Hey, chess fans! Last month was crazy at Chess.com—and everywhere. As our normal lives and routines were suddenly interrupted, we were fortunate to still be able share in the fun and community of chess online.

The Chess.com team kept busy with improvements and new stuff around the site! (And that's not to mention lots of work on things yet to be released. There's so much going on!) Let's see what happened in March 2020...

COVID-19 Impact & Response

The end of March saw the beginning of a huge spike in registrations and site use as the emergent pandemic forced so many people home from work and school. Our Ops team is continuing to work hard to ensure we can handle the increased load! For the time being, Puzzle Battle and club creation & management features are free. Read Erik's blog post here.

Lessons

Lessons got easier for all members to take in March! You can now choose freely, taking any lessons from the library, up to a certain number a week, based on membership level. That's in addition to any courses that are free for your membership level!

The Learn to Play Chess lessons are free for everyone. You don't even have to be logged in. Gold members also get the From Beginner to Winner lessons, and platinum members get Think Like a Chess Player as well. Not counting those, gold members can take any three lessons per week, and platinum members get five lessons per week. Basic members get one free lesson a week.

Other Stuff

• Much work went into our brand new boards, which saw a lot of beta-testing (at least in daily chess) and lots of fixes and improvements too!
• Fixed a bug in the pop-up board that shows a puzzle in your history. It was formerly showing the position before your opponent's initial move. 😳

• Also in the "coming soon" category, we've been hard at work on a new, unified Play page!
• Made the buttons in our embedded game diagrams bigger for mobile web users.
• Lots of design tweaking and coding for Club Chat, which will be released very soon!
• Daily Chess got a sunny new icon!
  
  
• To discourage some spammy behavior that was messing up Blogs, we limited posts to 3 per day for basic members and 10 per day for premium members.
• To safeguard member privacy, we are now masking email addresses everywhere in the interface.
• Added new cheat detection logic.
• Updated default member avatar to use our new pawn! But adding your own avatar would be even more fun!
• Put all settings related to chat availability (site chat, daily game chat, live game chat) all in one place, on the Privacy Settings page.
• Gave the "Countries" award a name that's more fun: Have you checked out your Passport? Play other members from around the world to add to your stamp collection!
• Fixed a sound-effect bug that happened when navigating around in a game's move list where the piece-movement sound would be heard a bit too early.
• Lots of server-side changes to help bring better, cloud-based analysis to our Android and iOS apps!
• Added a simple page to let you see and share your saved analysis games! We also made some minor improvements to the analysis interface.
  
  

Fair Play and Sportsmanship

• 94,906,279 games reviewed for fair play.
• 3,975,120 accounts reviewed for fair play.
• 9,843 accounts closed for fair play (including 7 titled players).
• 403,771 abuse reports received.
• 28,506 mute actions taken.
• 22,727 individual accounts muted.
• 22,234 accounts closed for abuse.

Member Support

• Average time to first response: 24 hrs, 20 mins
• Total support responses: 19,697.
• Average quality by member rating: 92 / 100.
• Total ratings: 2,329.

That's it for this time! As always, thank you for your attention, your time, your bug reports, and your suggestions. See you next month!

⏮ February 2020・ 🗓・April 2020 ⏭