Has chess.com still not brought back the option to download all games?

Has chess.com still not brought back the option to download all games?

I read here that it was removed from it some time back

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/help-support/download-all-games-in-a-pgn

Sadly it doesn't seem so.

Guess they will make it difficult for people to leave for another site, but in reality they are making life difficult for their paying costumers. 

It has nothing to do with lock-in. You still can get every game and there are ways to programmatically grab games through the API. Limiting it to a page at a time is primarily performance mitigation.

Computers can maybe offer a page at a time , not necessarily to reduce server load, but to make it easier to see(for example many forums offer e.g. viewing 20 or 50 or 100 on a page),, but either way, how many games are shown at a time on an individual webpage, is independent of a download all option.

There are people with tens of thousands of games, some with more. Allowing a download all option absolutely has performance consideration from a server side perspective, especially with the number of members.

For someone like you, with just over 300 games, it may not have a performance hit to download all games, but that isn't true of everyone.

@Martin_Stahl

a PGN file is a text file.  And we are in 2020.  The amount of bandwidth required for a member to download.   52 games is 28KB.  .  So 5200 games is 2800KB  that's 2.8MB

A PGN file is a text file. If you are telling me that a 3MB file is going to pull down a server,.. No.

Even with technology where it was 20 years ago., that would not be the case!

Go to LIVE on Chess TV (A feature of the site), I can assure you that's sending more than a few megabytes.   I don't know how long they do that LIVE broadcast for, I just looked at it now and it's playing so probbably a long time,  but that'd probably run into not just hundreds of megabytes, but Gigabytes even per person that watches. And you think a few megabytes would break a server? in 2020?   Not even in the 1990s.  Streaming video would probably break a server in the 1990s or early 2000s though!

People often go to some websites and download files  of hundreds of megabytes. And you think a few megabytes from time to time is going to be a bandwidth problem?

And if we pretend for a moment that there was a bandwidth issue with downloading a few MB, in 2020, then let the download go at late 1990s speed. Even back then a few megabytes would be a very quick download.  A long video would have to be downloaded overnight but a file of a few megabytes was nothing even in the late 1990s.  If the file size of a few megabytes is too big then compress it and it'd even fit on a  1.44MB floppy disk.   To pretend that it'd cause a bandwidth problem now or any time in the last 20 years or even late 1990s, is too absurd. (and possibly even before the late 1990s but I don't think we have to go back that far to see this).

So maybe you think the 10s of thousands of games guy's file is too big. So his file is maybe 30MB. So let him download it at some ridiculously slow speed. If that were true, which would be a joke.  But it's still possible to make it downloadable. 

I didn't say anything about bandwidth. Games are stored in a database. The database stores all the games, of every player (though I guess there may be separate databases for different game types such as Daily and Live).

So, requesting all the games for a member has to query the database to pull all those records. I don't know the size of that database, but it's probably significant (in the tens or hundreds of billions of records at the very least) and it's very possible data has to be joined from multiple tables as well. While there are optimizations, full archive downloads do have performance considerations. Apparently the site didn't want archive downloads to cause issues and the solution was to require smaller queries.

As to the TV section, that is hosted on Twitch and doesn't impact bandwidth to and from the site. The clients load the streams directly from Twitch.

A lot of post by the Mod on this thread and other threads most stinky stuff.

The Mods and chess.com make this site less then desirable. *** offers a free 30 day membership and then you pay or go to che**.com

Well, he's just the messenger and he has given a technical reason so kudos for that.. if one differs then one should take issue with the details of what has been said..  

Joins of tables tends to be for columns, I don't think it's for PGN style data. And I don't think a few Megabytes for a person is a big dataset.     If it were really intensive on database resources, then  maybe it's an issue with the design of the database?!