Hey, chess lovers! A happy New Year is upon us, and with it, an opportunity to look back and catch up on what happened around the site in December 2021... Let's go!

Web

• The biggest story for December—and surely one of the biggest of 2021—was the full release of Players League! Now you can earn Trophies by winning qualifying real-time games and compete to be one of the top players in your division of 50 members... If so, you advance to the next League level! Check out the full announcement for more detail—and good luck, players!
• Another extremely cool feature for coaching and reviewing games went into Beta testing in December... Stay tuned for more about the release of Classroom next month!
• Find new and handy links to your game Archive and the Leaderboards at the bottom of the Play page side-panel...

• Just in time for the holidays, we improved our membership gifting features—best of all, removing the restriction that you have to be a member to gift someone a premium membership. 🎁
• There were two features that got a lot of love last month, with loads of small improvements and fixes: the awesome new Insights feature, which really helps you get to know yourself as a chess-player, and Events, bringing the world's best chess to a browser near you... Check 'em out!
• In Forums and comments, you can now hover over the arrows ↑↓ to see how many up- and down-votes a post has received.
• Behind the scenes, we're working on some very cool new changes and options for the Member Home page and site navigation... Stay tuned for more on that!
• We implemented a very handy auto-fill feature to make it easier to use the Search—for instance, in the search field in the left navigation area...
• Your Vs. Computer games are now saved to your Archive when you submit them for a Game Review. This is less of a "new feature" and more something we had to do to resolve some other issues. Please note that Vs. Computer games can also be deleted from your Archive, by opening them and clicking the 🗑 in the side-panel.
• In Lessons, we added Dark Mode support for Course detail pages.
• Also in Lessons, we added a quick link to "More by this author" to the Course detail page. Easy!
• Last but not least, the Holiday Bots made a return for some seasonal fun in the magical realm of Vs Computer! ⛄️

iOS

Last month, Team iOS released three new updates:

• 3.9.26 (3), which included access to Insights, via a web-view, and a fix for Offline Mode.
• 3.9.27 (2), adding Players League!
• 3.9.28 (4), with League improvements and fixes.

Android

In December, the Android team released version 4.4, including Players League, a new & improved Solo Chess feature, and more!

Fair Play & Sportsmanship

• 20,970 accounts closed for fair play (including 11 titled players).
• 1,204,344 abuse reports were received.
• 63,374 mute actions were taken.
• 51,779 individual accounts muted.
• 64,364 accounts closed for abuse.

Member Support

Average time to response: 31 hours.
Total support responses: 35,873.
Average quality by member rating: 94% "Great" or better. 🙌
Total ratings: 4,059.

And that, give or take some holiday celebrations (and trying to rack up some League Trophies!), was our December. Thanks for reading, and please let us know what you think in the Comments. Of course, we'll return next month to take a look at the start of '22... Until then, stay safe and enjoy your chess!

⏮ November 2021・🗓・January 2022 ⏭