July is upon us, chess fans—and you know what that means: Once again, it's time to catch up with what's been going on with Chess.com product development and community support over the last month. June kept us busy! Here's how...

• Live Chess
• Daily Chess
• Lessons
• Vote Chess
• Puzzles
• Other Stuff (Web)
• Android
• iOS
• Behind the Scenes
• Coming Soon...
• Fair Play & Sportsmanship
• Support

Live Chess

• Added an explanatory message in the chat/console when clocks are adjusting for internet lag
• Removed event announcements from Tournament chat rooms (you still see them in game chat if your Live Settings allow)
• Added sportsmanship messages for cases where a player fails to make a first move
• Added Leaderboards for Live Chess variants!

• Added Help message in game chat if we detect that a member is disconnecting (has a spotty connection)
• Added explanatory notes to "game over" message in the chat/console with a link to the FAQ on ending games for learners (for example, to help people understand rules around stalemate, insufficient material, etc.)
• Added educational note in chat/console the first time a member plays a time control that uses an increment
• Changed draw offers to appear as a toaster-style pop-up alert when you are in Focus Mode
• Linked the closing of a game of a player you are following to unfollow that player
• Added option to give your opponent more time to think!? 🎁

Daily Chess

• Improved logic of Next/Previous game buttons (mostly to remove some weird edge cases). Basically, if you have two or more games where it's your move, these arrows cycle through those games only. However, if you have one or zero games where it's your move, they step through all your current games.

Lessons

• Improved Lesson Search feature so that it now also brings back matching Course results as well as individual Lessons
• Added subtitles for Lessons (to allow international members to read along with the voice-over in the tutorial videos)
• Thanks to our Internationalization team, Lessons are now entirely available in Russian!

Vote Chess

• Removed "Finish vs Computer" feature from Vote Chess analysis mode 🐞

• Added and improved some additional filters for Vote Chess challenges (Club Size, Min Games)

  

Puzzles

• Fixed a bug that could cause strange results in Puzzle Stats for members practicing on multiple devices 🐞

Other Stuff (Web)

• Added Criticality graph to Analysis interface

• Added tool-tip to Tournament Results to clarify wins, losses and byes

• Made several design improvements with respect to Dark Mode (Themes), including making the "hover" state of buttons less blinding 😎

• Added provision to automatically activate accounts for new members who have been gifted premium memberships
• Made a number of interface fixes and improvements for Analysis in mobile web
• Added the ability to download PGN for an entire CCC event
• Created a new diagram/game viewer that can show multiple games in the same panel!

• Redesigned your Game Archive to indicate which games have been analyzed
• Modified time-stamps in Analysis to show minutes : seconds (instead of just seconds)
• Added new optional notification to indicate when a featured ChessTV show begins—see your Notification Settings
• Improved vulgarity/abuse filtering for Messages
• Improved Retry Mistakes (Analysis) to show the original move visually on hover

Android 🏗

• Work continued on the next big release, which will include new Lessons, enhanced computer analysis, new Puzzles and Puzzle Rush, Vision, and Drills!

iOS 🚒

• Released 3.8.68, a hotfix versus a crash when launching the app where the member's next lesson was a Mastery Lesson (not yet supported in iOS)
• Released 3.8.69, a hotfix versus a crash caused when parsing the PGN of certain game diagrams in articles and news
• Continued working on Mastery Lessons compatibility and other good things for an upcoming new version this month

Behind the Scenes

• Added new high-power cabinets to the data center for driving more analysis, bigger databases, and neural net engines
• Completed database upgrade, a first step in our new 100-billion game initiative
• Added new page to list current ratings/rankings for the world's best players: chess.com/ratings
• Fixed a password-cracking vulnerability! (No evidence that this was ever exploited; the security researcher who discovered the issue reported it directly to us for repair.)
• Added new caching tools that help render common pages (like the homepage) in 50–80% less time, freeing up servers to deliver other number-heavy pages more rapidly 
• Added new application compiler that reduces code downloads for most pages by 20% and is much faster, allowing us to test and deploy new code more often during the day
• Modified the Daily Seek and Master Games pages that used to be their own application code, even if it all looked like the same site. Now they use the same JavaScript as the Daily Chess section, reducing the load times and improving our ability to add features and fix bugs!

Coming Soon...

A lot of work in June went into a few exciting projects that you might not be able to see yet... but they are so close!

• Customizable user icons ("flair") and member status blurbs!
• The Platform team has been working hard on site-wide Chat—now in Beta!

Fair Play & Sportsmanship

• 63,277,535 games reviewed for Fair Play
• 2,782,440 accounts reviewed for Fair Play
• 5,157 accounts closed for Fair Play (7 Titled)
• 270,298 abuse reports received 
• 15,560 accounts muted for abuse (28,131 mute actions in total)
• 31,846 accounts closed for abuse

Support

• Average time to reply: 21 hours, 32 minutes
• Average quality (by member rating): 9.37/10
• Total ratings: 1,245

OK! That's it for this time—thank you for reading! Please share questions or thoughts in the comments, and we'll see you again in August!

⏮May 2019 ・ 🗓・July 2019 ⏭