Seriously Broken

Just played a live game on Play. In fact it's still going as I type this, but it shows in my game archive as a loss already.

On move two my opponent seemed to be taking an age - after 5 minutes I was getting suspicious.  I had a premove locked in for the next move and wondered what was taking so long and if they'd abandoned.

Both players showed full bars for connection strength - no drops at all.  After about 7.5 minutes of the game time had ticked down (in a 15|10) the message popped up saying my opponent wil auto-resign after 13 seconds - the counter ticked down to zero and still nothing. I waited. Nothing.  Opponents game timer still ticking down. Finally I opened the game archive in another tab, and the game showed as "white won" (my opponent was white).  The clock showed 4 minutes remaining in thee game and ticking as I started typing this.

It sounds like you got disconnected.

https://support.chess.com/article/213-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues

The bars measure doesn't measure the entire connection to chess.com.

Thanks for your reply.  Unfortunately that support articles is basically "blame the user". This is a chess.com bug.

It was probably a brief blip with our wifi - I usually play on a wired connection - but it's still a chess.com bug. There's no reason a game can't survive a brief connection loss, and the web client should detect it immediately and inform the player. I was sitting there for over ten minutes with no feedback to indicate either than my connection had briefly dropped (it must have been *very* brief), or that the game was over.  Much of the world have far less reliable Internet connections than I do, and the technical solution isn't very difficult.

Disclosure: I work on network programs for a living - both server side socket code, and websockets / webrtc in the browser and this is very fixable.  Looks like Play uses HTTP/1.1 websockets. The onclose event will fire pretty much instantly when a connection is dropped (I use it to detect and restablish connection when restarting server daemons)  - there's no need to leave the player sitting for 15 minutes with a connection bar and ticking timer giving false feedback that the game is active.

The popup timer that told me that my opponent was about to auto-resign must be triggered by client-side only code, as the game had ended on the server many minutes previously. All this can be fixed if chess.com point the resources at it. A great start would be a proper bug tracker/reporting tool.

Is there a client? I know that places like ICC have installed clients but I didn't think that existed on chess.com, because it is all website based. My admittedly limited understanding was that structure was why there is nothing on the players side to detect a disconnect.

At any rate, it sounds like you know what you're talking about.

They do have a bug tracking/ reporting system. (It's on the Help menu.) But in this case, I would just copy your whole post and send it to support@chess.com. They may route it to someone who can knowledgeably respond. 

It certainly has been a long term frustration for many users.

The "client" in this case is the javascript code running in the web browser.

Thanks.  I reported it via the help menu also, and sent a screenshot of the game while it was still running. Unfortunately those bug reports aren't public, so I usually make a forum post also, which might help others experiencing the same issue. It would be better if chess.com moved to a proper bug tracker/support ticket system to combine the two. That way others with the same problem could comment, know that the developers are already aware of the issue, and possibly find an answer without wasting the devs time by reporting the same issue multiple times.

I don't think that a proper bug tracker/support system here could involve the users because there are too many new/young users every day who can't be bothered to search for previous posts or even read what's in a thread before commenting.

You might be right. Unfortunately there seems to be a default assumption from chess.com support that the user is wrong or has done something stupid. And, to be fair, 90% of the time that's probably true, but not always. Some of us don't delight in complaining, and actually want to help improve the site we play on, but getting no response or a stock standard response (sometimes about a completely unrelated issue) to real bug reports is pretty frustrating.

Perhaps chess.com needs to implement xkcd 806 "Shibboleet" protocol :-)