whats the difference between a moderator and staff??

why don't they just make it one symbol? like rainbow chess pawn

Mods are volunteers.

but aren't staff volunteers too

Not AFAIK. I could be wrong, though.

Most staff are paid employees of Chess.com. I think there might be some, based on comments made in previous posts, that have done paid work in the past, are not current employees, but have kept access as staff.

11507 wrote:

then we could all volenteer and become a Moderator right?

If you volunteer to become President of the United States, do you automatically get the job?

I thought it was a bit more complicated than that.

Mods are like the student hall monitors at school.

There are requirements

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/the-chess-community-needs-you

There's nothing wrong with ratings. The site uses the Glicko rating system and it does what it's designed to do. The only people getting or losing 100 rating after games are those with uncertain ratings for to few games in a rating pool or large gaps in play.

It's a way to get players to an appropriate level quickly. Higher strength players, for the most part, don't want to slog through a bunch of lower rated players to get challenging games

Most lower strength players don't want to get constantly destroyed as their rating drops if they chose an initial strength that was higher than their actual level for the pool.

The Glicko rating system helps move players to where they should be, relatively quickly, regardless of the initial starting strength chosen. That gives them fewer games where they are completely mismatched.

You suggested "+10 for a win, -5 for a loss" - that's obviously not going to work, since every single game that is played inflates the rating pool, but let's pretend for a moment that the suggestion was +10 for a win / -10 for a loss.

Suppose a new player picks 1500 as his starting rating, not knowing just how strong the opposition really is. If his actual playing strength is really only 300, how many games in a row will he have to LOSE before his rating drops to its actual value and he starts getting paired against people that he has a decent chance of beating?

One hundred and twenty losses in a row, at -10 points each, before he drops to 300?

How many people will stick with the game after losing a hundred games in a row?

Your suggestion is poorly thought out. Especially since you actually suggested more points added for a win than subtracted for a loss, which would gradually TANK the entire rating system.

agreed I climbed way too fast by gaining way too many points for a win initially. it makes no sense to have the first few games be worth hundreds of rating points.

And the secret handshake. They never tell you about the secret handshake ...