Useless Features

You may want that. But it isn't a smart decision if you want to keep members. Starting fresh would be pointless because:

You would lose your members

You would have to advertise and promote your website over again (which requires money)

The new website would already have to include an update to its rules and guidelines.

Laughable

Just leave if you really hate it.

Oh, I'd be gone already if I didn't have groups. 

The site is looking at some new designs.

https://www.chess.com/news/view/chesscom-redesign-contest

Wonderful, so CC is offering jobs for people to make the site look worse than it already does? 

#41 You are talking about #1? Maybe he wants to follow them but not get useless notifications?

Says nobody who doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. 

the calm approach hasn't worked for 7 years...

↑↑↑ 

The definition of success is going to be different for you than it will be for the site, most likely.  My guess is that the site has been considered a success for the most part, they just want some new design ideas and are willing to pay for it.

They're willing to pay for a worse UI but they arent willing to pay for better servers?

They can do both, though they are certainly looking for a better design....

What better design? Putting the word "forums" in two different places? 

This new group look which looks absolutely awful? 

And the new profile look which is just as bad? 

Highlighting the group who's ahead in a match when its not even over? ( Real stupid $h!t idea ) 

And thats just the recent ones, don't even get me started on the past 2 years.... 

Chess.com has ruined the UI enough. They dont need to keep f**king with it and making the site look so bad that it's unusable like chess24 is. 

instead of quoting numerous posts, i'll put most thoughts in this one response.

some of us have been pointing out site failures for years (i have about three topics on it). in the past they would at least pretend to care. today, staff could care less about any individual interaction and/or feedback. all that matters is that competitors are not mentioned. 

they simply do what they want, which results in implementations to attract kids. 

i've said it before-the site is following the template of facebook. soon, being able to contact staff will be obsolete, and everything will be in faq or you're out of luck. 

for the idiots that typically write horse$h*t like, "just leave", you can stuff it. you make it sound as if constructive feedback should be silenced (which cc is doing by not responding). also, some of us have been here for a decade or more and have developed relationships. 

what most of us have done is relegate our conversations to groups and playing most of our games on those other unmentionable sites as the kiddos flood the forums with counting topics.

They really don't care anymore. Their support team is a joke as well, I've sent so many emails from a year ago that they are messing up the UI too much instead of fixing how the site runs, they are constantly making stupid new features, etc etc and NONE of them have gotten any responses. Literally NONE of them. I also used to make a lot of forums in the Beta group complaining about the new bull$h!t they've been making, but I've given up on doing that because chess.com doesn't give a single f#@k about their members or their complaints. It's like they just think that, "Oh, we are the #1 chess site on the internet, we don't need to do jack $h!t and we can just sit on our a$$es, f#@k our members' opinion." ( Uh yeah, you wont be the "#1 chess site on the internet" if you constantly disregard your own users, the entire f#@king reason your site is where it is now ) 

Totally agreed, the interface looks like its completely catered to kids now, the green buttons for example. It just looks so bad. They also have no problems with kids acting like brats on the forums when they should be nowhere near any site with interaction until they've grown the f#@k up. Like seriously, the forums are an absolute joke now. Its just filled with kids spamming nonsense like "xyz closed their account, type F for respects" or "join my club plz." I remember back when you could actually have a good conversation on the forums about chess and now it's just kids writing pointless $h!t. 

Yup, Support Team is useless now. If they even respond, they just give you some automated bull$h!t and its unhelpful. 

Once again, totally agreed. If we didn't give a f#@k about the site, we would be gone by now. Its up to the users to give the site feedback, and the staff members are just being arrogant pricks by not responding, because they think that they dont need to do $h!t. There are always morons who say "Just leave," but they are just kids who have no f#@king clue what they're talking about. 

That is something I've done too. I'm almost never involved in public forums or anything public for that matter. It was another reason why I stopped posting on Beta forums, first of all staff does f#@k all and also kids just post "just leave" and more unhelpful BS, clearly being too delusional to see the issue. 

Lol, now thats funny. They write anonymously but tell you to msg them if you don't know who they are?! 

During the 14 years I've been here, I saw an awesome improvement during the first 6 or 8 years, then a gradual decline since then.  Too much garbage has been forced on members, the design is kindergartenish and the attitude of the staff has devolved into arrogant self-absorption.   Quality has been eschewed and substituted with fluff and annoying "features." 
But that's just my opinion.

I'm still scratching my head on that one.  
It must be a New Deal tactic.

+1