I was very disappointed to find there was not an answer here, I really think we should be able to disable chat for kibitzing.
Chat rooms during live streaming
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May 18, 2014
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#3
I'm totally with the Genghis on this. The chatrooms during live streaming are like a school playground. It's hardly surprising there are so few women in chess when so many people seem to think that when a female chess expert appears on their screen, it is an invitation to debate her physical characteristics.
Regardless of whether the person being discussed is present, it creates a bad environment where some women are going to (correctly) think that they will be judged on their appearance rather than on their skills over the board.
I really wish that the moderators would more aggressively police this kind of behaviour.
I've been watching the US championships on chess.com and I love the way you can click on every game and follow the ones that interest you while simultaneously listening to the commentary by the GMs. The sessions have had their glitches, as do all new technologies ( see Bill Gates struggling with the "blue screen of death" here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84 ) but the part I find really distracting - while adding nothing to the championships - is the chat room.
I know that you can block annoying participants by right-clicking their names, but the constant stream of ignorant, sexist comments today was just too much to bear. I ended up covering the chat with a SCID window and analysing one of the games on a chess engine while listening to the commentary and ignoring the chat room.
What purpose does this chat window serve? There is already a lot going on. The GM commentators are going from game to game, analysing the moves at a pace that is difficult for us poor mortals to match. I am trying to follow on SCID one of the games that started with the French defence (my defence of choice right now to 1.e4 ) and the chat room is suddenly full of ignorant sexist slobs.
If the purpose of the chat room is to encourage insightful commentary from chess.com members, maybe there needs to be a 15 second delay during which a moderator can delete all comments that have nothing to do with the chess games at hand. Or maybe the comments can be relayed to an intermediary site in cyberspace with only the interesting comments being relayed back to the chat room. Something that we can cope with. But at the moment it's like watching the credits scroll by at the end of a porn movie. It's too fast to read and just as uninteresting.
I'm glad I got that off my chest.
Ghengis
@:-)---o