Danny Rensch Q&A: Ask Him A Question!

why is there not free wifi timeout protection

Yeah there are only like 10-15M "actual accounts," and of those only like what 1-2 million care about the community, and only like 100k maybe are active at a time. so 26k isnt that bad especially considering as we have o reason to care

What is the state of chess.com?

ding

There are 62 million in the Rapid leaderboards and that requires a minimum number of games over the past 90 days. There's almost certainly a lot fewer active in clubs and forums though.

Ok I must've underestimated, thanks for the facts.

Question: why is it that almost every change in the past 6 months has worsened the site? If you reversed all of the changes since March htis stiw would be a far better place.

Hello Danny, I have a couple things to say:

• Chess.Com shows blatant favoritism to titled players and those affiliated with the sight. I messaged @Trym writing half a dozen plus paragraphs of examples of this, and had this complaint passed along to the writing team. But of course, nothing happened and those that completely ignore the requirements about thumbnails, two introductory paragraphs are ignored while some write 1-2 sentences - or literally nothing - advertising their Youtube.
• @HornetCruise lost TB over writing a blog about Hitler's chess game, which Colin explicitly said was allowed. Hornet literally denounced Hitler in it, and while I agree that including an image of the man in the thumbnail was a poor decision - the fact that they revoked his TB status in addition to removing the thumbnail just appalls me. And, reportedly, a titled player made a horrible blog on the Alejandro Ramirez situation, had it deleted, and kept TB. It's possible I'm misunderstanding the latter situation, but I think the department for ensuring whether or not blogs are appropriate is failing here. https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/this-is-wrong-chess-com
• Some people have received a lot of arbitrary mutes, so I just hope you could look into that. And it would be great if membership gifting in limited forums was extended to more popular clubs, just so that they could grow like the Chess.Com community club did via this method.
• Variants need more attention, because they're introduced and Youtubers popularize them and then CC doesn't do a great of keeping them in the spotlight, and only does what I believe is a non-streamed WC for 4pc and not any of the other variants.

I apologize if I sound angry or upset. I am. The first two points are the main ones, and I have avoided mentioning any specific users because I worry that this would be received as an attempt to belittle someone to a whole stream if you responded to this, very possibly for a valid reason. Which is why I have not done so.

My question to you is pretty simple, what do you think of my grievances and would you be willing to have a conversation about this. I love this website too death and appreciate it's superiority to Lichess as well as all it's done to the game, I just am concentrating on what I perceive as issues because those are the primary things I care about rn.

In summary of my annoyingly long and goofy essay from above:

• The standards you set for being a Top Blogger are not properly being enforced with primarily titled players.
• Variants need more support, as do clubs and other parts of the social side of Chess.Com.
• Can you please PM me about this, Danny, so that we can have a conversation?

good of the community that's a good one

Also the word "i**ot" being banned is kind of ridiculous tbh, it's nor a curse word, there are situations where it's warranted

Not too well right now, to be honest. But I still appreciate the site and hope they'll actually listen and act upon our feedback instead of dismissing and defenestrating it.

I love this site, that's why I am so frustrated with how it's going down the drain

Oh, and last state of chess.com, Danny talked about wantin to have a conversation with @tournamentix about improving clubs, yet chess.com has just been destroying them at worst and ignoring them at best, and Danny reportedly never replied to this user's message like he suggested he would.

"In the last State of Chess.comshow, that he wants to know more about club difficulties. He asked the author for additional information, which he has received immediately … without any answer or other known further action until today." @tournamentix in THIS blog

Also, it's possible I'm misunderstanding it all, but one thing that was a bit concerning is Chess.Com's promotion of Opera. This website is largely made up of children, like me, so promoting a Chinese browser without alerting them of the security risks is concerning.

I believe the headquarters are in Norway, but there is still more risk to this, and tricking kids with links to downloading a new chess browser without informing them of possible dangers and the importance of this being a bizarre concept called a parental decision is just unethical to me.

And the fact that I'm literally promoting parents ability to make the decision here for their kids shows how unusual this situation is to me lol.

Wait when is danny promoting to a queen? Can a male pawn promote to one?

I think clubs are as popular as ever. However, I think the ability of basic members to make clubs has diluted everything more. A lot more clubs exist now than there used to be and some members are stretching themselves thin being in too many clubs or are just segmenting into smaller and smaller ones.

goo clubs are ot popular, several great clubs that were nice last year are dead, and there are only like 5 active good social clubs that ik of