Eugene O.

I have played hundreds of games of chess on Chess.com since I became a member in 2015. Here is my assessment of the website.

Plusses. The site is available almost one hundred percent of the time. Making moves is easy, either by dragging and dropping a piece on a square, or by clicking on a piece's source and destination squares. The appearance of the chess board and pieces can be easily customized. With millions of members online at almost any time of the day or night, an opponent can quickly be found, with filtering options, such as by an opponent's range of rating and number of games played.

Chess.com takes cheating very seriously. Games are not proctored, however, Chess.com continuously monitors and analyzes every player's move. If a player makes a series of moves consistent with a much higher skill rating than a player's past performance, his or her account could be closed for violating the fair play agreement all members are expected to honor. The cheating detection software allows for fluctuations in performance, so you do not need to worry about having your account closed because you found a brilliant move or had a single great game.

Minuses. Technical support could be better. There is a straightforward way to submit a bug report, but there is no published service level agreement, setting an expectation for how soon technical support will investigate and respond. In my experience, technical support has not responded to some bug reports a week after they were submitted. When a technical support person does respond, the response is sometimes not particularly helpful, either indicating they did not try to understand what was said in the bug report, or pushing back, telling the customer to avoid interacting with the site in a way that triggers the bug. Or the technician explains how to follow a work-around without ever implementing a fix to the bug.

For daily chess games, games allowing one to fourteen days between moves, the user can view all his or her games at one time, presented as either a list or grid view. If a user then clicks on a game, they can then make a move in that game, or click on a button to go the next game. The next game button works fine if you are waiting on all your opponents to make a move. If, however, you must make a move in one or more of your games, the next game button only takes you to the next game requiring your move. This is an undesirable behavior, and it has been occurring for years. Is there any quality control person, or someone in management, who tries to use the website like a regular user, so these kinds of issues could be discovered and fixed?