It's nice to be missed. Well, at least the guys over at chess.com apparently miss some of their members. From time to time, I get this email from them asking where I went. Then the email says, "we haven't seen you at Chess.com in the last 14 days and just wanted to say - we miss you!"
Oh that's nice.
I think the last time I mentioned these guys was the first time I did way back in May last year. But since then I've dropped in only a handful of times, like just before I wrote this post, for example, to make a little tweak on my profile. Other than that, there's just no reason to go - speaking for myself, of course.
The site is just a bit, too, I don't know. American. Too distant from the main action. Maybe if they can start putting some legs on the ground in the big events like those folks over ChessVibes, ChessDom and the still unbelievably old fashioned ChessBase - then maybe, just maybe, I'll type in chess.com more often. Hec, I'll even add them to my bookmarks toolbar.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I have you to thank for first alerting me to Chess.com and I've been an active member ever since you first mentioned the site.
It's a shame you don't pop in more often. I have a busy round of websites and blogs that I visit - most involving chess - but Chess.com is a firm favourite for me.
The site has grown rapidly and now has 268,000 registered members. Many of these are attracted to play chess and are then drawn towards the friendly community and the long list of extra features available - most of it free.
(Full disclosure - I'm such an active member that I now write for Chess.com. Apologies if I start to sound like an advert.)
I understand what you mean by the site feeling "American" (speaking as a Brit the mm/dd/yy date format still bugs me), but in terms of membership over 50% are from outside the US. There are over 8,000 members from Australia!
At the moment almost all content is provided by the community - a very different approach to the likes of ChessVibes and ChessDom. Those websites are great too, but in a different way. They do excellent on-the-spot reports from tournaments, but don't have the active and vocal community that Chess.com has, discussing the results and just about anything else too!
Thanks once again for mentioning the site when it started - I hope more of your readers will join and enjoy it as much as I do!
As an American, I tend to visit many sites where there is everything from mm/dd/yr to yr/dd/mm to every other thing. Common sense figures out these minor details. Also, it helps to install firefox's flag add on which tells you the orgins of the site which is a useful detail to figure these things out.
At any rate, I find most of these chess sites to be a disservice. I have found I can only follow a few of them (this blog, chessvibes, chesspub, chessgames, mig's blog, twic, uschess and a greek blog. Ironically as an American the only American site I visit is Uschess.
I find it particularly disturbing in the chess world all these stupid 'nationality' divides I see both in the articles as well as the commentator base (notably chessbase/chessdom etc). "Oh this site is American. Oh stupid Armenians. Oh my god those dumb Russians!" Whatever happened to pure civility. I always heard back when I started using the internet in the 90s the greatest thing the internet would bring was a loss of this national identity. Communities could come together instead of ruthlessly and pointlessly assault each other out of pure arrogance.
Are you watching the Women's World Championship?
only one good site
www.chesspro.ru
Post a Comment