Pawnpusher3

November 18, 2011

Ideas

New Ideas

Hey Guys,

As you all are well aware, our invites have not been going to well. We are only getting a few members a day with the 30 invites sent out. Also, those invites are not always even sent out, which means that on some days, we aren’t even gaining 1 person! That clearly can’t help our group develop. Because of this, I have been devising a plan and testing it out (using some of the other groups that I have run). I also tested it yesterday for the cats and I got 17 new members (which is quite a good result for a day’s work in my opinion)

There are 2 parts of this plan. Possibly three, but 2 real main parts.

The first part is by far the most critical. It definitely gets the most members. The only problem with it is that new people tend to go to live once or twice and then never come back. Returning people can stay for a lifetime. This would be beneficial for the group because if we can turn new members into returning members, we would make a more active group. So the way that this works is:

1. Go to live chess

2. Go to main hall and look around for any high rated players, or players who are on your friend list.

3. Go to debate hall and check for any high rated players/ friends. If you see any new players (they come here so they can talk) then try and recruit them, because they usually will want to join.

4. Give them the link. Just explain the group a bit and say “Here is the link. We are a great group, so I suggest you check it out” or something like that and then copy and paste this link:

The second part is better for getting more active members, but it recruits less than the first option. It does still work, but I don’t suggest you do it a lot because if the server thinks that you are spamming, then your account may get shut down. That would really be bad. At most, you can do this 30 times a day, or up to 210 times a week. This is safe according to domain and legal according to kohai. Because this doesn’t break rules, it is also much more direct than the invites (because chess.com is very good at spamming the inboxes of members. This results in people not really checking their messages, so a lot of the invites that are sent are not even SEEN let alone accepted.) The way that I have done it is just left a little message and said “Hey, I have seen you play and you are very good. Please join my group, because we would be happy to have you” and then leave a link. Or say something that explains the group a bit more and then give the link. Once again, here is the link:

This is the basic outline for the new inviting system that I am proposing for our group. Besides the fact that this has a better result of: members gained/members invited, it also doesn’t limit us to 30 invites a day. This means that we can recruit multiple members a day, even more than 30. This would allow our group to grow faster.

Team Match Ideas:

As you all are well aware, we clearly have too many team matches set up for people to join. Some of you may view this as a good thing, but I definitely think this is bad. How should our members have any idea on which team match to join? For now, I think the first step in correcting this is to cancel the current team matches (the ones that are open for signups). This will allow us to get this back in order. Also, I wanted to suggest that we make a roster for players available for team match games. To do this, I suggest that we make a “Dummy group” and have a team match made to face them. The only trick is that no one will join from the dummy group because it’s just there to help us make a roster for the available players. Because this team match will never start, it’s quite useful as a nice roster to see who is available and who isn’t. Let’s say a player was available today. He would join the roster. If he has to go on vacation in 3 months, he would leave it. When he returns he would rejoin the roster.

This would help us know who is available to play, so if we needed more members in a team match, we could just invite the players on the list. It will also give us “team rankings”. What I mean by that is, we will see where each player places according to ranking on the roster. The highest will be at the top, while the lowest will be at the bottom. This will also allow us to see which rating range (ex. 1300-1400) has the most players. This will help us have ideas to design team matches that would appeal to ALL the players in the group, not just the high rated. Note that this will keep all players satisfied. Dissatisfied members leave (I have talked to 3 members who just recently left the group: Adude23, Jmac100, and Skofe, and they all thought that the team matches didn’t allow them to play. Now, they are all 1600+ players and when they were members, they were only 1300’s. This clearly is important to note.)

Besides the chart, I think we should make team matches like the following:

Title: (Creating Admin) Challenge (number)

Team to challenge: (Leave blank)

Days per move: This varies

Maximum and minimum rating: 2 choices: open or a rating range of 100 points (ex 1250-1350)

Players: Varies, but I think for most matches, 1-20 will be nice. I don’t like 1+ too much. I think we should definitely set a range for this so that teams will know how long the match is going to be estimated to take. A 1-500 match will take much longer than a 1-5 player match.

Vote Chess ideas:

I think that vote chess is a less critical aspect of the group. It definitely is important, but I think we should only have 1-5 games going at once. I think this will make the focus on each specific game more concentrated. Right now we have 4 which is good. I think that we should keep it this way. The only thing that I would change is to make it clear what the official final vote is for the group. Many people vote randomly (I saw some people voting c3 and g4 as our first move. Clearly not the best choices in my opinion.) I think that we should invite some more of our strong players into these games as well. That way we will have some more “high-level input” in the games.

Forums ideas:

NONE! They are excellent with the daily puzzles.

Miscellaneous ideas:

Overall, there are really no more ideas to be made. I think that I have taken my say in what I think we should do. The last final “ideas” that I will make is that I think we should use the “News” more often. News is sent to everyone’s messages and many people in our group will see it. We can ask them to join team matches, vote chess, or just ask them to help us out with something if we ever need help. For the dummy group, none of the admins can make it. If you accept a team match and you are admins in both groups, it won’t work, so there is a great example of where we would need some help from a random member.

I hope you guys take a look at these. I want to hear your views on this. Feel free to criticize and tell me why this could be bad. I also welcome ideas that build on top of mine or extra ideas.

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