An orange indicator means “in live chess” or connected to the live chess server.
Are you and your friend playing on the website or with an app? If by website, then you both should go to “play -> live chess”. If you are official friends on chess.com, you should see your friend listed in the friends tab.
hmm thank you for the reply manekapa. When I see him with the orange indicator and issue a challenge it always says he's in the middle of a game, so, truly, he is in live chess :-) . I guess I was assuming that as long as somebody was logged in and not in a game, like maybe reading messages or doing puzzles, if you issued a challenge, they would get a notification like "hey, so-and-so has issued a challenge, do you want to play?" It sounds almost like you need to schedule a time and both be sitting there on the Play screen for this to actually happen?
hmm thank you for the reply manekapa. When I see him with the orange indicator and issue a challenge it always says he's in the middle of a game, so, truly, he is in live chess :-) . I guess I was assuming that as long as somebody was logged in and not in a game, like maybe reading messages or doing puzzles, if you issued a challenge, they would get a notification like "hey, so-and-so has issued a challenge, do you want to play?" It sounds almost like you need to schedule a time and both be sitting there on the Play screen for this to actually happen?
One option is to go into Live and choose Play a Friend option. That will allow to create a link to the game.
Otherwise, you would need to both be in live at the same time and both be available to play.
Strange problem here, possibly my misunderstanding of the interface?
I have a friend I'd like to play some online games against. We see each other logged in. Neither of us is currently in a game. His status indicator (the little colored square next to his avatar photo) is green, which I take to mean "available" (as opposed to orange, "not available").
Whenever I go to my friend's home page and hit the challenge button, I am informed "<his name> is currently not in live chess and cannot accept your challenge at this time" or similar. We've tried the same thing with him challenging me.
This is a bit frustrating. We joined chess.com at the same time and played our first games against each other but haven't been able to play since--not for lack of trying. Ideas, anyone? Thanks in advance.