Reward: Free Platinum Membership and 1 Year of Chess Mentor!

Or add an hour of mentor time to the lucky runners up :-)

I think there's a lot of civic minded helpful people in this community. I for one don't do this for reward - then its more like work.

still looking into the issue!

issue resolved! it's pretty technical, but here is the explanation:

some user data is stored in the database immediately and some is stored in a memory layer called memcached. what was happening was that these two layers were getting out of sync and overwriting each other in this particular instance because live chess and the main chess.com site are developed a little differently :) so while we originally thought it was an application error, it is not - it is a technical error on our site. thanks for your help! all those who gave serious help on this will receive some free chess mentor time!

Those sorts of bugs are so hard to track down. When you assume you're infrastructre is behaving it's hard to find the needle in the haystack.

unless your the mythbusters. lol

so, did anyone win?

The bug has existed for over a month...the problem seems to be with Fire Fox memory of last site visited...which keeps a pseudo link open.  The fix can come any number of ways, but user activity should refresh at a faster rate to provide accurate online numbers.  You have no control over browser functions, but you can alter your refresh rate to minamise the occurances.  Does this just annoy members...or skew advertising rate numbers.  Fire Fox may provide tech assistance ....I cant believe they want to tie up their servers either.  The problem was one of your last overhaul changes of the system... remove the Icon and simply re-add it.

Try this Erik....it seems to work best to have a friends-list player sign on with FF (which keeps links open), then sing off....they'll appear to remain on long after.  The refresh rate at chess.com ought to bump off inactive players.

ps..try with someone your playing also! (it's been happening over a month), I noticed it at work playing all night with people I play from work.

This will skew your online numbers and maybe agitate your advertisers if they knew!  Ask FF why their keeping their severs running at your site...maybe they'll give ya free tech help.

we have fixed the issue :)

great who won