Rome • Rot-Weiß Hessen • Sachsen-Anhalt Team • Saechsische Staatstheater Dresden • Schachfreunde Franken • Schachfreunde Hamburg • Schachfreunde Sachsen • Schleswig-Hostein Team• Schwarz-Weiß Ruhrgebiet • Springer Niedersachsen • Springer Westfalen-Lippe • Squadron Commandos • Steaua Bucuresti • Szach-miau • Team Alexander Grischuk • Team Alireza Firouzja • Team anime and manga • Team Anish Giri • Team Asturias • Team Buckinghamshire • Team Connacht • Team Ding Liren • Team Dublin • Team Elisabeth Pähtz • Team Fabiano Caruana • Team Gloucestershire • Team Greenland • Team Hans Moke Niemann • Team Hikaru Nakamura • Team Hou Yifan • Team Ian Nepomniachtchi • Team Italia • Team Jan-Krzysztof Duda • Team Ju Wenjun • Team Judit Polgár • Team Kateryna Lagno • Team Koneru Humpy • Team Leinster • Team Levon Aronian • Team Magnus Carlsen. • Team Mariya Muzychuk • Team Maxime Vachier-Lagrave • Team Nicaragua • Team Nordirbek Abdusattorov • Team Occitanie • Team Oregon • Team Richard Rapport • Team Thorsten Michael Haub • Team Tournamentix • Team Vaidotas Valantiejus • Team Vasyl Ivanchuk • Team Vincent Keymer • Team Viswanathan Anand • Team Washington • Team Wesley So • Team Wiltshire • The Chess Warlords - TCW • The Chess Union • The Environmental Protection Society • The Globetrotters • The Golden Phoenix • The Great British Empire. • The Great Viking Warriors • The Green Team • The Mighty 64 • The Pandora’s box club. • The Royal Falcon Club • The Special Forces • Total 960 • Turm Thüringen • UltimateClub1 • Union der Regionalvereine • Union Rheinland-Pfalz-Saar • Violet. • Yellow. • Young Beauties

Source: https://www.chess.com/blog/Tournamentix/open-letter-to-danny-rensch-please-make-2024-a-better-year-for-clubs

I wonder what would happen if every club member, moderator, and administrator were to write Danny about this?

Here is an extract of the main problems from link #2 in the open letter:

A Notifications

Theoretically Chess.com creates automated notifications e.g. about new daily matches, vote chess games or upcoming live events: These notifications are unreliable, incomplete and susceptible to faults.

B Club communication

Based on experience the most efficient tool for club admins is sending personal messages to active club members while preparing club events: Unfortunately they risk to get muted for this part of their usual activities.

C Multi Club Arenas

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.

D Vote chess games and Players' home pages

Vote chess games are the most challenging of all club activities: Members dedicate a lot of time to discuss move, to vote all few days … and all this over months. Unfortunately they don't get support as they deserve.

Players' customizable home pages have been voided early in 2023 and aren’t restored until today.

E Club redesign

In addition to all previous problems Chess.com has decided to release a club redesign in September: None of the above problems is addressed in this dubious project. It looks to be based on a misleading input, which led to a wrong orientation, followed by a series of astonishing decisions far away from reality and needs in the most active clubs.

F Summary

Chess.com needs to change fundamentally their attitude towards clubs, their admins and leagues: They should finally start working on solving the issues described above.

Clubs, their admins and leagues deserve protection, help and support: Today's reality is far away from what they need and should receive as soon as any possible.

There exists also a list with 28 ticketable points based on the above description.
Two of these 28 points has been fixed within the last four months.

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Feel free. Danny Rensch has a lot of accounts. This one should give you best chances: https://www.chess.com/member/danielrensch

What would happen if we all wrote Danny? Based on the recent track record, I'd have to say "not much".
The folks in charge are aware of the issues. For whatever reasons, they don't seem to be taking steps to resolve them. My best guess is that clubs just aren't a priority for them, they'd rather focus on tweaking Titled Tuesdays and other GM competitions.

@Bramblyspam: Probably you're right.

Never thought, that I would stay without an answer – for more than six months – after having been publicly asked to provide Danny Rensch more information about clubs related issues.

ikr the old club layout was much better

Clubs status: No relevant progress since September

This is the list mentioned in comment #3. It has been initially posted after Jonathan Cannon took "responsibility for all these clubs related issues". Unfortunately near to nothing has happened since then:

Notifications:

• Send notifications for Multi Club Arena challenges to club admins
• Send notifications for upcoming Multi Club Arenas to club members
• Send notifications for new forums to App users
• Send notifications for new comments to announcements, forums and match comments to App users, if activated
• Fix delayed distribution of notifications
• Fix inprecise showings for first new comments and first unread messages 
• Create internal auto check system for notifications
• Give general priority to tickets about notifications

Club communication:

• Reduce risks for clubs admins being muted
• Create a real „Help Access″ (24/7) for muted club admins 
• Make sure, that content of Super Admins don't get hidden in their clubs
• Make sure, that content don't get hidden in competitions
• Design and develop a tool, which allows sending messages to defined groups of members (e.g. „online now″, rating from x to y, at least x games played for the club, already having played in matches with „defined text″ in match names, excluding [member name, member name ...] ….)

Multi Club Arenas:

• ✔︎ Fix: Live server restarts let disappear pending challenges (in progress 22/09, finished 20/10)
• „Eligible scorers″ aren't taken into account for offline shown results (which are generally unrelated to correct online results and tinkered from a spreadsheet)
• Create another (complete and finally reliable) presentation of club and individual results without downloads needed
• Create an access, which allow copying and pasting lists of participating clubs (complete or partially) from one Arena to one or several (!) others
• Create an Arena description, which allows Arena creators giving additional (and editable) information about the context of the Arena.
• Show all parameters of completed Multi Club Arenas.

Vote chess games:

• Fix access to opening explorer
• Fix showing votes after having voted
• Introduce chat/messenger for short time controls
• Add a comfortable section for vote chess games in players' home pages

Players' home pages:

• Bring back customization
• Add some kind of „pre-registrations″: If new event appears, players should have an option like „remind me″ (e.g. 72 hours before the start of daily matches)

Clubs redesign: 

Please refer to „Club redesign: Five questions to @jdcannon″

List with 73 unanswered question, 19 "unticketed" description and 16 announcements without known follow-up

Divers:

• ✔︎ Daily matches: Fix „invisible pieces″ bug 
• Messaging (mobile browser): loading all previous messages (e.g. from @chesscom), creates "flickering", which may last hours
• Messaging (App): Enlarge text field, if needed. Add option to send pictures

Please note: This list is still incomplete as I don't have enough time right now to add newly appeared degradations within the last 16 weeks.

This is a very detailed list, which only shows the biggest difficulties of a club management. Thank you for taking such great care of these issues! Have you received any concrete answers yet? Is there any sign of Chess.com addressing these issues in the foreseeable future?

@hohes_cs: Let's check.

It's surely positive, that I've got mails with friendly words from Danny Rensch and Jonathan Cannon confirming that they "are working to address all of these things".

It stays extremely negative, that this is first positive element after four months of persistent silence: Jonathan Cannon stopped commentating in the three biggest forums about clubs related issues (links in the open letter) during September. 1350 comments have been posted since then ... without any reaction from the responsible for "all these clubs related issues".

Jonathan Cannon, our "point of contact" is online: Does anyone still have questions or want sending a message to @jdcannon: It's your chance ... to become the first of us with an answer in 2024.

I just received this message from a player on my 3000 member team: “Good morning! I noticed some smaller clubs have a leaderboard where I can see how many games I win for them, but my bigger team doesn’t have it. Why not?”

Our players like to know where they stand on the team match top player list. It is fun, exciting, builds camaraderie, and they deserve to know after they put so much time and energy into playing games for their team. It would be like playing games and never seeing your rating! 

This one?

https://www.chess.com/club/leaderboard/team-usa-southeast

The link for the leaderboard is https://www.chess.com/club/leaderboard/yourclubname

Yes, that team. 2 lists often get confused….

”Leaderboard” lists players by rating. The “daily match top player list” lists players by the number of games they have won for their team.

I am talking about the latter. It is very important to admins, players, and team success. 

https://www.chess.com/leaderboard/daily?group=4493 lists players by rating. Available on team page.

https://www.chess.com/club/leaderboard/team-usa-southeast lists players by number of games won for the team. Not available on team page. How do I get that on my team page? 

Thank you for your help. Jim

It should look like this

It lists players by match points, not rating.

As far as I know, there is no way to get this on your club homepage ever since the layout was changed, but you can just record the direct link in the club description.

But the "leaderboard" in the top right corner brings up the players listed by rating when I click on it. how did you get the list you are showing in the picture?