Unjustified charges for premium accounts.

100% agreed.

The thing I really don't like about chess.com is that artificial scarcity approach - game reviews are free on others sites, and if you wanna do puzzles, chesstempo is miles beyond chess.com in terms of UI & insights. That, plus the frequent server overloads, doesn't really entice me to go premium...

IMO, the only thing chess.com has, besides its larger user base, are the lessons : charge for those, but let people enjoy basic features for free (especially game reviews and profile insights).

you can use schoolschoolschool.com if the main websites lags

They are not different websites, just different URLs. The hit the exact same servers.

The Basic review is lower strength but still utilizes the same resources used and basic members dwarf the number of premium ones. Having unlimited reviews for everyone would incur a very large cost in hardware. It's also one of the primary premium features members upgrade for.

The puzzle system is using resources as well to generate good puzzles from the games played. There's are staff resources spent on designing and coding systems to make that better and automatically theme puzzles.

A subscription based site requires ways to differentiate features. Puzzles (along with Rush and Battle) and Review are two of the most popular features as far as I'm aware and some of the bigger drivers of premium subscriptions.

Yeah, well... You could always offer the option to have it run locally, even if it takes more time to process, I certainly wouldn't mind...
I mean, you already have ads - given the number of users, those must be bringing substantial revenue... I seriously doubt offering a free local review system would have that big of an impact. As you pointed out, premium members are a minority, so clearly charging for unlimited reviews isn't the main source of money, is it ?

I'm guessing it will never be ran locally for a couple of reasons. Review results are tuned to Stockfish 16 NNUE which would either require running that engine client side or the site to tune results to a different engine. Running locally also would expose the review code source.

Regarding ads, I know historically that @erik has posted in the forums that the revenue from them Is not insignificant but that premium memberships are still the bulk of the site's revenue.

They could still raise the baseline to like 10/20 instead of 1/5. I would have still signed up for premium in that case to have unlimited.

Well, I wasn't asking that much, but I like the way you think. Thanks for the feedback, mate.

Amen to that.

I'm glad there are people like you here. Thanks for the feedback.

Oh Martin, come on. Let's cut up the manure, here. You and I and most of us know that AI can generate puzzles automatically. You don't need to pay a staff for that. Maybe just one guy to do that and supervise it.

I don't get it, though...

Analysis are free and unlimited; I assume that the analysis itself is the most resource intensive process when doing a review ? I fail to see why unlimited reviews would cause a hardware cost increase. Plus, there's always the option to run free reviews at a lower engine depth ?

There are automated processes that identify puzzles in games played here (and likely from OTB events). That code requires development resources to create, modify, maintain, and test/QA.

The site is also coding processes to automatically theme those puzzles and go through existing puzzles to fix themes. There are also staff that handle reports of bad puzzles to either modify or remove them from rotation. If bad puzzles get generated automatically, then developers need to find why they are being selected and write code to eliminate new ones in the same vein.

It takes resources to run a site and provide content. Chess.com has chosen the subscription method to run the site and if they felt that changing the benefits on basic accounts would keep the site sustainable and grow then they would do it

That said, if it's so easy to do, you can use the Public API to get games from your or other member archives and generate puzzles from them

Analysis is ran local to your client and doesn't use site resources, other than the UI code, especially if you're using Stockfish. There are site development resources in the Komodo and Torch engines but those still run client side.

As to lower depth reviews, that's already done but as you increase the number of free reviews the amount of processing increases as well and has associated hardware costs.

Now I can't even skip puzzles. Used to be able to refresh when a theme came up I didn't like and get a new one...not anymore lol. I have that same stupid puzzle on my homepage that I cannot figure out and have absolutely no interest in. It seems checking what themes you want before a puzzle does not work at all.

Skipping puzzles isn't supposed to be possible.

I meant normally when you log out and log back in the posted puzzle is new, it's random. If I don't want to do 3 move forks for the 15,000th time what's wrong with that? Why are we now stuck with the exact same ones. And I'm beginning to think the one on my screen is flawed, been occasionally looking at it for months now and cannot for the life of me find the theme or the best move.

I was always complaining about the ability to simply skip puzzles. I'm glad they fixed that.

I didn't skip for the easy ones. I skipped cause I wanted certain themes. That actually costed me alot of rating points but I liked those puzzles better. Or I would not feel like figuring out the one I wanted to skip so I would make a random move instead of trying. I'd rather do a hard but interesting multiple pawns on the 7th rank puzzle or some 5 move forced mate with an insane move mixed in there, than yet another easy to moderate simple tactic. I was looking for the hardest Endgame ones even with getting 80% of them wrong.

Yes. Thanks for the feedback.