Chess.com Month In Review: October 2019
Hello again, chess fans!
Wow, November is flying by, and we have yet to address October. Sorry for the wait.
Let's step back in time and find out what happened at Chess.com last month.
Puzzles
- Capped the Puzzle Battle Streak multiplier at 10 (for sanity!).
- Built the foundation for Puzzle Battle direct challenges. Because it's more fun when it's personal.
- Increased member exposure to new, provisionally-rated Puzzles (to grow the Puzzle collection).
Live Chess
- Team Matches now clearly display their rating requirements.
- Added play integration with DGT electronic chessboards.
Other Stuff (Web)
- Rearranged the controls on the right edge of the board, moving the resize dragger to a more natural position at bottom right.
- Added code to prevent accounts from creating too many new forum topics at once (for spam prevention).
- Added a game-over pop-up for games relayed on the Live server for major chess events.
- Created a new feature in Explorer; if you select the "My Games" database, the "View all games from this position" link will also include only your games—not "Master Games."
- Added lots of fixes and improvements to site-wide chat.
- Added a search feature to Top Players pages.
- Created option to search by theme in videos, for instance, at /videos/tactics.
- Changed the Mouse-wheel scrolling over the board to moves back/forth through the move-list.
- Added new images for use when sharing games or Achievements.
Rearranged the controls on the right edge of the board, moving the resize dragger to a more natural position at bottom right.
- Renamed the different types of Awards that you can get on the site: Medals are won in tournaments; Badges might be exchanged between players after a particular game and Cheers are just for fun.
- Added a links from Vote Chess games to the playing Clubs' Vote Chess pages.
- Added a handy way to enter a variation line if you're using arrow keys to move through a game in a chess diagram (like in an article or news post)—mouse-free.
- Added API to support Flair on iOS and Android.
- Added some new Achievements for members who've been around a while.
- Created option to see more engine lines in Analysis when you Retry Mistakes.
- Improved the performance of the Analysis interface.
- Displayed links to all Streamers' Twitch.tv channels, whether they are currently live or not.
- Worked on a rumored, brand-new member Home page...
Mobile 📱
- The Android team worked on improvements to the new v4 version of the app, tweaking performance and stability, fixing notifications, and making the app look better than ever.
- Team iOS worked on a huge new release (see November) with new Puzzle Rush time-controls, improved Chat, in-app Notification and Profile settings, better Help, and more.
Behind the Scenes
The 2019 Chess.com Meet-Up took place in Cancun, Mexico in October.
Almost the whole team (ChessKid included) gathered in "real space" for a week—to meet, play, plan and imagine the future of Chess.com together. Unforgettable!
Fair Play and Sportsmanship
- 72,429,634 games reviewed for Fair Play.
- 3,045,323 accounts reviewed for Fair Play.
- 5,263 accounts closed for Fair Play (three titled).
- 361,426 abuse reports received.
- 17,862 mute actions taken.
- 13,506 individual accounts muted.
- 31,509 accounts closed for abuse.
Member Support
- Average time to first response: 1 day, 17 hours (We were definitely slowed down by the meet-up. But still...).
- Total Support responses: 12,341.
- Average quality by member rating: 90 / 100.
- Total Ratings: 1416.
Whew! Well, that was October at Chess.com.
As always, please let us know what you think in the comments, and we'll be back soon to recap November. Thank you.
