for staff, a must read

Sir Trash Panda,..... Scroll to the very bottom of any page, jobs are listed under "Jobs".

For a company, it isn't a great idea to neglect a popular feature. One of the site's goals is to increase the reach of chess, so offering features that appeal to a while variety of players is one way to do that.

And you're neglecting the fact the site can do both. The bots are extremely popular and it would not be a good idea to stop working with those and remove staff working on them. Getting rid of those resources doesn't suddenly provide new qualified staff to work the already open positions. They apparently have resources to add staff in needed positions. They just need quality and qualified staff to work them.

The site also tracks issues and prioritizes them based on severity and impact. If it's something only posted in the forums, and not directly submitted to staff, then it's unlikely to get on any lists. Then there's things that some members may not or want done differently that won't be changed.

"And you're neglecting the fact the site can do both."

no! this topic would not exist if they could do both!

They do manage both. However, they also prioritize work for the available developers, so some things can take longer to be resolved than others. There's also the possibility that some things may never get changed as they may be working as desiged.

Here are a few suggestions to improve the dire state of the forums.

1. Abolish the Off Topic forum. It is an embarrassing pile of puerile doggie-doo. Make all forums focus only on chess topics.

2. Pre-moderate all threads. In other words, all new threads would be checked before being allowed to appear on the forums. There are not so many each day, and this would stop the wave of nonsense threads, time-wasting threads, attention-seeking threads, etc. And spam too - I regularly see threads for "Call girls in Dubai". How the eff do such threads even make it onto the forum? This is a glaring quality-control failure because the site managers are fast asleep at the wheel.

3. A lot of thread topics are repetitive (how do I get better, who is the GOAT, and so on). For improvement queries, have pinned links to various knowledge-base articles on the site. For the GOAT questions, just have one poll thread and people can vote for their favourite there.

4. Start a separate forum for books. Some of the best threads in the past were discussions about chess books. It attracted the well-read and stimulated debate about various chess ideas. At the moment, books are lumped in with chess sets, software, electronic boards and so on.

5. There are a lot of people who beg for free memberships on the forums. Some members already gift these, but CC could be more generous in this respect instead of throwing money at multi-millionaires like Carlsen, Nakamura et al. I notice that it had $100,000 to splash on its bullet championship recently, but it is notoriously stingy in other respects (moderators work for free like serfs working the boyar's land for nothing).

To tie this in with better-quality posts in the forums, CC could offer each month a diamond membership to the person who best contributes to the forums or who is otherwise deserving for various reasons.

The above points are just to be going on with. Free of charge too. 😏

Good suggestions, although I’m not with you on all of them. Clearly you’ve thought through the matter.

Some repetition is okay. Letting the site control the improvement topic would wreck much of what I’ve found enjoyable. Articles allow comments, too. But they tend to accumulate more fluff: “Good article, thanks.”

The easiest way to reduce the ads for call girls in Dubai is to severely limit the number of threads that can be created with a new account. It might be good to allow new members to post in other threads for a week or so, and with limits, but not create new threads.

//Some repetition is okay. Letting the site control the improvement topic would wreck much of what I’ve found enjoyable. //

To be sure, there is a place for improvement discussions, but there needs to be some reduction in the same old queries: "I'm rated [400/600 etc] how do I improve" has been asked and answered countless times, and the advice does not need to be done over again each time. It is quite adequate to put together boiler-plate answers to such simple queries and pin them to the forum.

Other improvement questions would still be allowed of course. It depends on the person asking. A complex improvement query would still need a thread.

What I'm getting at is that at the moment the forums are so lax that they are full of rubbish. Just to give one example: recently that guy Cheetersallover (or whatever he calls himself now) was allowed to make a series of tiresome, attention-seeking threads whining about the moderators. That should have been stopped in the beginning. But because everything is so lax here, he could get away with it. So it just encourages him (and others who notice it) to do more of the same in the future.

If the rules were tightened up and pre-moderation were introduced, that sort of dross would be nipped in the bud.

Have staff make me a mod. I might only last five minutes, but it would be a memorable five minutes...

I would make the point that the pre-moderation the site has in place is one of the main problems this thread brings out. You can be auto-muted for trying to say jacka**, mo*on, idi*t, or any number of other perfectly fine words. The list of banned words is hidden because “people will find a way around it”.

What in the heaven is wrong with finding a way around getting muted for ordinary English?

Ah, but that is auto-moderation, and as we know it is not up to the task. I'm talking about human moderation, using good judgment about what posts are allowed.

Incidentally, this would also help to put new threads in their proper place. "General Chess Discussion" in particular is a jumble of threads about various topics. It seems quite a few people use that as their default posting place and don't bother to think about the best forum for their post.

I also notice the trend of people making a self-important "Announcement" that they are not going to be on the site for a few days or a week or whatever. Why they need to start a thread for this is anyone's guess. Surely they can contact any people they know directly or edit their profile. The rest of us couldn't care less. 😐

You can't do away with "off-topic" because some people just want to talk about books, movies, the weather, and the Red Sox.

There are other sites where that can be done. And in practice, that forum is not filled with interesting discussions like you imply. It is full of counting threads, Just say Hi/Date the person above you/Plz spam here/Sneaking and so on. In other words, it has been taken over by people who post total dross.

1 I am not sure about. Even though off topic is god awful there is usually a few good posts whether it’s satirical or just helpful information that isn’t about chess. The rest is good maybe tweak point 2 a little bit and it would be good

I sapose your right......you'll get no argument from me there. ---responce to Lotus.

The important purpose of off-topic is that it serves as a place to move threads that don't belong anywhere else, such as absurd accusations of socialism because someone got blocked.

So it's a rubbish bin? Most people keep their rubbish bins out of sight, seeing as how they smell bad and look unsightly.

I have suggested that off topic threads be removed from the "Most Recent" and "Hot Topics" categories many times.

They have been, from Most Recent, for a long time now.