for staff, a must read

Yes, a free benefit game -

Play word minesweeper! See if you can post a message without detonating a word-mine!

[Minesweeper: The game features a grid of clickable squares, with hidden "mines" scattered throughout the board. The objective is to clear the board without detonating any mines ... ]

Waiting for the Barbie bot to show up, as a tie-in with the film. Oh, and Ken bot too ...

I bet the CC team are hard at work on the licensing rights issues even now.

The staff handling new bots are very likely not the same ones involved in other development work. As far as I'm aware, new bots are mostly content (art and chat) and then changing parameters for the engine along with testing. I don't believe there's much, if any, developer time involved.

There are a lot of different staff and it's possible to work on a lot of different projects at the same time.

martin, it's a matter of where the resources go. every adult here knows that.

Yes, but some responsibilities are handled by specific staff/teams and they don't work on other areas of the site. So one group can work in one area while another group works on others and both can happen in parallel.

*sigh*

i'm not talking about certain areas working on certain things. it's about the overall allocation of resources. erik, and maybe others, have decided that putting more time and money into those bots is more important than site functionality.

that is upside down. the site should function virtually without flaws before time and money are used for new 'inventions'.

They may be putting resources towards the right things, but their advertising is pushing these bots. That says more about priorities than numbers on a spreadsheet.

This seems to be happening to many products. The philosophy seems to be to quickly release bells and whistles to keep market share. Functionality is becoming unnecessary overhead.

If the team that has the bot updating under their responsibility aren't part of the regular development teams, then having them working on bots doesn't take time or resources from other work. Staff have things they work on based on position and skills and may not be able to work in other areas.

For example, the content teams don't generally do web design or back-end server development, design, or support. Different jobs, skill sets, and responsibilities.

Almost all companies, except for smaller ones, have separation of duties and parallel work being done in multiple parts of the company.

What Al is saying is that if CC did away with the bot development team altogether then the money could hire more people for support or for correcting the site's flaws.

Why would anyone care? You're obviously a shameless attention seeker.

Now this would have been a job for the autobots to look up newly created names.

But no, let's go after the low hanging fruits.

How low are those fruits hanging?!

Only an lDlOT would know. So technically I should ...

Or maybe we should just accept what accept had to say about low hanging fruit

Low-hanging fruit eventually drops off the tree and becomes a pile of rotting fruit on the ground.

There are open jobs in a lot of areas. Doesn't seem like the site would gain anything from removing staff working on bots, which happen to be a very popular feature used by a lot of members.

In February, when over a billion games were played, a little under half were against the bots. Probably would be a bad idea to not work on such a popular feature.

Back in the early 1980s, I did my history seminar paper on Jean Cauvin (John Calvin). A statement of his has long stayed with me, although I find the translation from French a bit awkward. 

“So long as opinions are counted, rather than weighed, the better part had often to be overcome by the greater.”

Popularity is not the road to truth.

Does Chess.com post those job openings on the site? I ask because I have read posts from people that claim to be working in computer programing offering solutions to issues being brought up in the forums. Maybe Chess.com should offer some of those members a chance to fill those positions.

I don't know enough about programing to determine whether or not they know what they are talking about but I'm sure someone from the sit would. If they qualify then offer a free membership and decent pay for some part-time work or hire them on full time.

People work better when they are working on something they care about. Someone combining a love of: programing + chess + forums + chess community would make a really good employee.

you seem to be ignoring the issue, so, i'll repeat it. it is about allocation of resources. cc makes a conscious effort to employ those to work on the development teams you mention, instead of using that time and money for the site to function properly.

my issue is not with any dev team, it is with those that employ them. that you think i confuse who works on what, separation of duties, etc. appears condescending, as if i (and others) are simply clueless how businesses operate. most in this topic are adults. please treat accordingly.

an example for you of resource allocation. a retail outfit near me has a team of people dedicated to improving the customer experience by posing as online customers. the goal is to eliminate any glitches online. this same team deals with customers experiencing glitches. this is a company being proactive about site bugs/issues. compare that to cc. they, instead, wait for people to tell them the issues. even you have written so. then, even when we do start topics about issues, little or nothing is done.

big difference.