Multiple Logins detection code is seriously broken

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Knightly_News

The multiple-login detection/management logic is broken because it is clearly unnecessarily extremely disruptive to users, and it is quite obviously a highly preventable misguided attempt to deal with the session load problem. Why not just time-out abandoned sessions, based on time of last activity, rather than interfering (in any way) with active sessions , and particularly live chess games currently in progress?  It's extremely annoying to have unexpected dialogs popup in the middle of blitz games where every millisecond counts, when the user is not only caught off guard,  but has their essential concentration broken, where there no time to deal with anything like that on short notice.  Is that punishment for forgetting some session the user didn't log out? When your site could just handle it automatically? What is the point of it??? What does it accomplish besides making people resent chess.com?

 

Suddenly the app or browser pops up a message saying another login is detected "elsewhere" and exits from the session with the game in progress!  Highly intrusive. No obvious or quick way to re-access the disrupted game, and typically one wouldn't know how to quickly find the offending older unused session/login. It' a serious bug and or design issue. and I have lost too many games because of it, and worse, my opponents are also punished by it, thinking I bailed on the clock, when I'm a victim too, and would never deliberately bail. I always resign when my goose is cooked or I have to leave. Meanwhile Chess.com chalks-up another abandoned game against me, as though I'm intentionally doing it, when it's the site's fault. It's a horrible bug that seems unjust to everyone on multiple levels.

 

It would be much better to warn and then log out long-inactive sessions that the user might have lost track of in a sea of browser windows and tabs or an app that was left running in the background on a phone (which might be in another room or lock screen or whatever),  How many people actually remember to log out of Chess.com when they open new tabs on the browser, or start the app on the phone? Expecting busy users to track all of that is egregiously absurd. Users just open up a window or start the app start playing. They don't expect to be subjected to some draconian hard-coded abuse by some novice who probably didn't think things through. Can you imagine if Amazon.com did that? Who knows if 40 tabs ago they were playing chess? Chess.com needs a better strategy to manage that.

 

Plus it betrays your algorithms designed to thwart users who deliberately stall and abandon games, when Chess.com's own site behaviors are an unwitting contributor to the problem, or in some cases even the cause.

 

*** Another way Chess.com contributes to unintentionally abandoned games...

 

In the browser, I can resign a blitz game instantly with a click, but on the phone I am forced to deal with a confirmation step even though I want to (and try to) resign instantly. That's an inconsistency among your user interfaces, where generally a theme of consistency is sought and designed for. If you allow instant resignation in the browser, why not in the app as well?  For people like me who sometimes play dozens of blitz games in a day, requiring an extra confirmation step when resigning is nothing but an irritatingly patronizingly pointless hassle, and very prone to problems (such as inadvertently abandoned games).

 

Please add a preference or an option that, when enabled, allows resignation from live chess with a single click.  If I'm in a hurry, or distracted, sometimes I don't notice the confirmation dialog and inadvertently leave someone hanging, when I was trying to do the right thing and resign immediately, and thought I had only to come back to my phone later and see it was hanging on a confirmation prompt and the poor other guy was the victim.

 

Again, Chess.com is unintentionally making things worse for everyone through what I believe is a design flaw.

 

If you fixed those two problems I think there would be at least some perceptible % reduction in abandoned games which would offer some relief to the whole live chess community.

Knightly_News

Um, no  @morethantwentycharac you seem like part of the problem telling me if only I was pleasant about it (after enduring it far too long), I'd get good feedback. The only feedback I need is fixage - or maybe a note saying "Noted, on our list to resolve". You seem part of the BS PC squad pretending frayed diplomacy in the forums trumps the rude inconvenience to end users of nuking games with automatic session logout.

 

That @#)(*&@#$%@ just happened to me again. I was playing chess in the browser, grabbed my phone and went into another room, started playing on the app. In the middle of a 3 minute blitz game I was winning easily it told me I was logged in somewhere else, took me out of the game and offered no way on the phone to restore the game. I ran back to the computer where it was looking at the old game and took me a minute to figure out how to show the games and then I lost on time.

 

Sometimes I really hate architects and/or coders who don't know what the f' they're doing. Sorry.  Go ahead do the wrong thing; let this wretched 'logged in session' problem persist, because you don't like the messenger's tone. I guess you think that it makes ok for you to be treacherous irresponsible apathetic shirkers. Or you could just admit you're more than willing to be jerks to all the members of chess.com to piss off or slight one guy who swore at you for inconveniencing him as a multi-year premium paying member, time after time with some stupid bug you should have fixed years ago without having to be asked. Like this is really the first time this was brought to your attention or you figured out how broken that cr*p is? I seriously doubt it. Snobs. You're as bad as the 'president' 'elect'. Tired of being screwed over by ignorant arrogant jerks who abuse their power. People like that deserve all the bad karma they have coming.

 

You ivory tower technocrats, managers, admins, mods; totalitarians in a teapot, self-annointed heroes of the business world who let customers stew in your god forsaken bugs and messes are just petty little people; semi-demi-micro-autocratic would-be monarchs of bad character. You should acknowledge the issue and let us know you plan to address it instead  of wasting our time letting us suffer, while you continue to screw us over. You know who you are.  You think I'm a troll for posting inflammatory material like this? You guys, who don't acknowledge legitimate complaints are the pathetic little cubicle trolls who quasi-consciously imagine some kind of glory in passive aggressively wielding your miniscule faux power in this big world at least twice your size. Life is going to do the same thing to you for for something in your life that you have to endure that's important to you.  It doesn't matter how important it actually is, just that it's important to you. Maybe it will be more important than chess bugs. But you will still reap the kind of petty arrogant neglect you foisted day after day, year after year at your patrons and glad handing each other for the obsequious favoritism of people who kissed your derriers. Doing the wrong thing because dubious business priorities, when it's just a lame excuse and everyone knows it. Because what you do and side-step that you shouldn't has an effect that's felt in the world. And THAT is karma. And I hope you know you're *exactly* the kind of people who do that, and deserve it back in spades so that you can feel at least as miserable as the people who have to endure your crap.

 

But hey, make *me* the bad guy. I know I'm not. I know I'm speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You can comfort yourself by saying I was rude, angry and ranting because I had it up to here with your blithe impunity and nefarious negligence and therefore you're off the hook to take responsibility to do the right thing about the problems you know it is really incumbent upon you to try to fix for the benefit of your subscribers and people who count on you to make the site a decent experience for the service you provide.

pjr2468

Wow. This really annoys you huh?

blueemu

You must be a John Belushi fan. This sounds just like one of his Weekend Update rants.

 

fuzzbug

I thought "totalitarians in a teapot" was a nice touch.

Other than that, it's a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

jorma1998b

my standard time is 3m. Now I don't see it. How can i fix it. I'm a free user

notmtwain
jorma1998b wrote:

my standard time is 3m. Now I don't see it. How can i fix it. I'm a free user

Did you hit Daily Chess by mistake?

It's still there. Look again.

David

The developers don't hang out in the forums regularly. Have you tried reporting it via the Help icon, either via "Report a Bug" or "Make a Suggestion"?

I would think the confirmation of resignation on the phone interface is a good thing, because it's much easier to click on the incorrect button with your finger on a phone than it is with a mouse on a computer.

Don't you get the "multiple sessions" error on your new device as soon as you try to start Live Chess on it? I didn't think it was even possible to start a new game on a new device while you had a session open on another, so all it should do is remind you that you need to go and close whatever one you already had open. What are you doing with 40 tabs open at once anyway? I don't see how you'd find anything with that many open at once, not to mention the performance hit it must burdening your browser with.

I find it's mostly a problem if I'm in a game and while checking out my opponent's profile, I click on one of their past games, which tries to open that game in a new Live Chess tab - that's the session that says "Multiple logins detected". I just close it and go back to my game.

80sThrasher

*too long to read. BUT I agree with what I did read. Imagine in an OTB game and an official waves a flag in your face for ANY reason. It is annoying, but seriously, don't need a 10,000 essay about it. 

80sThrasher

If this is a troll effort...bravo!!!! 

Martin_Stahl

I'm pretty positive it isn't about session load and more to do with having two live views on the game at the same time.

 

So, to handle that, there are a couple of options. One is to not allow a new session at all when there is an existing one. The other is to disconnect the older one when a new login is detected. Personally, I don't know what is the better way and still prevent two active sessions.

Knightly_News

@Martin_Stahl:  Right. Most recent session touched by user should not be interfered with.  They should just terminate the other sessions/views as necessary.

 

@Caedrel: Just leave it up to the user to decide which way works best for them, your assumption is it's too easy to resign w/o confirmation, but no, you have to select it from a menu which is enough of a hassle in and of itself. People who play 1 to 3 min blitz are going game to game fast and can usually handle a fast resign option.

Just give users a preference. Make it their option as to how much handholding they have to deal with, but don't force it on them. 

 

As far as how I work, and browse that's an idiosyncrasy and just another way people do things. My own habits in that regard aren't the issue except only insofar as to indicate people will lose track of chess.com sessions in browsers and devices and the site should handle it better without destroying their games arbitrarily. Destructive actions on computers should never be undertaken precipitously, and in this case even popping a dialog up in the wrong place (middle of a game) is a destructive action.

 

Knightly_News
80sThrasher wrote:

*too long to read.

 

Wrong! It's perfect. had to be said. Grow a pear.

Knightly_News

---This reply redacted due to unintentionally duplicating a previous post--

Martin_Stahl

But if a session refreshes, for whatever reason, on a second device/tab, it may not be trivial to determine which one should have precedence.  Maybe it is easier than I'm thinking it would be. meh.png

Martin_Stahl

Maybe a popup on the new session is best, with a notification of another active session. Only fully load Live if the user clicks OK in that session and immediately disconnects the others.

Knightly_News
Martin_Stahl wrote:

But if a session refreshes, for whatever reason, on a second device/tab, it may not be trivial to determine which one should have precedence.  Maybe it is easier than I'm thinking it would be. 

 

Why would it be a problem to determine the session that the user most recently interacted with via keyboard or widgets, and give that one the highest priority to not mess with?

Martin_Stahl

Because the new logon may be the most recent interaction....

Knightly_News
Martin_Stahl wrote:

Because the new logon may be the most recent interaction....

 

No, the chess.com app and site code easily have ways to distinguish between periodic events triggering logon or other session activity vs. the user's manual interaction, right?

 

The app can certainly know whether it's taking an action based on a user's explicit activity with the GUI, and a website can similarly detect widget engagement by trapping events through javascript and convey the state through AJAX or whatever means they're using to talk to the back end, accordingly.

 

I think it is a very solvable problem and it could have been and still could be designed to work better.

Martin_Stahl

I really don't know for certain. But if a member is in live, and suddenly a new live tab/screen/connection opens, the site can't easily tell at that moment if they did it on purpose or not. Even if they had just moved in a different session there is no easy way to tell that the new session wasn't intentional.


I think reversing the detection direction would make a little more sense. Instead of defaulting to automatically allowing the "new" connection when it detects multiple sessions, it could prompt to see if the new connection is intentional. If it is, bounce the other connection, if not, don't load a new session.

Now, how well that would work on the back-end, I can't say, but seems like it would get rid of unintentional reconnect issues on forgotten devices/tabs.

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