erik, we are frustrated

He has said as much!

i'd like to make a point about why cc might constantly ignore this topic asking relevant questions-kids and idiots.

there is this person, nylonsock that has created at least two topics mocking this one, and, of course, blocking me. 

lo and behold, this stinkysock has posted three topics since 3-10 asking for help! 

so, we have an idiot who thinks he is funny in the way of mocking, but then has issues that would be relevant to why i started this topic. 

i'm sure staff sees all this and laughs-yes, the average age of those on the site goes down as adults get fed up and leave. so funny!

No, he's just a guy.

but is he also a cool frood? 

The site is designed for clickbait.  Same reason why the first icon at the top of every post is an invitation to give a gift membership to the person whose comment you are following-on.  

"Kids and idiots" are along for the ride.  Given enough numbers, they actually generate the ride.  And Nylonsock becomes an influencer, while aiming for "celebrity."

At least Autobunny keeps us laughing,, inside the chaos and blizzard of posts.  

Sure like most of the internet it's designed for clicks, but "clickbait" is a little lower on the food chain. Clickbait is more like "doctors hate him, find out this one Shaolin monk trick for immortality"

just off a mute for writing "now   h o m o s a p i e n   is a bad word?" in https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-com-community/hi-guys-i-was-was-muted-for-not-saying-any-thing-bad-47063324

without the spaces so i won't get muted again.

the response from the staff member after unmuting me is absolutely unacceptable. he blames ai for the automute as well as referencing so-called "curse" words i used in game chat.

ERIK! blaming ai means you are claiming YOU are not responsible, and that members should "get used to" being muted for speaking english-correctly. i think it is unacceptable that the regular mutings of members are sloughed off as "oh, that's just our ai bots. they're dumb right now so this stuff will happen".

secondly, i did use two "bad" words-s**t and b***hing. however, those words were used in game chat with a friend here. a person whom i have played over 100 games with. and, none of the "bad" words written by either of us was any type of a derogatory remark about the other. furthermore, there was no big red banner when those words were written-no bot zapped those posts.

ERIK! doesn't the buck stop with you? don't you see how this needs to be addressed/fixed?

Daily users outnumber employees by at least 10,000 to one. No matter the mechanism, there will be downsides. At heart I agree with the censorship is telling a man he can't have steak because a baby can't chew it thing, but intellectually I understand there isn't a better way...

If there is a better way go ahead and let me know.

And sure the corporate non-words about your ban/mute are just PR blah blah blah that don't mean anything. That's how businesses operate. A carefully crafted facade of due diligence keeps you employed if you're a grunt, and keep you making money if you're further up the chain.

llama, as a fellow long time member/contributor i am surprised to read that. 

i hope my response ticks all of the boxes you mention.

back around 2010-2012, staff was involved. i have even shown in this topic how erik had a topic asking the members what they thought. as the site has grown, it seems the staff has not kept up. i, and others, have shown how the move to using bots penalizes members unfairly. and, the whole help & support forum rarely receives input from staff. i wrote about my tickets that went unanswered. STILL, nothing on that. 

as the site has grown and cc has bragged about how big they were getting, they should have made the effort to keep customer service at the same level. they have not.

the 'carefully crafted facade" as you put it is quite a thin veil that anyone with a modicum of intelligence sees through while reading. 

i know many things today are about the "now", but, the posts in this topic cover a range of issues that members have had for some time. 

I've been muted unfairly before (once by a mod who was a little nutty). I was also banned once.

Both times were post-2017 and I contacted chess.com support via e-mail and it was resolved within a few days. If they're ignoring you I don't know what to say.

Bots penalize members unfairly, but for example to be muted by the red banner thing takes a huge number, like 15 offenses, before it kicks in.

A few days ago I quoted an OP who used bad language and the bot didn't block it (I guess it doesn't work when posting from your phone or something?) But it gave me the red banner because of what the OP wrote. To show my displeasure I spelled the bad word with letters like this Ê and told chess.com to f off.

A mod removed it from my post, but didn't warn me or anything, so they seem to be pretty chill about the whole thing.

Unfortunately, I suspect the overwhelming majority of uses of "h o m o" are intended as homophobic insults; I suppose the bot could look at the subsequent word as well and figure out that "h o m o sapien" is okay, but that means the bot would have to look at twice the number of words. I think it's one of those trade offs: you eliminate or reduce the sort of unkind insults that can be made and unfortunately it picks up the much smaller percentage of non-insulting uses as well - as @llamonade2 attests, the Support team will normally just unmute you and everyone moves on. It's an inconvenience, but clearly one that Chess.com believes is worth the trade off. The number of users v the number of staff is obviously a challenge for any site growing as rapidly as this one is: and let's face it, even much bigger companies like Google and Facebook haven't figured out this comment moderation thing yet either, so clearly it's not easy to do.

Are S h i t a k e mushrooms still banned onsite? And the s h i t o r y u school of karate?  My thoughts are now so full of spaces... 

i agree that the use of certain words are insults. there is the ability to report. this also goes to the point of increasing staff as membership grows. context matters. what i have seen is disengagement that helps no members-the bots simply keep cc from having people monitoring. in other words, as cc has grown, staff has shrunk, and we are all at the discretion of the site, no matter what it is.

i completely disagree where you appear to be ok with mutes and then, when convenient, an actual staff member comes by to explain it was a bot that muted you. that is horsesh#t. we shouldn't be muted.

the comparison of cc to the other sites seems apt as cc seems to be following the same program as fb. have you ever tried to contact anyone at fb? 

   What frustrates me is that we use to have a R.I.P. thread.  Kenny Rogers passed away at 81 this week and now I have no place to post it.

It is completely impossible to monitor all live chat, forums, non-club content, and other content. The site couldn't hire enough people to cover all of that.

Blocking is an option, but a lot of people, when faced with abuse, will just leave the site and look for somewhere else to play. A filter will catch the most egregious stuff and still allow a fairly open site.

Sure, it is pretty easy to bypass filters, but they catch the most obvious abuses, and will likely deter some abuse.

Frankly, @alczervik, while my heart is with you, my impression is you're howling into the wind. You yearn for the days of old when chess.com was more of a community, or at least when letting yourself believe so was your vice. The times when Erik was a younger man whose dreams were big and bank account small. It drove him to connect with us personally on the forum, an act which was endearing precisely because it was unnecessary. These days they've moved on, both Erik and chess.com. The froums don't matter, and even if they did Erik wouldn't care, but you can't blame him for it, it's just the circumstances.

On the plus side, if someone is deliberately bypassing the filters, they can't really claim ignorance of the rules - they're just ignoring them.

They could probably put in some rules around muting: maybe premium members don't get auto-muted in this way, but maybe they could also exclude people whose accounts are more than 6 months old; maybe that's more actionable than trying to make the bots smarter.

Dunno about the karate, but shiitake mushrooms should be fine - your spelling of them, not so much ;-)

   I could be wrong but I think its shataki mushrooms. 

These days it's not even fun to feign ignorance... knowledge is microseconds away. Just google it.