Timestamp info in PGN downloads

Hi chess.com friends

I'm loving the new v3 site, and one feature that I think is particularly good are the "timestamps" in live chess. Really excellent!

My problem is that when I download the PGN of my games, the timestamps for each move come along too, embedded in the file text after each move, eg. "1.e4 {[%clk 0:04:59]} c5 {[%clk 0:05:03]}" and so on.

Please: can anyone tell me a way that I can download PGN files from my archive without all this timestamp info? I've tried turning off the "show timestamps" option during play but even then new games keep the timestamp info in the PGN. For better or worse, I download ALL of my chess.com games in order to store them in a separate database, so this is really important to me!

I hope someone can help.

Cheers
DM

I downloaded some games the other day and didn't really pay attention if it included the timestamps or not.  Ultimately it would be nice to toggle that off for people that don't want it. 

That said,  the DB program I use has a quick way to remove all comments and I want to say it can strip comments on import. Might be something to look into,  until an option is available here to turn it off. 

I'm not sure how feasible it is to offer both options, but I have passed this feedback along to the developers. In the meantime, as Martin said it's probably valuable to find your program's option to strip notes from a pgn. I believe they all offer that as a feature.

The way I would envision it would be a main setting that is always on or off. Then the download would query  that setting and filter out the times if they are not wanted. 

Thanks guys - I'll look for a 'bare' import option in my DB but nevertheless still hope that chess.com might think about a simple feature to toggle this on/off. Ideally, I'd like to actually play with the timestamps on yet not have them appear in the PGN. Let's see.

So I found a relatively quick way of stripping all comments from my PGN files, albeit after import to my DB. Anyway. I haven't heard anything from chess.com on this and still think it's daft. Here's hoping this can be made an option rather than the default in future.

Can you teach me how to remove the timestamps from my game PGN's please?

It annoys my coach when we go over my games.

Thank you!

I don't know what DB program blackrookwhiterook was using, but I was able to strip out the time comments using Scid vs. PC. (I would assume that Scid vs. Mac would have similar capability to do the job.)

You might try installing a copy of Scid vs. Mac to see if that will work for you: http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/index.html

Here are the steps I used in Scid vs. PC:

1) Using Scid vs. PC, open the PGN file that you downloaded from Chess.com. (File --> Open)

2) Export the game back to a new PGN file. (Tools --> Export Current Game --> Export Game to PGN)

3) Now an "Exporting" box should appear, with about 10 "Yes-No" choices. One of the choices will be "Export comments?" Choose "No" for that one, then go over the other 9 choices and pick the appropriate Yes or No for those.

4) Click "OK" in the "Exporting " box, and you'll be prompted for the Save path and file name for your new PGN file without comments.

Note: For anyone using Windows, there's a Windows command-line utility that might be a bit quicker and/or better. It's a small utility called "trim.exe", and it's one of the 51 tools in Norm Pollock's 40-H PGN Utility Suite: http://www.hoflink.com/~npollock/40H.html

Trim simply strips out all comments in a PGN file, and it also cleans up the spacing, etc.

go to your profile --> games. open the game you intend to download. it will download without timestamp from there. cheers!

The games seem to always be downloading with timestamps now, regardless of whether the clock icon is ticked.

It's a known bug and staff are aware

Will it be fixed?

It will be fixed at some point.

Any updates on this?

The automatic inclusion of timestamps in games downloaded from the archive has been fixed for a while