Starting tomorrow we are hosting the European Chess Union’s Online Youth Championships. This will see over 750 of the best young players in Europe playing in a Hybrid style event.
Our work this week is mostly stabilising work to ensure the player experience for this event is as seamless as possible. However, we do have one headline feature to announce….
1. BETA Feature: Arbiter Chat function
When a player calls the arbiter, or when an arbiter pauses the clocks, a button will appear under the game for both Players and Arbiters.
Either player or the arbiter may communicate through this chat function via text chat. Both players and the arbiters will see the chat, it is not private between one player and the arbiter.
Simply type into the box provided and click Send
Take note that only a maximum of 160 characters can be used per message. A count of the number of messages in total during the game is displayed.
2. Feature: Enforce player limits on tournaments
Tournament settings has a space to input the maximum number of players in the event. This is a maximum across all divisions.
Once you enter this number, no further online entries will be accepted.
- Arbiters may still enter additional players via the pairing program
- Players that have already started an entry process may complete the process
3. Updates and improvements
- Improve TRFx import to ignore missing email addresses
- Improve TRFx import to import incorrectly formatted names correctly
- Update to correct Tournament Lobby sort order of players
- Improve clock synchronization with server
- Fixed some broken links
- New sounds in Tournament Lobby when Pairings are Published and when Round Starts
- Fix bug where clocks kept running after stalemate
- Updated the text of some welcome emails and our terms and conditions
- Removed BETA status from Online Games and set defaults to allow Play games online
WORKING ON
- Currently we are continuing work on Stability and Scalability. This means a couple of weeks without many visible feature releases, but you can be more confident that we can handle large numbers of players and a large number of events.
- We have started work on automating 3x repetition and 50-move draws.
As always, we’re keen to hear your feedback, feature requests or bug reports.
Kind regards,
DAVID CORDOVER
Founder