Chess.com's Biggest Blunders

I agree, and I think webmaster's new blog is precisely for that purpose.

Wow! I never knew about that! Thanks for the heads up.

I wonder why they didn't announce that? 

Wow! Thanks for the link. You really picked a good example of why we must not accidentally delete anything from the virtual world. But seriously, I see your point. But c.c doesn't seem to have any qualms about deleting the comments of members that are booted off the site.

Example: There was a member who made frequent (quality) contributions to several of the vote chess games I have participated in. When he was booted from the site (for reasons unknown to me) all of his comments were deleted; rendering those discussions almost useless. They were not replaced by (Comment Deleted)or by any type of notification whatsoever and if you read the discussions they just don't make sense anymore. We are not talking about a conversation of opinions, we are talking about suggested lines in a chess game.

In conclusion: I am withdrawing my assertion that the aforementioned blunder was in fact; a blunder.

This is one of my bigger pet-peeves.  I understand that there are times when you need to be able to quickly remove all of a user's content and delete their account(as with a rampant spammer), but I think that always deleting a user's content when an account is closed constitutes a real blunder.  Innumerable threads have been rendered incoherent and have lost their continuity when a member who has contributed useful content either get's their account closed or closes it of their own accord.

Interestingly, a number of the peeves identified in forum annoyances have been addressed.

I did thanks.. am tracking it.

One of chess.com biggest blunders: letting some girls post.

lol

I think the biggest blunder chess.com makes is forcing people to buy recurring payment memberships as the only available option.  They even go so far as to make it impossible to gift yourself a non-recurring one year membership.

I think this is a huge hassle, and if you believed strongly in your product you wouldn't be hoping for extra sales from people not realizing their membership is about to renew and rebill them.

This one is not a blunder. This is a strong tactic. This is Bu$ine$$.

Some other girls?

Ah! Okay!  I thought of a blunder. This was maybe a year ago. They did a big upgrade to improve live chess. It took many hours of the site being offline to get it done and when the site went back online nobody could find the vote games they were participating in. It took a couple of days to get vote chess back to normal and during that time many of those games went time-out.

I don't know their credit card policy, but at least chess.com does allow a way around that.  According to their FAQ they accept checks by mail to pay for memberships, so one could get an annual membership rate without automatic renewal with a check payment. I don't know if you'd receive a timely renewal reminder email for a subscription paid by check or not.

I agree, automatic renewal annual memberships are an irritation when there's not an option to decline the automatic part at the time of the original order, and many such businesses make it an extreme hassle to prevent the renewal charge when the time comes around, even if you remember ahead of time and want to head it off.  Ever tried to cancel an XM Radio account?  You can't do it online, only by phone.  Be prepared for 45 minutes on hold before you get to an agent, followed by a 15 minute fight before the agent eventually "agrees" to cancel your account. I had to keeping yelling "just cancel my account or transfer me to someone who will" over and over before the agent finally stopped trying to get me to accept a different rate or a temporary suspension with automatic start-up on some date down the road.

It's insulting when businesses present a mandatory automatic renewal practice as a "convenience" to their customers. Everyone knows the real reason behind not offering a choice. Still, businesses must make more money from accidental/unintended renewals than they lose by irritated customers turned away by the procedure in the first place, or there wouldn't be so many companies that do the evil deed.

--Cystem

To me it just doesn't make sense.  I'm not going to buy a $12.99 monthly membership to try the site out if its going to renew on me when the annual membership is 5 dollars less per month.  But the annual membership also auto-renews.  Maybe its a "strong business tactic" and sure other businesses do it, but its hassling me to the point where I refused to buy a membership and try it out.

I'm not saying get rid of auto-renewals entirely, I'm saying if someone feels so strongly about not buying an auto-renewal that they try to give a gift membership to themselves instead, that shouldn't be blocked, particularly for the annual option.

One of the biggest blunders; is the same blunder made by most chess playing websites. When I sit down to play a game of chess, I don't move the board over to the far left before I start playing. But that's what most chess websites do. There is one and only one chess website that I have found so far that allows you some leverage to control where the game board is situated in the browser. But I seem to be the only person out of more than a million who is bothered by this. Am I so unique?

My board is in the middle.

It is? Did you move the browser window to the right?

Nope, I use the huge board on a 1920x1080 monitor:

The webpage is centered but the board is still on the left. The center of your screen (and the webpage) is the line seperating the f-file and the g-file.