Inactive members and rankings

On the homepage of Chess.com is the announcement that soon 1 Million members have registered. I am wondering how many of those are actually active. In Blitz chess my measly rating of 1677 is sufficient for the 97 percentile. In Online chess a rating of 1290 put you right around the 50 percentile. I think it would be much more informative to only include members in the percentile rankings that have made a move in the respective category within the last 6 months (or pick your time frame). This would be similar to FIDE rankings where someone will drop off the official list if inactive for a certain period of time.

Dietmar,

Whether or not all 1 million and some members have contributed much, or played a great deal of chess recently, each and every member has helped make chess.com what is now. There have to be some less active members, because otherwise you end up with an astonishingly large group of overachieving people, or a small group of dedicated chess players that frantically post, trying to keep the site alive. No, it is equally important to have players that do NOT post at all and are only here for the occasional game of free chess. If you want to see active members, take a gander at the list of "most active members." There you will find plenty of people who are very active on chess.com, possibly topping your "measly rating." I have a Blitz rating of just over 1000, for the record. Whether or not everyone plays very often, or even does anything with their account is not important to their member status. They have supported the site in a small way just by becoming a member and doing NOTHING. While it would be interesting to see the comparison between active and inactive members, I for one would find it frankly insulting to see an enormous group of people suddenly dropped off the membership list because they weren't active enough.

Thank you,

Leo

Leo,

thank you for your comments. You misunderstood me to some extent. I have no problems with them being counted as members, as there is no way to figure out anyway whether someone is never to come back (nobody would make the effort to unregister) or whether someone just takes an extended break. But for the rankings I I would like to see some differentiation. I don't see how this can be an insult when this is common practice on the top level of chess.

Kind regards,

Dietmar

good idea, Dietmar.  Probably easily implemented too.

I would go around 65% are inactive over for a year now. Maybe something should be done about it.

Dietmar-

Please, I didn't mean any offense. I understand that those are the rules implemented in the top level of chess, but this is not the top level of chess. Chess is a hobby for me and I play for fun and to improve, not to be ranked alongside other players. Maybe you should start a group to do exactly that?

Cheers,

Leo

Leo,

I am not sure how you would even be affected by it. The only thing that would change is that an active player is now ranked at #3567 from 21234 active players rather than out of 156908 players. The number simply has more validity, that's all. It does not make you better or worse you just have a better tool to measure yourself against. If one offers statistics then they should have some meaning.

Cheers,

Dietmar

Maybe the best solution is to do as dietmar says except when irregular players return they should return to their former status[rating]

Of course, if someone resumes playing he/she should be reinstated at the last rating. The rating would never go away so if you click on a member profile you see the same info as you see now. The difference is that the rating of an inactive player would not be considered for the calculation of the percentile rankings.

  From a business standpoint I don't think Chess.com would want to publicly say how many of those "members" are inactive, it would have a negative impact on advertising revenues.  Let's just pretend they're all active for the advertisers.

  Personally I'd like to see the changes Dietmar proposes, but I also like seeing 1,000,000+ members because it might help keep membership fees lower.  Let the advertisers pick up the tab.   

Cheers to Chess.com

[COMMENT DELETED by me]

Schachgeek: I take it that the early morning hour did not help in comprehending what I wrote. Perhaps you should revisit the topic after you had some caffeine.

apparently he misread a bunch of them.  lol

Where do I find a definition of an active chess.com player?

Many people create spam accounts.

Check out user name harry potter and several of the derivations.  There's some inactive members. 

 For the sake of this thread, they aren't affecting ratings, though.

 It's not official but an active player connects to chess.com at least twice a week.

Zxb99551-

So, seeing as I connect to chess.com at LEAST once a day, what does that make me? (I'm hoping the answer won't be "pathetic" or something like that...)

-Leo

You ARE pathetic - I check in at least 3 times a day! Seriously, with the site's ability to compute thousands of ratings it should be simple enough to exclude from the percentile rankings those who are "inactive" by whatever definition without affecting their rating, no?