Embedding chess.com viewer in blogs doesn't work anymore

https://www.davidsmerdon.com/?p=2133

https://schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/2024/07/de-sterktelijst-deel-3.html

The chess.com viewer suddenly stopped working on external blogs with the embedded code. I hope it can be fixed as I am using this service a lot.

You should use the bug reporting tool to let the developers know.

Thanks I've reported it yesterday via the tool. I hope it is just a maintenance update and not something permanent so waiting for their feedback.

Back online, thanks !

The viewer is again offline for some days. It would be nice if somebody can share what is going on.

The viewer is not giving a proper display of the board. That is ongoing for several days already.

That is the third time in one month that visitors can't for several days/ week read my blogarticles.

I am considering to move more than 1000 games to another viewer despite it will be a time-consuming and painstaking process. Anyway thanks for the work as it is afterall a free service.

Do they display properly if you use a Chess.com blog?

I am just curious if some change made by chess.com broke lots of blogs hosted by Chess.com.

Yes using the chess.com blog is working fine. So it could be that the decision was made to stop supporting non chess.com blogs. This hasn't been announced anywhere but such negative messages are not always publicly done as it generates bad publicity.

No change, still not working in an acceptable format. Chessbase, Chesstempo, Lichess have a working alternative. Which one is best and do you know others?

The viewer was 1,5 months working fine but now already 2 weeks broken again. This time moves and annotations disappear. I guess very few people use this great tool as such regular long failures would otherwise be much quicker noticed.

Yeah, the embed game / puzzle widget is broken again. I rely on the widget to display puzzles and games on my blog. Very frustrating. I'm a paying customer so I feel some right to be annoyed this has happened numerous times over the last three months or so.

Chess.com puts a lot of effort into creating and marketing silly bots. Then screw up the basics like regression-testing the embedded game viewer in QA before deploying updates to Prod.

Thanks for the moral support.

I have triggered the chess.com-supportteam already 3 times but I am not a paying customer.

I am next week playing in Serbia the European teamchampionship. If the chess.com-viewer is still broken after the tournament then I will move my blog to something else. I haven't decided which alternative yet so I am open for any advice.

I don't believe that's the case. Chess.com includes a Share button in every game on which they report. This button opens a pop-up dialog where an embedding option is prominently displayed. In addition, chess.com includes the Share / Embed option in your completed games, the analysis board, blog editor, etc. It's a high-visibility feature.

See the screenshot below that shows the game viewer causing an error on a News article reporting on the U.S. Championship tournament. I doubt chess.com intends to fail in such a visible place. In addition, I think chess.com would like people to share games their reporters post on the News page because...

Chess.com has an important business reason to enable embedding their game viewer in external websites: The game viewer includes a Play Chess at Chess.com link (and the Analysis button) that brings traffic to their website, most certainly increasing membership and paying subscribers.
No, I think this problem is caused by chess.com lacking necessary quality control gates to prevent buggy code from being deployed to their Production servers. And, apparently, lacking reserve engineering capacity so an Engineering Manager can pull engineers off feature development work to focus on "meteors"- unplanned work that is now hurtling at them because the team broke Prod and many customers are adversely affected.

I understand chess.com is growing fast and this stress creates engineering and project management challenges. I get it- I'm a Software Architect myself. However, repeatedly breaking their game viewer widget indicates their engineering practices are less mature than is required of a website with 100 million members. This problem needs attention.

It is not easy to find non chess.com-sites which use the chess.com viewer. I would even say that is very rare to find an active site like my blog which uses the chess.com-viewer.

I fully agree that the embedding option is prominently displayed. However I doubt it is used a lot which is something you can even see in your picture. Frame-id = 12288711 so less than 1 game stored per 10 users over +10 years that this feature is available.

Chess.com doesn't like sharing trafficfigures but I wouldn't be surprised that this particular feature is not profitable to maintain.

Beside myself, you are the first one I hear asking for a fix.

Looks like the issue has been fixed now.

Yes everything back working. Thanks

There is now again the problem with the privacy questions popping up dozen of times. The blog behaves very weird due to it and it disturbs many readers.