Chess.com Month In Review: July 2019

Hey chess lovers! It's time again to look back at the month that was.

As always, the product-development team kept things humming with new features, bug fixes, improvements and new releases. The operations, fair play, and support teams made the site faster, more stable, safer and more fun!

Let's dive in and look back at what made July 2019 great.

Live Chess

• The low time warning sound is now optional (see your live chess settings).
• The time warning now occurs only once per game for each player. (Time controls with intervals once made multiple warnings possible.)
• The follow feature is now a bit less intrusive when someone you follow starts a new game (games open in the background if you're doing something).
• Improved the game share feature for live games in your game archive.
• Added an exciting new 24-hour marathon arena event every Saturday! 

Daily Chess

• The challenge details screen has better support for challenge links (challenge anyone by sending a URL).

Game Analysis

• Engine lines (displaying 1-5 lines of visible engine analysis) now off by default.
• Made the evaluation graph clearer by removing move-quality glyphs; now they show on hover, with color-to-move and the numeric evaluation too!
• Analysis will now display the time graph for games imported via PGN (if the PGN includes time-stamps).
• Improved scale of the time graph to avoid values topping out.

• Analysis will now prepend the conventional opening moves for thematic games that started from a specific opening position.
• Simplified the analysis UI, especially for games with no game report generated.
• Certain game data on info tab is no longer editable (bug fix).
• The details tab now describes how the game ended (resignation, time-out, etc.).
• Improved sharing an analysis via permalink .

Puzzles

• Fixed a bug that caused the final puzzle in a Puzzle Rush to be displayed as failed if you timed out.

Clubs

• Club coordinators can now send and accept match challenges.
• You can now send a live match challenge even if the other team has no admin member online. They will get the challenge when they log in!
• Improved visibility on club coordinators in the sidebar.
• Added a link to leagues in the sidebar.
• Added link to club leaderboard in the sidebar (if club is configured to play matches).
• Consolidated "members" and "manage members" features in the sidebar.
• When you create a match challenge, you will see that challenge (instead of being dropped unceremoniously on the main clubs page).
• Moved disable club from club settings to profile settings (already admin-restricted).
• Also changed "club settings" to "alert settings" Clearly clearer!
• Now only club owners can disable clubs (Sorry, super-admins).
• Made minor improvements to leaderboards.
• When members are given a role in a club, they now get a notification.

Other Stuff (Web)

• If you change opponent rating preferences while sending a daily chess challenge, those values will be remembered next time (bug fix).
• Opening moves are now displayed orange in the Computer Chess Championship (CCC).
• Large articles (and news) use less memory (mostly because of changes made to embedded game viewers).
• System messages are now nicely sized and animated. (These are the messages shown at the top of the screen to confirm something happened, describe an error, etc.)
• Relevant pages related to daily chess, analysis, puzzles and explorer features have been updated so that focus is on the move-list when the page loads: Navigate moves with arrow keys without needing to click.)
• Fixed minor bugs in the list (or grid) of current daily chess games (e.g. player ratings went missing briefly!)
• Added vulgarity checking to some places it was lacking, including the location and name fields of the member profile page.
• Many UI and SEO tweaks to the new top player pages .

• You can now get notifications on your mobile device when a featured ChessTV broadcast begins (see your notification settings).
• Site-wide chat goes beta!
• In chat, we no longer close the emoji menu every time one is selected.
• A few more cosmetic tweaks here and there for dark mode (see your theme settings).
• Fixed some issues with the visibility of board controls (near the top right corner of the board).
• Added the ability to make Puzzle Rush unlimited for all members (and used it once—for International Chess Day!)
• Added the ability to grab a permalink to a specific comment.

• On the tournaments page, you can filter out tournaments where you've been eliminated on the "current" panel.
• You can download all games from a multi-game viewer (in Articles or News, etc.) as a single PGN.
• Lessons you've completed are now marked visibly in the results.
• Added FIDE/USCF player rating (from member profile) to our public API.

Behind the Scenes

• Developed a new tool to query performance on multiple servers in near real time, to help make things fast and efficient with less hardware.
• A brand new AWS system is being born, where application code defines its own infrastructure needs, and the infrastructure is deployed when we deploy the code.
• CEAC, the Analysis engine swarm (it actually stands for "Computer Engine Analysis in the Cloud"), saw 100% uptime in July!
• Fixed and improved auto-muting of spammer accounts, and spoiled the party for some ambitious spammers.
• Launched a new Bug Bounty program!

Android

• Continued development of the forthcoming V4 version. So close!

iOS

• Added support for mastery lessons.
• Main lessons curriculum can now be taken in Spanish and Russian. (We're currently working on French, Portuguese, and others!)
• Computer games now allow use of both the opening explorer and post-game analysis.
• Recent puzzles were added to let members view their history (in rated, learning, and Puzzle Rush).
• Select multiple themes to practice against in puzzles learning mode.

Fair Play and Sportsmanship

• 63,277,535 games reviewed for fair play.
• 2,782,440 accounts reviewed for fair play.
• 6499 accounts closed for fair play (4 titled).
• 178,797 abuse reports received.
• 28,131 accounts muted for abuse.
• 31,846 accounts closed for abuse.

Support

• Average time to reply: 22 hours, 28 minutes.
• Average quality (by member rating): 9.19 / 10.
• Total ratings: 1465.

That's it for this month! Thanks so much for reading, and for the feedback that helps guide our efforts! See you in September (to talk about August, of course)!

⏮June 2019 ・ 🗓・August 2019 ⏭