I'm just like you, speculating. I don't have any special insight, other than being a member for a while, reading a lot of topics some dealing with this question, and a background in IT.
It certainly is easiest to just have limits rather than worrying about load or other potential attack vectors as you mention.
It would make a lot of sense to implement it though, from a business standpoint. Maybe by limiting it to paying customers. Chess.com has always been lagging a bit behind the competition in terms of features. Personally, I've always been thinking about switching somewhere else purely because of the feature we're discussing. I guess I'm just hoping it will be implemented eventually.
It would make a lot of sense to implement it though, from a business standpoint. Maybe by limiting it to paying customers. Chess.com has always been lagging a bit behind the competition in terms of features. Personally, I've always been thinking about switching somewhere else purely because of the feature we're discussing. I guess I'm just hoping it will be implemented eventually.
We are all just guessing here. I'd guess that most people don't care about being able to download their bazillion Blitz games, because why?
It would make a lot of sense to implement it though, from a business standpoint. Maybe by limiting it to paying customers. Chess.com has always been lagging a bit behind the competition in terms of features. Personally, I've always been thinking about switching somewhere else purely because of the feature we're discussing. I guess I'm just hoping it will be implemented eventually.
We are all just guessing here. I'd guess that most people don't care about being able to download their bazillion Blitz games, because why?
Not all guesses are created equally. And why? To add to a database, obviously. There's a lot you can do to figure out your own weaknesses and analyze your performance.
I think you can just download them and them move them into your database folder, it's usually in the form of a PGN file.
How do you download them?
Bad troll.
It would make a lot of sense to implement it though, from a business standpoint. Maybe by limiting it to paying customers. Chess.com has always been lagging a bit behind the competition in terms of features. Personally, I've always been thinking about switching somewhere else purely because of the feature we're discussing. I guess I'm just hoping it will be implemented eventually.
We are all just guessing here. I'd guess that most people don't care about being able to download their bazillion Blitz games, because why?
Not all guesses are created equally. And why? To add to a database, obviously. There's a lot you can do to figure out your own weaknesses and analyze your performance.
Analyzing Blitz games is widely considered a waste of time, for good reasons.
It would make a lot of sense to implement it though, from a business standpoint. Maybe by limiting it to paying customers. Chess.com has always been lagging a bit behind the competition in terms of features. Personally, I've always been thinking about switching somewhere else purely because of the feature we're discussing. I guess I'm just hoping it will be implemented eventually.
We are all just guessing here. I'd guess that most people don't care about being able to download their bazillion Blitz games, because why?
Not all guesses are created equally. And why? To add to a database, obviously. There's a lot you can do to figure out your own weaknesses and analyze your performance.
Analyzing Blitz games is widely considered a waste of time, for good reasons.
Not only is that completely besides the point, people can analyze more than blitz games. And even in blitz games, they can extract meaningful information.
A site that doesn't have the basic resources to enable members to download their games conveniently is not a site worth paying money for.
Correct. It's not like we're talking about cheap membership prizes here... Also, if downloading a bunch of games in one go is a problem, how about the video section then? Streaming video's takes up a lot more bandwidth than downloading games totaling maybe a few megabytes. And I imagine people watch video's on chess com all the time (this corona business should have crashed chess com if 'bandwidth' was a problem - and if it's a software issue, then fix it!).
No one said the problem was bandwidth. The database query to pull all games at one time is more resource intensive (server side CPU and memory, not network) than limiting it, especially with large game archives and the possibility of people doing it a lot (lots of members with very large game archives).
I'm a premium member at chessgames_com and downloaded a bunch of Magnus Carlsen games there a few moments ago (3,278 to be exact). Took about one minute and the pgn-file was 2.4MB. Then I also downloaded 1.281 games (all of my games) in one go at Lichess_com, where I have a free membership. Took just a few seconds and this pgn-file is only 1.03MB. So, we shouldn't really be discussing this silly matter here. If chess_com would want their members to be able to download their games in one go, they could easily do it. It's not very smart to make things hard for your members when you can easily avoid it. Just my humble opinion, of course.
I'm a premium member at chessgames_com and downloaded a bunch of Magnus Carlsen games there a few moments ago (3,278 to be exact). Took about one minute and the pgn-file was 2.4MB. Then I also downloaded 1.281 games (all of my games) in one go at Lichess_com, where I have a free membership. Took just a few seconds and this pgn-file is only 1.03MB. So, we shouldn't really be discussing this silly matter here. If chess_com would want their members to be able to download their games in one go, they could easily do it. It's not very smart to make things hard for your members when you can easily avoid it. Just my humble opinion, of course.
There are millions of accounts here with hundreds of thousands of active accounts at any point in the day and probably a million active accounts, maybe more. There are members with tens of thousands of games, and around 5 million games played daily overall.
If you here was the ability to download in bulk, even if just limited to your own games, there would be members that would download every single time they had a bunch of new games.
If it wasn't limited to your own games, there would be people downloading millions of games from multiple members.
If anyone would like an official, definitive answer on why it's limited, you could always ask support. I'm pretty confident it is a resource consideration and can't really compare a few thousand games in a download to the sizes of many player's archives.
@Martin, reading your comments it would seem like downloading pgn games is some sort of a rocket science, when it's not. All chess sites have this option enabled, so should chess.com.
Somehow I was able to do this before but I cant figure out how I did it. I tried to click and drag the pgn file into a chessbase database but it didnt work. I also tried copy and paste and cut and paste but that didnt work either. There must be something else I can do since I successfully did it once before. Any suggestions? I have chessbase 8.
You can go to the Archive and download a page of your games at a time to a PGN file that can be imported. You can also download each game into a PGN or copy the PGN into your clipboard and you should be able to create a new game in Chessbase and paste from your clipboard.
How do you do that?
I actually found how to do that, but then how do you put it onto chessbase>
I actually found how to do that, but then how do you put it onto chessbase>
You should have an option to import a PGN file into your database.
Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else, this is the only reason. It simple is that. Such policy will backfire in a long run, they lost several battles in chess field already, but act the same, old habits die hard. I hope they adjust to reality and start to make better customer experience before too late.
Such function like ‘downloading all you own games in one click’ is a common feature across online chess, it could be debatable in regard of all members, but there is no single reason in regard of premium subscriptions. No single plausible reason except the one in the first sentence.
Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else, this is the only reason. It simple is that. Such policy will backfire in a long run, they lost several battles in chess field already, but act the same, old habits die hard. I hope they adjust to reality and start to make better customer experience before too late.
Such function like ‘downloading all you own games in one click’ is a common feature across online chess, it could be debatable in regard of all members, but there is no single reason in regard of premium subscriptions. No single plausible reason except the one in the first sentence.
This.
Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else, this is the only reason. It simple is that. Such policy will backfire in a long run, they lost several battles in chess field already, but act the same, old habits die hard. I hope they adjust to reality and start to make better customer experience before too late.
Such function like ‘downloading all you own games in one click’ is a common feature across online chess, it could be debatable in regard of all members, but there is no single reason in regard of premium subscriptions. No single plausible reason except the one in the first sentence.
Next conspiracy theory, please.
Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else, this is the only reason. It simple is that. Such policy will backfire in a long run, they lost several battles in chess field already, but act the same, old habits die hard. I hope they adjust to reality and start to make better customer experience before too late.
Such function like ‘downloading all you own games in one click’ is a common feature across online chess, it could be debatable in regard of all members, but there is no single reason in regard of premium subscriptions. No single plausible reason except the one in the first sentence.
Next conspiracy theory, please.
What part of this is remotely doubtful? It's a rational explanation.
Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else, this is the only reason. It simple is that. Such policy will backfire in a long run, they lost several battles in chess field already, but act the same, old habits die hard. I hope they adjust to reality and start to make better customer experience before too late.
Such function like ‘downloading all you own games in one click’ is a common feature across online chess, it could be debatable in regard of all members, but there is no single reason in regard of premium subscriptions. No single plausible reason except the one in the first sentence.
Next conspiracy theory, please.
What part of this is remotely doubtful? It's a rational explanation.
Rational thinking requires the use of evidence. Where is your evidence that "Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else"? That's just an unproven assumption. That's a superficially consistent theory without hard evidence, hence a conspiracy theory.
Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else, this is the only reason. It simple is that. Such policy will backfire in a long run, they lost several battles in chess field already, but act the same, old habits die hard. I hope they adjust to reality and start to make better customer experience before too late.
Such function like ‘downloading all you own games in one click’ is a common feature across online chess, it could be debatable in regard of all members, but there is no single reason in regard of premium subscriptions. No single plausible reason except the one in the first sentence.
Next conspiracy theory, please.
What part of this is remotely doubtful? It's a rational explanation.
Rational thinking requires the use of evidence. Where is your evidence that "Chess.com doesn’t want you to go anywhere else"? That's just an unproven assumption. That's a superficially consistent theory without hard evidence, hence a conspiracy theory.
You should check your dictionary first. Secondly, it's not an assumption, it's a hypothesis, backed up by empirical proof (other websites) and basic critical thinking.
@Martin_Stahl Complete nonsense! You would only need to download it once initially to get all your games, and then periodically to update. You make it sound like people would be downloading from the site non-stop. It's ridiculous to suggest that this is a resource usage issue in the year 2020. It's not. It's a "we don't want you analyzing your games with 3rd party software" issue.
But amazingly, it is easy to do here. The site isn't trying to prevent anyone from analyzing their games locally. No, you can't download thousands of games at once, but you can believe it's done for whatever reason you want to.
That's basically what you're doing here. Realistically speaking, it's fairly easy to set up a system where you could have your games compiled with minimal resource usage. If the issue were too many people putting up requests at the same time, there are three aspects to look at. Firstly, Chess.com only has double the amount of members active as its next competitor, which does allow downloading all your games. Secondly, how many members would be actively downloading their games at one point, 0.001%? Thirdly, if all of this was still somehow a problem, a delayed delivery similar to FB's would solve everything, ensuring that compiling would only be done when there are spare resources.
In short, whatever their reason is, it's definitely not what you are presenting. If I had to guess, they are worried about introducing possible DDoS vectors of attack if it's not programmed properly, but that's just speculation on my part.