Chess site news blog

We have listed all our entries for our chess blog here. This is intended to keep everyone updated with any bugs fixed or changing to this chess game site.

26th April 2012
A trophy cabinet has been added to every player's profile. To view any player's cabinet, just click on the new 'Trophies' link near the top of the player profile page.

At present no trophies have been awarded.

24th April 2012
The chess league will officially end on 30th April 2012 at 23:59:59 GMT. Awards will be given to top 20 players. These awards can be viewed from the player profile page.

12th April 2012
Player profile country flags have now been updated to the offical 249 world countries defined by ISO 3166-1 standards.

Some redundant countries such as Yugoslavia have been removed.

24th March 2012
We will now warn our players if maintenance is in operation on our site. Che55.com will be running on 5 levels of runlevel. More info can be found here.

12th March 2012
Global ELO system has been tweaked from today for all our players.

ELO changes are now calculated when a game is completed from the actual ELO of both players at that point in time. Before today new ELO changes were calculated from when the game started, but this could of been weeks or even months before.

Hopefully, given time, this change will give our players more accurate ratings.

28th February 2012
As of 12:00am GMT tonight, any live games that a banned player is playing at the time of their ban, will be aborted.

Aborted games will stop immediately and be archived. No points will be awarded to the remaining player.

A player can also be suspended. Suspended players cannot login, but their games will still be ticking down. Once the matter is resolved, their status will change back to normal active account or banned.

Both banned and suspended players' usernames will display in grey.

This rule change will only apply to future banned players. Any current banned players' games will timeout in the usual fashion.

20th February 2012
The player avatar section has now been upgraded, same as player profile picture upload last week.

Player 'plankton' has very kindly offered to help if players are having trouble changing their profile images. Also, if you require a custom made image, he may be able to help. Please contact him if needed.

12th February 2012
As digital cameras have advanced so much in recent years, the size of their output files have increased greatly.

For this reason everyones profile image upload file limit has been raised to 10 megabytes.

Most camera images are around the 3-4MB mark so this gives plenty of leeway for future camera developments.

Also, an extra function has been added to allow a small optional text caption to be added below your profile photo.

8th February 2012
It seems we have problem. Some players prefer the 'Submit Move' button under their chessboard, others like it back in the old position, under the main menu.

To keep everyone happy, an option to choose yourself has been added to your Control Panel >> Game Options. The default will be the new position.

8th February 2012
From today onwards, we've decided change the position of the 'submit move' control in the game board screen from it's present position (left, under the main menu) to a better positon directly under the board in the centre. Hope this doesn't confuse our players too much.

6th February 2012
You will notice your friend list is now conveniantly display at the top right-hand column in your 'My Games' screen. At a glance you can now see if your favourite players are online.

Also above your friend list is a new player search box. This is used to locate players even if you only know part of their username. Players can also be easily added to your friend or ignore list from the resulting search.

1st February 2012
Our regular players have no doubt noticed that development on che55.com has been at a crawl over the last few years. This hasn't been due to lack of interest, but rather family commitments have intervened.

Don't worry we aren't going away anytime soon.

I have enlisted the help of a long-term regular player to be in charge of the forum to listen and respond to input from players.

Hopefully this will give our existing players and future players more of a say in what path che55.com will take in the future.

28th January 2012
From today onwards, we've decided to move the link to access your 'Player Control Panel' to below your avatar picture, just above your logout button. We feel this is a better place to have this link instead of above the live games in your 'My Games' page; which has now been removed.

21st December 2011
As from 1st January 2012, we will no longer be supporting Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 web browser.

The ten year old web browser is not secure and is no longer supported by many websites. Even Microsoft, its creator, is fed up of it.

Please take the time to switch your organization to the most up-to-date browsers available. Thank you.

27th November 2011
Our new Chess Store is now up and running. Check out the latest reviews and book offers.

2nd April 2011
Some players may of experienced a few login and session problem over the last few days. Our chess server has been overloaded unexpectedly, possibly due to a denial-of-service attack. Normal service should now be resumed. Apologies to all our chess players that may of been locked and timed out of any games.

31st July 2010
We had a problem with our website security certificate, which has now been resolved.

Some of you using Firefox may of experienced a problem saying our certificate was from an untrusted source.

This was nothing to worry about, the certificate is fine, just wasn't installed correctly on our server.

12th December 2009
ELO ratings are calculated in finished games from the historic ELO when the game was started. This has always been the case, nothing will change.

But to avoid player confusion, from today all live and finished games will display the ELO when the game was started not the current rating of each player.

28th March 2009
Player account settings area has now been named as "Control Panel". This can only be accessed from the top of "My Games" page. "My Account" has been removed from the main menu.

Various improvements have been made. Most obvious are; holiday control panel has been moved to this area, change of email address now requires email confirmation, seperate avatar and picture upload sections and additional pre-defined avatars.

25th March 2009
From today, when a new member joins up and creates a new account. That account must be activated using an activation email we automatically send to that player.

The new player will be unable to login until that email has be received and the activation link contained inside clicked on.

An account not yet activated will be invisable to everyone else.

24th March 2009
Password security increased. From today, all new members joining will have to select a password for their new account that's minimum 8 characters in length and must contain at least 1 numeric number.

Existing member's passwords will stay unchanged of course, but if they choose to change their password from their account setting, the new rules for the new password will apply.

20th March 2009
The "challenge a player" screen has been upgraded to include a full username text search. For example; entering "123" would find players with 123 in their username, such as "123456" and "edk123kapo".

14th March 2009
Due to a recent spate of players opening multiple account, we have installed our new MADS (Multiple Account Detection System) to che55.com. This new system will hopefully alert us quickley to players opening more than 1 account and act accordingly. Also, let us take this opportunity to remind all our players that our rules state only 1 account is allowed per player.

8th March 2009
The new server switch over has now been completed. Sorry for any problems with our players unable to login during this period. The new server should provide our players with more faster and reliable chess games.

27th February 2009
Player login system had serious problem yesterday. We are currently changing to a new server and this caused the problems with the database. The problem has been fixed and site is up and running normally again. Sorry about any inconvenience caused to our players.

24th February 2009
New players will now not be shown on the league table unless they have verified their account with a valid email address.

10th February 2009
Players using the new Google Chrome internet browser were unable to view moves in archived games. This bug has now be fixed.

26th January 2009
With the sudden spate of new players violating our site rules, we have decided to show banned player names in grey. This will clearly show to our many geniune chess users, the players to avoid.

11th January 2009
Problem with player graphs not showing last 50 games properly. Graph plots were shown incorrectly. This bug has now been fixed.

25th December 2008
May we wish all our chess players a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from che55.com.

23rd September 2008
We have decided to remove the 10 minute, 1 hour and 24 hour game timers from all new games starting from today.
We felt this was necessary due to abuse by some of our members deliberately setting low time games to increase chances of timeouts.
Games already started with these low times won't be affected.

19th July 2008
A global fault occured on our webserver concerning the player username and login section. We are glad to say the bug was quickley tracked down and solved. Sorry for any inconvience caused for all our players.

23rd June 2008
A chess beginners guide has been added to our site. This guide will explain to those new to the game of chess, the general rules of the game. The guide can be found in the main menu.

20th June 2008
We have increased the available time per move options for all our games.
10 Minute, 1 Hour, 24 Hour and 2 Day options are now available for all new games.

20th June 2008
Holiday system maintenance has now been completed. Sorry for any inconvenience caused for our chess players.

19th June 2008
We will be closed for players logging in for approx 2 hours starting at 10:00pm GMT on 19th June. Remember to adjust this time for your country time difference.
This downtime will enable us to fix problems in the holiday system, which cannot be done while players are logged in.

Any players login at this time will automatically be logged out.
Sorry for any inconvenience.

12th June 2008
Bug fixed in chess game names. If a game name contained an ampersand character, an error would occur. The problem has now been fixed.

11th June 2008
Bug fixed in chess forum that prevented Internet Explorer users from posting messages into board.

10th June 2008
We have added our chess forum to our increasing features to this site. All are members are free to post their own messages onto the forum board. Hopefully getting some good discussions taking place.

26th May 2008
Bug fixed in holiday system where players were unable to view a chess game if a holiday period was set, even if they was only the opponent during that game.

17th May 2008
Our secure player login form is now available from every page, making it easier for our players to login. Even better, the login still encrypts your password before being sent to our server for verification.

3rd May 2008
Great new feature added. We have installed our holiday system so players can increase their game times, avoiding any timeouts when on holiday. Usernames will be displayed in purple when a holiday period is set. 50 days holiday are allowed per player per year.

29th April 2008
A total moves played counter has been added to the statistics area. This displays the total aggregate number of moves played in all archived and current games. Any moves played in cancelled games will also be included in the total.

28th April 2008
Problem with Apple Mac Safari Web Browser users not being able to see the text fields properly. This problem has been correctly by altering the background and text colour.

16th April 2008
Players are only allowed to login using our secure login page from now onwards. This will ensure that passwords for players are encrypted before transmission over the internet.

15th April 2008
We have now completed the switch over to our new web server. Che55.com should now be faster and more reliable. Some players may of experienced site problems while this delicate changeover was in progress, and we thank them for their patience.

24th March 2008
Bug fixed that caused some chess games to display incorrectly. Many thanks to 'robbiebee' for alerting us to this problem.

7th March 2008
We have added a Frequently Asked Questions page, which is linked from the main menu. We hope to keep this page updated with new common questions.

27th February 2008
A big thank you to all our members. We have reached our first 1000 games played on here. How long before we break our next 1000??

1st December 2007
The Christmas period is upon us. For those with Adobe Flash Player 9 installed on their computer, a festive flash movie has been added to our homepage. If you don't have flash installed or your using an older version, why not visit the Adobe website for a free download?

30th November 2007
We have added a complete list of all finished archived games by all players. This list can be accessed by 'Archived Games' now listed in the main menu.

12th November 2007
Subscribe to your own personalised RSS game feed from 'My Games' games list section. With a suitable RSS feed reader you can check if it's your turn to move in any of your games without logging into your account. Most modern internet browsers have a feed reader built in. Internet Explorer 6 is not a modern browser, and doesn't have this facility. Why not upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or even better, Firefox 2.0? You can then use our new RSS feed.

31st October 2007
Our web server host decided to update their system today to Apache 2.2. They didn't bother to tell us about this beforehand, so we was unprepared. This caused us to be down for a large length of time. The problem has been fixed now.

We decided to add 10 hours extra time to all live games, as players were unable to login and play their chess moves. Apologies to all our members for this annoying problem that occurred.

21st October 2007
Maximum number of chess games that are allowed to be played simultaneously has be increased from 10 to 100.

19th October 2007
Upgraded the player avatar system. The avatar size has been increased to 162x100 pixel size. This means we had to change the predefined avatars to different images when changing to the new size. Players may still upload their own image as an avatar. All uploaded pictures will be forced to 162x100 pixel size.

On some areas of our site, for example in member lists, the avatars are reduced to half their size to save space.

18th October 2007
Many thanks to chess player "birmie" for the suggestion of a notepad to jot down ideas during each game. We have now installed this notepad into the game move area. It is important to remember, comments written on your notepad can only be seen by yourself. They will be invisible to your opponent.

13th October 2007
Security captcha images are also included in the new chess member registration section and forgotten username or password area. This security images should stop automatic robots from sending spoof requests to our server.

2nd October 2007
Security captcha image has been integrated into our contact us form. This feature will stop spam robots from automatically filling in the form and overloading our server. It's works because a robot cannot read the numbers in the image, only by a human. The form cannot be submitted without entering these numbers.

25th September 2007
We have added a chess resources page that we hope will provide links to external chess related sites. If anyone would like to add their own site to this list, please us our contact form. We will try to reply as soon as possible.

23rd September 2007
Bored of the pre-defined avatars on offer? You can now upload your own picture of yourself to use as an avatar image next to your username. Also an additional photo is now allowed bigger at 400x400 size.

13th September 2007
Programming bug with top 10 chess players league table, caused players with joint places not to be displayed. The problem has now been fixed.

12th September 2007
We have increased the maximum number of games allowed to 10. This limit has been increased for all chess players. This is a temporary measure until our premium membership is up and running.

7th September 2007
We updated our homepage to give a fresh new look to our site. Page will auto expand to fill any size browser regardless of size resolution used.

Homepage has also been re-written in the new XHTML markup code, to give a more consistant rendering across different browser platforms.

We will gradually change the whole site over to this new style page.

6th September 2007
This news function added to site, giving visitors information about updates and any bugs fixed.