RFC: Countries

Yeah, I should've thought of that. Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 is being used? Inquiring minds want to know...

I'd definitely like it documented, and that should be less work than a new endpoint.

Of course, country names change so perhaps "... standard as of YYYY-MM-DD" and bump the date if/when the standard changes and chess.com catch up.

Country names don't change often (he says optimistically) but as the wall came down and the USSR broke up I know one school librarian stopped buying atlases for at least a while!

Nope, not these codes. According to the above page, Curacao should have code CW, but actually has code AN, which is reserved for Netherlands Antilles.

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." -- Andy Tanenbaum

Well, since no standard was identified, I brute-forced it. The table is too big to fit in one post, so it will take me a couple of trials to figure out how to split it...

Apologies for the weird blue artifact at the bottom of each table. Curiously, V2 displays these tables correctly. The tables were prepared in Numbers app on a Mac and pasted, using V3.

This is indeed the standard we are using. It looks like you found a bug. I've created a ticket to fix it. Did you notice any others that are incorrect?

Sorry, new member here. I am not sure whether the country member list only includes the members that logged in the last 7 days, 2 days, 1 day (before the computation), it might be useful to have some way to parameterize it (otherwise I understand I should keep polling every day for the list, that's fine, there are other priorities). Just want to be sure what is the current default, as it has changed in the last few weeks.

Thanks!

No need to be sorry, @r000k! This is a great question and a good place for it. The answer is 1 day, but we don't use a 24 hour clock — anyone who logged in since midnight yesterday will be included. This is done to obtain reliable start times regardless of when the data are cached. It does mean that a single request might have 24–48 hours worth of players listed, and that's not predictable. The result is cached and will not change for 24 hours. In this way, if you poll the endpoint each day you will be guaranteed a complete list. You will not be able to deduplicate it (for example, if a person logged in earlier today they might be listed in both today's and tomorrow's data for just this one login), but you can verify this info more precisely for specific players on their player profile endpoint.

These specifics may change over time as our system gets fine tuned. When I can update the documentation, I will include this info there.

The current API has certain technical restrictions, and the results you get are more like flat files of data that database queries — parameters will not be supported in this version.

I wonder why Catalonia is in the country list and not Aragon, both are part of Spain.