Open Letter to Chess.com Management

Dear Chess.com Management,

I have been a member of chess.com for some years and, because I love the site and many of its features, am a diamond member.

I recently upgraded to using Mountain Lion on my Mac. Since then I've been unable to use Tactics Trainer and Computer Workout, only seeing a grey board with no pieces. I went through all the troubleshooting steps that are listed, like installing Java and trying different browsers. Then, when that didn't work I wrote an email to support. 

I exchanged emails with one of your employees, who I won't name, going through some tecnical things like browser version and the such, and eventually recieved a curt email saying that Chess.com does not support Mountain Lion.

This raises some very serious questions:

1) Is it really chess.com policy not to support the latest version of Mac OSX?

2) Will chess.com place a notice on the upgrade account page telling potential gold and diamond members that some features don't work with Mountain Lion?

3) Is chess.com working to get the these features to work on Mountain Lion?

4) Will I recive a refund for my diamond membership?

5) What steps will chess.com make in respect of all other gold and diamond members using Mountain Lion?

This incident has been my first and only disapointing experience with chess.com. I sincerely hope that it is not true that chess.com doesn't support the latest Mac operating system, and that this will be addressed promtly.

Alexander

Alexander

I'm sorry you have such a negative experience. I'll look into this for you.

Hello kohai,

It has been five weeks. Please can you give me an update on your discoveries.

Alexander

I am so sorry about this but believe it or not I did actually think I'd already replied to this a few weeks ago.

To address your questions:

1) Is it really chess.com policy not to support the latest version of Mac OSX?

This was my fault and I take responsibility for this. I'm head of support so the response you received from my team was giving you information I'd given them.

I was (falsely) under the impression that as the Lion was (when it was released) buggy and it wasn't used for testing the features we were releasing that we weren't fully supporting it and that as a majority were still on Snow Leopard we were more focused on that osx. I was wrong.

The Lion is fully supported, I now have Lion OSX (i kinda killed my snow leopard with coffee)

2) Will chess.com place a notice on the upgrade account page telling potential gold and diamond members that some features don't work with Mountain Lion

They should all work. However please be aware some things are out of our control (like a recent sound issue coming from the Safari 6 version itself)

3) Is chess.com working to get the these features to work on Mountain Lion?

We will make compatible and fix any issues that we are can, again we can't fix something if its coming directly from the browser creator

4) Will I recive a refund for my diamond membership?

Yes if you still wish this

5) What steps will chess.com make in respect of all other gold and diamond members using Mountain Lion?

These will be handled on an individual basis though a large majority of the Mac issues we do get are snow leopard based

As for the curt response you got, I can only apologise on her behalf. I'm responsible for training the support staff therefore responsiblity falls on me. I can arrange for an apology to be sent from said member of staff if thats what you'd like, but I can assure you the curtness won't be an issue again.

I am still pretty new to Lion myself but have bug tested other features on it over the last couple of weeks. I didn't have any obvious issues on their so perhaps you and I can work together and you can let me know more about what you're running in order for me to locate whats causing the grey board - no pieces issue

Someones in the doghouse..