I disagree with this policy that changed the behavior since I first started playing 10 years ago. It discourages kibitzing. It was easy to block an annoying person. Sometimes I like to see what they type before resigning out of frustration or some blunder. I agree with others, that the yes/no permission is more distracting.
Just make it a toggle option in settings. like the others said, its a dumb feature if u cant toggle it off/on to auto-accept/auto-allow incoming messages from "non-friends".
As OP said, you need to 'accept' the request to chat from your opponent before you see their message, even if you've set live chat to 'Everyone'. Also the 'Chat Request' notification button is the same colour as background of chat window & can easily be missed. I guess chess dot com have added this additional roadblock to protect women players from seeing unwanted messages, unless they explicitly click to see it, or it's from their Friends but it's annoying for the rest of us & basically makes game chat useless so I've actually completed disabled all chat instead of having to see that button pop up demandingly during games. Also this anti-feature has been present since many months & probably ever since the chess boom took off...
This automatic disabling of chat is especially noxious for bughouse players who cannot get timely messages from a new partner about their game.
I dont know how many times I have finally seen the chat request, clicked it, and then noticed that our team is now losing due to a message I was not allowed to see
VERY FRUSTRATING
Just to add to the other complainers, it's very annoying. More than that, it pretty much makes in-game chat useless, as there's even no easily visible notification for such a request. The ones I did notice were by accident because I looked in the chat window; I don't even know how many there were that I didn't.