Chess.com moderator questions

I think these are good questions that would increase the enjoyment of playing on chess.com

1) Why isn't a user allowed more control of whom s/he plays? For example, I want to be able ti say, I don't want to play against anyone who isn't a platinum member

2) Provide more statistics. I am sure that all the player stats are already stores in SQL table of some sort. Why not expose the tables to readonly queries?

3) Provide the actual usernames that were banned, and show the game(s) that got them banned.

There are many others, but this is a great start

I often see very strange clock behavior. I am not sure what is happening, but a DOS attack on my connection is possible. Does chess.com encrypt as much as possible and the defend the integrity of the user from DOS attacks?

There were even cases in the past where the opponent could see my pre-moves somehow. It made moves that were ONLY possible if it could see my pre-move. What insurances does chess.com take to encrypt the moves back and forth?

I want to see a list of ALL players elligible to be paired with me at any given time given the rating range I select. I want to see the stats on that player. if I put my mouse over their username. And if I click, I can make my own pairing.

The #1 improvement on chess.com is to be able to control your own pairings.

1. The more filters on a random seek, the harder it's going to be to find a quick and compatible pairing.

2. Each player has a stats page that ban ge looked at to see the available data.

3. You can see that information in your archives and accounts closed are often going to be based on a collection of games, not any one specific game.

No, an attack on your connection is not possible. The clients do not directly communicate so your opponents can't get your connection details. For that to even be possible they would need to exploit the server and if they have that kind of access, they would be doing more than an occasional DDoS of a few opponents

Your packets to and from the server are SSL encrypted.

Regarding clock issues, lag, lag compensation, and potentially normal disconnects explain them

https://support.chess.com/article/423-why-did-the-clock-times-suddenly-change-the-clocks-seem-broken

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/9010617-why-can-t-i-connect-to-chess-com-when-other-sites-are-working-fine

You opponents can't see your premoves. All premoves are stored client side and each individual move is sent immediately after receipt of your opponent's last move.

Does chess.com ensure that the IP on the connection corresponds to their country of origin? I understand that proxy servers can make this comlicated, but there are list of well known proxy servers.

I want to be able to filter out playing against players whose IP doesn't match the country of origin

I want chess.com to institute captchas, so that I can say, I only want to play against players that accept and pass a captcha

Pretty confident that's not something that's going to ever be available.

However, in Live you can go to the Players tab and see all online players and could manually challenge from but you would need to check their stats manually. Currently there's no filter there for rating or premium status; not sure if there are plans to ever include that.

No, there's nothing like that and won't ever be. It's impossible to determine a country of origin of a member want to not have it shown.

Pretty confident that's not something that will never be implemented.

But these would be optional filters for users to select. If they aren't satisfied with how long it takes them to get paired, they can simply turn some filters off. Some optional filters already exist, and they are one of my favorite features on this site that Lichess doesn't have. Additional filters would be a welcome feature in my opinion.

Scouring through archives is hardly a substitute for a featured list. This would also be a welcome feature in my opinion, especially with many of the recent dramas surrounding the topic of cheating on this site.

Oh thanks to hear that!

This would be even more annoying than the confetti animations, and do almost nothing to prevent cheating.

The time to find a compatible pairing is likely the primary reason not to have stricter filters. The additional load on the servers is probably a reason to not have too many as well.

The site used to publish a list of closed accounts but stopped a long time ago. It doesn't really matter what gets published, there's always going to be some members that believe it's not enough, that there's more than there actually is, and/or the site is pushing false information.

As I said if they are optional then that isn't an issue. I can search for a 51:48 + 97 match with players +- 25 of my rating, and I'll never get paired. But then, I can just turn off those filters and get a game.

There's always going to be folks that believe that it isn't enough, but that doesn't negate the fact that many members would appreciate it as a welcome feature.

Good on @Martin_Stahl and @SoupSailor72 for fielding these questions like it's nothing XD

What is the country of origin? The country where someone was born, the country of their citizenship, the country where they currently live? Or the country indicated by the flag on here? Those can be four different things. And if they are currently travelling abroad, their IP address might be pointing to yet another country. Why does it even matter to you?