Old Thread: IMPORTANT Change Coming to Vacation Use!

Yes, but what if you actually have to go on vacation

What do you mean?

So if this (min 1 day Vacation Time Rule) applies to Auto-Time Out Protection as well ,how would we know exactly when it will be safe to turn it off/reset, once it has been triggered since we would not know for sure when it was triggered exactly ? .. ie after 24 hrs/1 day has elapsed. (to be economical/calculative ie)

.. Will we be given info on this ?.. even for the normal Vacation Time set manually by us,else we wld hv to note/remember exactly when we turned it on .

the art of compromise in public relations has always been lost on me. the alterations to the vacation rules seem entirely fair, although the existing arrangements are also seemingly entirely fair, perhaps in business its important to cater for the whingers in order to be successful, fair notice of the intended change has been given, if the change in practice is unpopular chess.com will no doubt be keen to further refine vacation rules.

>:)

It seems when a person resumes after automatcic vacation, time starts from 24 hours, not from where it was left just before (auto) vacation.

I agree that auto-protection kicking in up to 90 minutes earlier and causing a person to lose 1 day of vacation (even though they would have played their move on time, technically) is a bug according to:

- the vacation policy description, as well as

- a reasonable interpretation of the time left that is shown (otherwise, I should really be shown the actual time left until I am placed on vacation, not the time left until I lose on time, which won't happen because of auto-protection, which I can't turn off even if I wanted to).

But the key question is what chess.com thinks about this "feature" -- if they believe it's a feature and not a bug, so it is and we get accustomed to it.  Meanwhile, I voice support for fixing that bug.

By the way, for those who don't know it or haven't noticed/inferred from observation:  the time when you are placed on vacation (via auto-protection) always happens at the same minute of the hour, and is determined as the first such time when you have less than 90 minutes left for the next game that is due.

For example, it turns me off (puts me on vacation) always at :09 (9 minutes past the hour).  This way, I can compute before it happens whether I will be placed on vacation or not -- this should help many people who wonder how much time they actually have left before they lose a day of their vacation.

Actually I got put on vacation at 9:09 too! (that's when "your games have been paused" message came)

I'm not sure if it's been pointed out, but the reason that the auto-timeout protection kicks in a little early is to ensure that you have enough time to make a move once you turn your vacation off.

There is a related bug that affected one user here some time ago, who had so many games on the go that they got into a cycle of turning vacation on, making as many moves as they could in their near-timing-out games before the timeout protection kicked in again and they had to do it all over again.  Each iteration of this left them with less and less time on their remaining games, and their timeout protection kicking in faster and faster until they got to a point where they could no longer turn their vacation off to move as they had games with zero time left.

Perhaps a solution to both of these problems would be to let users pre-move in those games in which they have zero (or near zero) time before turning their vacation back on, and then always trigger the auto-timeout protection when one of the games hits zero time.

That was me no?

Did it happen to you as well?  I know that AWARDCHESS was affected.

What do you make of the suggested fix?

The solution is you lose on time in those games, sorry. (This is not in reference to the bug that Kacparov suffers where his time runs to zero when he's on vacation.)

If you have 100 games going each with 2 minutes left and you can't make 100 moves in 2 minutes, you'll lose some games on time, even with auto-timeout protection. I don't see how it's chess.com's responsibilty to cover your rear for getting into that situation.

I'm not sure you've understood the suggestion -- Autotimeout would kick in as soon as the time on any one of your games reached zero, and a prerequesite of turning your vacation time off would be that you've made pre-moves in all of the games that have zero time left (and optionally, those with slightly more).  This way, as soon as you turn your vacation time on all of your moves would be automatically made and you would not time out.

I'm missing something.  If you have zero time left, haven't you timed out?

TheGrobe, I wasn't responding to a new suggestion, I was responding to the original problem of how to deal with the situation where a member has so many games that they can't move fast enough in them before auto protection turns on. You provide one solution -- allow them to premove. I provide another solution -- allow them to lose.

By the way, please be careful about "turn vacation on" vs. "turn vacation off". I had to re-read both your posts to determine what you meant.

"as soon as you turn your vacation time on all of your moves would be automatically made"

Do you mean "as soon as you turn your vacation time off"? That is, switch your settings so that you are no longer on vacation.

Yes -- sorry, a little sloppy there.  In each instance cited in my posts above the user is turning their vacation time off.  Every time the vacation time is turned on in the cases cited above, it is done automatically.  I'll edit them for clarity.

I had very similar problems to Awardchess. But when his time went down to 0, he didn't move and just kept his vacation on for over half a month. I found out that even thought I have 0 seconds I won't time out, just the protection would kick in every few games. Slowly, switching the vacation off dozens of times, I used to play in all my games. Now it won't be possible - every time I would lose a vacation day, losing a few weeks every time. So one of the possible solutions should be chosen.

If there is a bug that makes your time go to run to zero even when you are on vacation, yes, something needs to be fixed.

If you can't make moves in all your games that are under 90 minutes before auto-protection kicks in, you should get some kind of option to work around that. The simplest would be a setting to turn off auto-protection.

If you can't make moves in your games before your time gets to zero, that's a loss.

I am currently playing a game with a player who has supposedly gone on vacation, and it has been a few days since his last move.  However I saw he was online this morning, so I thought "great, a move coming." 

It was not to be, so I had a look at his profile, and he has 139 games On Vacation, and 7 live games.  Most of these games are less than 6 moves into the game.  It makes me wonder if he actually intends to play any of games on vacation, or is it just a ploy of some sort?

Why would anyone even start a game if they know they are already overloaded with games they have no intention of continuing with?