Reward: Free Platinum Membership and 1 Year of Chess Mentor!

OK. I have a bug that I can't find, and I need your help :) We have an annoying bug on Chess.com that I can't reproduce. If you can message me a way to recreate this bug reliably, I will give you a free platinum membership (worth $80) and 1 year of Chess Mentor (worth $100)!

Here is the bug:

When you come on to the main Chess.com site you get an ONLINE status indicator like this:

If you are on the main Chess.com site (meaning you have visited a page in the last 10 minutes) AND you are in Live Chess you get an icon like this:

If you are in Live Chess ONLY (meaning you are in Live Chess but haven't been active on the main site in the last 10 minutes) you get an icon like this:

Here's the problem: sometimes when you leave Live Chess it still shows you as in Live Chess when you are not! It makes the numbers off here: http://www.chess.com/livechess by a significant margin and it grows every day, so we know this is a common problem. Somehow people are exiting Live Chess without the system recognizing that you are gone, leaving you in a permanent state.

If you can figure out how to leave Live Chess and then have it stay as , then you will earn the Platinum Membership and Chess Mentor 1 Year Subscription :) Some ideas are: clicking on the LOGOUT link, closing the browser directly, hard shutdown of browser, exiting in middle of game, maybe different browsers have different issues, etc. Who knows!

If you work as a team to figure this out (and I recommend you do since that will allow somebody to see if you are online still when you leave) then you can BOTH win it :)

Happy bug hunting!

Enjoy!

Yes, I have noticed this problem, but never really got around to mentioning it.

I always figured site management was just trying to fabricate numbers to make live chess look more popular ;)

Masterful_Forfeit wrote:

I always figured site management was just trying to fabricate numbers to make live chess look more popular ;)

HA! Nope - we've just been busy working on other things.

iil try to investigate:)

De-Lar wrote:

Can't you reset the livechess server twice a day?  I know that doesn't solve the bug, but would that work until you find it?

Resetting the live server = many unhappy people in the middle of games :)

Erik. I am trying to figure out whats wrong but i think i found another bug. When I go onto live chess and play a few games. My profile only shows me as online. there is no Live underneath it and when i am away from turn based site for more than 10 mins since my last game was 10 mins long it showed me as offline.

I have seen it happen to me in both of the following situations:

1. Log off of LIVE, and see (on a friend's session) that I am still apparently logged in.

2. Hard shutdown of LIVE browser (i.e. no actual log off).

Have not yet seen a pattern as it does not always happen.

I run Firefox exclusively.

I am not getting any live when I am in live chess and im a non member. but jonnyjupiter is  a gold star and hes red live but hes not in the lobby. Maybe it has to do with membership.

Im running it under firefox as well.

i had blackwolf a gold star member log out and i checked his profile. and it went back to normal logged on after about 20-25 seconds.

members in live chess should have another counter thing to double check if you really are in live chess

im not getting any indication that I am in live chess at all on my profile. I really wish I could spend more time helping you erik but its 1am here and i need to get up at 7am for work. if it isnt found by tomorrow night ill be trying again to figure it out cuz that reward is mighty good looking lol.

Well, I'm stumped. Crux and I tried everything. He (a gold-star firefox 3-using member) tried exiting by using the 'logout' link, by clicking the red X, and by ctrl-alt-delete, and all three of these both in-game and out-of game. Each time the same thing happened: after approx. five minutes his icon no longer registered as 'LIVE'. We even tried exiting the main site, waiting, then exiting live chess, but no luck there either.

One thing I have noticed, erik, is that this bug happens all the time with you, more so than with anybody else. Your icon is constantly showing you as live. Is there anything out of the ordinary that you do when leaving live chess?

Not sure this helps, but...

I entered LIVE, did not play a game, and properly exited after about thirty seconds.

I am still showing with the green LIVE icon on jd_ski's page.  It has been between three and four minutes since I logged off LIVE.

wow this is really tough

jd_ski and I worked on the following example that reproduced this issue (assistance provided by tactician_prodigy):

I signed into LIVE chess and minimized my chess.com sessions (turn-based and LIVE). 

jd_ski monitored my user until my LIVE icon went from green to red. 

Once it went to red, I halted my LIVE session without logging off.  My LIVE icon went to green for ten minutes. 

After ten minutes, the LIVE icon went back to red and is still like.  As long as I do not enter my chess.com (turn-based) session (which I have now done to write this forum post), the LIVE icon remains red, though I have not been logged into LIVE chess.com for over 60 minutes.

Screen image provided:

jd_ski and I continue to be able to reproduce this using the steps noted above.

(Sorry for the size of the screen image above)

you used the method i messaged you about just idling away?

Yes, that's why your name was noted as part of the team (it's also the same way I had encountered it previously).

kool, i had a feeling that might have been it. erik gave almost every other reason for examples.