Cup of Chess Official Blog

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.

At the end of every week, we will continue to include country flags from new members. This week, we are excited to announce addition of the following flags:

To all the new members from these countries, welcome!

In the past, users currently playing a game may occasionally lose their internet connection. This may happen for a number of reasons – dialup internet failed, wireless signal lost, etc. Sadly, we didn’t deal with this occurence very well in the past. We won’t bore you with the details, but the end result is that the player still connected to the game server will not get notified that their opponent has dropped off. Instead, they will just see their opponent’s timer endlessly count down (and when that timer hits zero, they do not get credit for winning the game). In our next content patch, we have corrected this problem and players will always be informed if their opponent has lost their internet connection – so they don’t have to stare confusingly at a slowly decreasing timer for 10 minutes!

Since losing your internet connection is really not your fault, you will not lose the match when this occurs, and therefore your rating will not change.

Update: Sadly, since this was still being abused, we made the hard decision to treat disconnects as losses. We are planning in the very near future to do this somewhat intelligently, by attempting to reconnect during a short period of time. This was in the plans for this week’s content update, but the unexpected server outages caused us to spend development time on that instead.

As requested by many of you, we have implemented a new rule when you leave a chess match by closing your browser, navigating away, or refreshing the page to find another opponent. Previously, the game would end with no penalty to the player that left the match. This was used by some players to leave a game they were losing without incurring any penalty.

In order to make this more fair for all players involved, leaving the match in the manners described above will now cause the leaving player to resign (and therefore lose the match) if they have already made three or more moves. If the player has not made their third move yet, then they can leave the game without penalty. This will allow the player to “decline” the game without resigning. Of course, after three moves have been made the user will be warned that a resignation will occur when they attempt to leave the page (and naturally be given the opportunity to stay on the page).

This rule is now in affect on our game servers.

Another week has passed and we have gained members from 15 new countries! Without further ado, here are the flags that we will be rolling out this week:

We hope to roll out more flags next week!

This week we are very excited about rolling out a new feature that we have been eyeing for some time – correspondence matches. A correspondence match in modern times essentially means chess by email. Instead of playing live, after you make a move your opponent is notified by email, and they can then make their move at their leisure.

As fitting our philosophy, correspondence chess will always be open and free to both guests and members. Members will enjoy the additional benefit of being able to advertise matches and send match invitations to their friends over email. They will also be able to limit how many incomming invites they get – so they don’t have to fend off 50 friends all wanting to play!

As with every feature that interacts with email, Cup of Chess remains committed to protecting privacy, and towards that purpose we will never use, reference, sell, or even store emails associated with correspondence chess for any other purpose other than sending you move notifications.

Correspondence chess will be rolled out with this week’s features, so look for it on your home page (for members) or the front page of the site (for guests) soon.

We have exciting plans to grow this feature and it takes a lot of self control to not divulge all the new ideas that will soon make it to the site. So check back here for updates on this, and other features we will be adding to Cup of Chess.

As a highly requested feature, we will soon be rolling out country flags that will display a member’s country of origin. When you play a match, you will then be able to see which part of the world your competitor hails from.

During our beta period, we thought it would be fun to add new flags for all the countries that are currently represented by our members. Every week we will then roll out new flags for all the new countries from members that just joined. Before we exit beta, we’ll be sure to add all the world’s flags.

In this spirit, we will be adding the following flags this week:

Don’t see your country’s flag? Join Cup of Chess today and help us grow!

We are pretty excited about what we’ve been building, and now we get to open our doors to the world. Cup of Chess has officially entered that wonderful period of time that people in the biz call ‘beta’. It’s really a fancy word for letting users try out the site and tell us what they think. To us, it’s a great opportunity to increase the popularity of chess and offer it to the world in safe, open, and free community.

If you are a beginner, welcome! Chess is a great way to keep the mind sharp. If your an advanced player, you can strenghthen your game and maybe even learn a thing or two in our blitz games. We encourage you to excercise your brain, and try a cup of chess.

Since we are excited to see the site expand and reach new users, for the winter months we will be making every feature on our site free. Since it’s our policy to ensure that everyone can play, we never plan to charge users to play a match – that will always be free. However, if you decide to join, we will offer you a world of features to strengthen your game including tournaments, correspondance chess, rankings, game reviews and much more. We are excited to roll out new features often, so check this blog frequently to see what’s coming next.

See you online at www.cupofchess.com!