Why the forums need a community manager presence...

These forums do not have an active community manager. Live chat and Discord do.

Social media is a cost center and liability for many sites of this size, which is why it is bring retired everywhere. Even Mojang/Minecraft has outsourced most of its social media to fan wikis and elsewhere.

This forum feature is superfluous. The main menu Support function auto escalates to Jira or SNOW or whatever you're using for ITSM. This forum is a big cost center with no functional benefit. Ending it would have a negligible effect on membership revenues and would solidly boost the bottom line.

pull the plug on it. let Discord have the headaches.

Not so sure about this. Ask the kids with the paying parents. Kids get to spam unsupervised for attention that they crave while parents think they get a babysitter and the site gets the moolah.

Win win win.

Not considering the effects on society of course 

Beg to differ. Average age at Wattpad and Quotev are much younger than here. Wattpad has a larger membership. Those sites assessed their social media functions and decided they were not worth the liability risks and management headaches. they both retired threaded social media in the past year, and they haven't looked back.

This very thread is indicative of the intractable problems that come of layering social media over core operations. Superfluous. Kill it. Transfer Richard and his staff to game chat oversight.

Sawdof nailed it. Parents shell out the $$$. The kids get to spam. The site is not going to cut off a source of income. Yes, they will perform some "Look... We are monitoring the site" stuff. But obviously nothing that is going to help. It's like cigarette companies putting warnings on the packs.

Wattpad and quotev are both sites already dedicated to writing. This site is supposed be about chess and parents believe that when they sign their kids up. It's heaven for spammy kids.

The site started as a social Chess site. Can't say that public forums will always stick around but the social features are a big draw to the site.

Too hard to address from the road, so I will respond next week, but I think perhaps since you decided just this week that you plan to bail on the forums, that suddenly they have no perceived value and should be shut down.

The developer cost on this type of forum is minimal, and the infrastructure for the server given the low numbers of active users is also minimal, but I will go more into that later.

Discord, having been in the news due to Charlie Kirk, is also a more immediate liability risk at present.

we'll see. management has to be taking a hard look at OpEx. There's game chat for the kids. (A cesspool that desperately needs attention.) And direct messaging, though that feature is no doubt an even bigger liability risk than this feature. DMs should be unplugged first.

The children... think of the children.... I am. And the company's lawyers are, too, no doubt.

The kids are all on OTF. Along with a few scruffy old cranks on soapboxes. Who's on this thread pleading for more duct tape on this feature? not the kids. they'd miss it for five minutes at most.

Anyone under 13 isn't supposed to be here without parental approval and monitoring.

As it comes from the User Agreement children under 13 are not allowed to use chess.com at all but nobody cares

Yes Mr. Stahl, acknowledged. But aren't Americans kids into their mid-twenties? Surely 13-year olds qualify.

Look maybe it won't happen. But management has to be looking at it. No way they're not. off topic forums are shutting down all over the Web. Needless hassle, easily outsourced.

Discord has many challenges. But Discord's problems are Discord's problems. Outsource the headaches, and focus on the core product.

this would improve the balance sheet, not harm it. the kids opening "kiss the kid above you" threads aren't doing it on diamond memberships. well, maybe some 'rents use this place as a babysitter. Still, best to unplug it. tell the three parents who complain that chess dot com is being made safer.

Martin we all know that the under 13 thing is not enforced and incredibly easy to get around.

There's an enforcement process when those accounts are found.

I have no doubt about that Martin. I'm just saying that it's not enforced. And as you said: "when those accounts are found.". When all it takes is "Click Yes if you're over 13" is not an effective way to enfirce a site rule. But I get it.

good morning and sorry to kick sand on the beach party. haven't been here long and i enjoy some of the people on this thread. Columbo, Sawdof Bunny, Mr. Stahl. (Martin my puzzles are back to 1793! Thx for your advice.) but the hypocrisy on this very thread is egregious. several friends have left the forums silently. i'm kind of a mouthy b---- in case it isn't obvious. :).

maybe management won't unplug but that's my prediction. see you around

This forum is far from a "big cost center". It's 2005 technology, much closer to a classic PHP + MySQL bulletin-board architecture. It might even still be running on a single server. It's almost completely decoupled from the rest of chess.com's infrastructure, and the game editor embedded is the probably the most work they had to put in, but they needed to do that work for the analysis board anyway, so it's not a big additional maintenance load. The editor is TinyMCE and the base forum software is probably extended from some open source solution (maybe not PHP, because chess.com seems to have been big on Java at one point, but could be).