Cup of Chess Official Blog

We are very pleased to welcome new members from the following countries:

Happy gaming!

Last night, Sunday, March 18th, we experienced an outage due to database system issues. Everything was restored this Monday morning, and Cup of Chess is fully back up for service.

We apologize and hope no one was too inconvenienced.

Mark, Cup of Chess

One of things we wanted to improve was better customer support for our members. Previously, users could send problem reports by following the link at the bottom of any page. One issue we had with this is that we did not know which user sent the report. There is now an option to include an email address (for non-members) for followups. Members do not need to fill this out as we will now track which member sent which report. This should allow us to more effectively respond to individual issues as they arrive and improve the overall quality of the site.

We are hard at work addressing some common issues such as disconnects, or issues loading the flash player. We hope to introduce an entirely new chess client that should hopefully resolve these issues that some users are experiencing. As always, stay tuned to the blog for updates!

We are proud to welcome new members from the following countries:

Welcome to Cup of Chess!

For a period of three hours, wins such as checkmates were wrongly being reported as resignations. This problem has been corrected, and the Cup of Chess team will review all games played during this period, adjusting the wins and member scores as necessary.

Our very deep apologies for this problem,

Cup of Chess Team

Update: We have finished our review of all the games we believe to be affected. We expect to update the match results over the next few hours, and correct member ratings shortly thereafter (this process may take a little more time). Again, thank you all for your patience.

Update 2: All user ratings should now be updated. We will be updating game results later on today.

Update 3: Game results have been updated.  Please email support@cupofchess.com if you still notice any aberrations.

You’ve just forked your opponent’s king and queen and victory seems certain – then all of a sudden your wireless connection is lost or your dial-up host hangs up.  We are very happy to announce that hopefully these occurences should be a thing of the past. The Cup of Chess game servers now support reconnects, meaning that if your connection should go down, your match should not.

With the latest content patch that should go live in a few minutes, Cup of Chess will allow a reasonable time for you to reconnect (which will be done automatically for you). If you are able to reestablish the connection, the match timers will be adjusted to account for the ‘timeout’, and the match will continue as normal. Being disconnected for longer than the allotted period will still result in a loss as usual.

As this is something new that we are trying, we are eager to hear any feedback that you might have. Feel free to send us email at feedback@cupofchess.com.

As you may know, every week we have been adding the country flags of new members that have joined. This week, we are very pleased to add the following flags:

Cup of Chess members now represent over 40 countries! To help celebrate, we will add all the remaining flags next week. The flags above will be added with our weekly content update.

One of the few updates that we were able to push to the site this week is a new rule that disconnection from the game server will now result in a loss. This was a tough decision to make, but was sadly deemed necessary due to continued abuse.

We are planning in the very near future to make this somewhat intelligent, by allowing a grace period for the game client to reconnect before we record the loss. We had originally hoped to push this out as well during this week’s content upgrade, but were unfortunately sidetracked by the server outage.

Update: We are just at the final stages of testing out new functionality to allow players to reconnect automatically when their connection is lost, and will be adding this at our next update. Thanks to the community for your patience while we resolve disconnect issues.

 Update 2: We will now attempt to reconnect for a reasonable period of time before determining that a user has disconnected.

It has been a terrifically long weekend for the development team here at Cup of Chess. What was shaping up for an already packed weekend made a sharp turn for the worse when our production servers suffered from hardware failures this past Friday. On top of this, one of our developers had a root canal planned on Saturday, and another was off supporting a charity event (btw: please support the great folks at ACWP). Fortunately, the surgery went well and the “To Kids from Kids” event was a wonderful show!

Despite all of the activity, our development team burned the midnight oil and managed to migrate the entire service to another production facility. We are very happy to announce that Cup of Chess is back online!

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank the community for their kind words and support via email and blog comments. We strive to build the best online chess community, and we are grateful for all the positive feedback that is continuing to shape the site.

So, see you online!

The Cup of Chess Team

Our humblest apologies. Our site went down today – we believe – early in the day on Friday January 27th.

For those that are curious – we had a hardware failure at our data center.

The Cup of Chess team also enjoys playing on the site – we hate to see the site go down.

Thank you all for your continued support and patience. We will be working hard over the weekend until we’ve resolved this current outage!

Update: We are working with our service provider to restore service. We will also be migrating the site to temporary locations to bring back chess as soon as we can. Thank you for your patience and for your support.

Update 2: We are now in the testing phase and working out minor performance issues on the backup production machines. We hope to have the service back up by the end of the day.