Useless Features

maybe if the site made an effort to check people's ages this would not be a big issue.

isn't there a chesskids site?

They have a Chesskids site but they ruin the main site for us by catering everything to kids. RIP logic 

oh, this is rich. as if, because hammer wasn't muted, he should be just fine when others are.

you are one of the few (current) mods that actually cares. but, your responses are almost always defending the site, and you know some of the moves are indefensible.

a kid that was a mod for about two months locked my frustrated topic. when i pushed him on this-in pm's-he responded that i would be muted if i contacted him again. so, i started a duplicate topic. he moved it to site feedback (so it gets less views). 

when i contacted shaun about this kid, he ignored that part of my correspondence and only replied to my mute by stating i had written the word a s s. 

when i contacted erik, he came up with the explanation that a ceo can't be responsible for everything (gee, where have we heard that before?) and that he was no longer involved in that "part" of the site. what? this was after he had participated in my first topic about site failures and even wrote there were some good suggestions.

it's quite insulting to write what they did, and what you sometimes do. the few remaining adults here have been to the rodeo.

I didn't know about that, but its not surprising. The moderation is terrible, the only good mods are MGleason and Martin. 

And as a result, the forums suck now, they're just littered with garbage. They don't even enforce their age limit and they don't care when kids spam. For example, I've been muted for sending PMs for group matches, but the kids who spam the forums don't get muted. I've basically given up on the forums because nobody aside from a few people have anything constructive to add. 

of course you don't know. the correspondence i've had with staff in the past has been via pm or email and i've been respectful keeping it private. 

now, though, the wheels have fallen off as the almighty dollar usurps any sense of community.

the age limit is something that doesn't matter. another functional change that sucks. in the end, all of our venting now seems to fall on deaf ears. 

i've said it before and i'll reiterate-this site is following the template of facebook. i've had conversations with erik and other staff in the past where they were human. now it is as if a committee needs to investigate any query. even with that, the response is likely to be a boilerplate response that does not address your concerns. 

i remember when the faq section started. i thought it to be kind of a joke, because members asked questions in these forums and they were answered by staff or other members. now it is what members are directed to. anyone ever use the 'help' function at the bottom of the page? i tried reporting someone there and was told it was automated.

Although I have no inside info, I had the feeling that @Erik had distanced himself from the day-to-day involvements and delegated all that to others.  Unfortunately those "others," at least in my personal experiences and now opinion, are severely lacking in understanding of the societal mechanics of the site, in caring about members and, really, in and feel for the chess culture beyond superficiality of the latest trends and boosting numbers.  My feeling concerning @Erik's involvement isn't due to his progressively less appearance in the forums but rather due to the obvious fact that the vision for the site has changed and that most areas (the forums being the canary) have degraded  accordingly. 

Age verification, with any precision, requires money to do, but the auto-moderation doesn't just stop kids from abuse. While it won't necessarily work for a committed abuser, it will stop a lot of heat of the moment stuff.

It starts off partially automated is you use the ? > Ask a Question option. If you click the Help link at the bottom, in the footer, it takes you to the normal FAQ/Knowledge base