Chess.com Month in Review: April 2020
Greetings, chess fans!
April certainly kept us—and our systems—busy! Behind the scenes, our operations specialists worked hard to keep the servers from boiling over, as COVID-19 kept site traffic higher than ever. But that wasn't all that happened. Let's review!
Web
- Lots of work last month went into a brand new, friendlier version of the index page—for when you haven't yet logged in or signed up!
- To make it easier to promote your club, we added unique Club invitation links.
- When viewing a list of Daily Matches, you can now easily see the ones you have already joined!
- Improved the aspect ratio for embedded videos on the mobile version of the website.
- Fixed a rare chessboard bug that affected castling in certain Chess960 positions.
- Added Arabic to the site's language options.
- In Analysis, you can now move around in a game without being taken away from the Game Report tab!
- We released a new Club Chat feature! We hope it helps all clubs keep organized and active! Check out the announcement here.
- We made some small improvements to ChessTV's Chat feature as well
- Site-wide Chat adds support for Dark Mode (which you can turn on in Theme Settings).
- We made a number of small improvements to the saving and sharing in Analysis.
- You can now create Live tournaments that start in as little as five minutes!
- Live challenge settings can now filter for opponent ratings to as close as +/- 25, formerly possible just on mobile apps.
- We introduced a safeguard to prevent a member from being invited to the same club multiple times.
- Added a few new Achievements—all of which are secret, so don't even ask!
- Lots of small improvements to the new Vs. Computer feature, including the ability to take back and replay moves after a game ends.
- Improved cheat detection in Live Chess as well as more aggressive auto-banning logic.
- Now download the games and results from any completed Live tournament.
- Made some changes so that moves, variations, and comments in game analysis will be more readable in both Light and Dark mode.
- Added a link to the Chess Federations page to the sidebar of all Clubs pages.
iOS
- Three releases in April! Including...
- An important fix for Apple Watch users.
- New post-game Analysis, including a guided "walk-through" of the game's Key Moments. (You can retry your mistakes as well and see how your new moves affect your Accuracy score.)
- We now fetch Puzzles for Puzzle Rush in batches to eliminate waiting.
- Now you don't need to start a Daily game to check an opening line! Explorer stands alone!... on the app's main menu, that is.
- Also on the main menu as of April... Leaderboards!
- We also added a Solution button to Puzzle training that is quicker and simpler than using the Puzzle Analysis feature
Android
- Bug fixes and small improvements
- Tons of work on version 4.1 also (...the month of May will be huge!)
Fair Play & Sportsmanship
- 103,273,839 games reviewed for fair play.
- 4,372,423 accounts reviewed for fair play.
- 12,786 accounts closed for fair play (including 39 titled players).
- 464,572 abuse reports received.
- 34,264 mute actions taken.
- 27,584 individual accounts muted.
- 63,577 accounts closed for abuse.
Member Support
- Average time to first response: 2 days, 8 hours.
- Total support responses: 28,081.
- Average quality by member rating: 93.5 / 100.
- Total ratings: 3,322.
That's it for April—and we've got some big stuff brewing for May! Until then, thanks for your attention and your feedback. See you next time!
