Site Server Problems - Possible Solution Proposal

Sites like these are the ingenius examples of human engineering and computer science. Like, where do you even begin programming a chess site like this, where do you even begin programming stockfish??

I did a little bit of BASIC in high school, don't remember any of it, then a computer science course with Javascript in college which I did *ok* in, the final project was making a calculator and the operating code stuff was too confusing. HTML was fine but does that even really count as a programming language? The high school course though, called "digital electronics" or "digital systems design" which was a core requirement for 10th graders at Brooklyn Tech, I was really good it. Logic gates, karnaugh mapping, boolean Algebra, making digital counters with coocks and logic circuits, I was a natural at,. The hardest stuff we did was making "state machine" circuits for vending machines, forgot half of that as well though now lol.

I have a degree that focused on programming (around half the CS coursework was programming of some type) and while I can program some thing, read and debug code, etc, a large complex site and all that goes into it is a whole different level.

I also work full-time in IT but the type of work I do has a lot fewer interconnected parts than a site like this has. Interactions between the parts is as essential as anything else and lots of places for things to go wrong.

Nope. Chess.com would not even consider it seeing most players are below 1k. More players more money and it keeps them up above competing websites. Plus these new players will gradually learn to become good players, the chess community wants that, right?

What's the percentage below 1000?

Sadly I’m part of the % under 1000

You're over 1000 in puzzles so that would be fine.

Between 80-90%. Here's the Rapid distribution, which has the most players on it.

Yea that would wipe quite a good portion of the site, but also some people are on this site as a social media platform

Oh it's that much? I thought 1000 to 1200 was the average rating? Was wondering my my blitz and bullet ratings were in the 97+ percentile all the time.

Average is 647

Oh wow. Is that a measure of only active or active and inactive members?

Yea I was about to ask the same thing does it differentiate the active accounts from the inactive accounts

Where are you getting these numbers from?

Leaderboards pages are supposed to be players with a certain number of games over the last 90 days, though based on another recent post I read, it's possible that isn't 100% accurate

In September of 2020 10|0 went from blitz to rapid on site so that would have impacted numbers quite a bit, depending exactly how the stats code for that actually worked.

So April 2020 numbers are being impacted by differ pools than now.

So maybe 500 would be a better cut off. Whatever percentage of the current members doesn't strain the servers, take that amount of the highest percentage players (if this site is 20% over capacity take the top 5/6 of all players regardless of rating..etc). That's not a math error by the way, 20% over capacity means 120% capacity, so 100/120 = 5/6, just clarifying that cause some people would use that against me for weeks if I didn't lol.

I do think this would never happen, it seems cruel to remove players simply because they aren't good enough at chess

You're making some assumptions that the site is over capacity and suggesting that removing half the member base would improve things as opposed to decreasing revenue enough they have to decrease capacity as well.

Your suggestion is as likely to kill the site as help it.

Assuming the stats just kept working as before, I would expect that the changes would spread out a few months before major changes were noticed. Though regular growth could also mute the effects.

Also, the first impacts of change would be seen until October, since the change happened at the end of September.