Cheat-No-More

As ChessCube approached the 250,000 mark, we had noticed an increased number of cheats on the system. Cheating on the Internet is not new and ChessCube has been dealing with this issue from the start in a number of ways - but the time for automated anti-cheating is here.

Over the last month ChessCube has built a comprehensive cheat-detection system that exposes cheaters in a number of innovative ways. We upgraded our services yesterday to include the cheat tracking service - and within the first few hours we had already tagged 100 cheaters across 500 separate cheating games!

Cheaters typically adopt the following cheat mechanisms:

• Using a chess engine to suggest some of their moves
• Using a friend as a 'ringer' - to help them improve their rating
  
• Time-tampering - where they attempt to adjust or slow down the time on their clock
• Playing themselves with multiple user names in order to increase their ratings.
  

The new ChessCube anti-cheating engine picks up on these methods and alerts our moderators in real time. Users can also log a cheating issue with the moderators who are now able to view a comprehensive report on the alleged cheater in order to take immediate action against them.

Over the following months we will be adding a number of new anti-cheating features to protect ChessCube users.

Watch World Chess Championships at Chesscube.com

The 2008 World Chess Championships between Vladimir Kramnik from Russia and Viswanathan Anand from India started in Bonn, Germany yesterday.

ChessCube is proud to introduce a new product that makes it much more exciting: ChessCube LiveLecture - another world first. ChessCube LiveLecture allows chess lecturers to comment live on the moves and variations from the Kramnik vs. Anand World Chess Championship games - totally free. Lectures will be delivered by International Master Malcolm Pein among others.

ChessCube is also offering a series of free videos: Download three 90-minute Kramnik & Anand historical videos and also receive a 20-minute video, with critical analysis after every single match game. These videos will be made available shortly.

This match is the highlight of the year for chess followers and we hope to deliver the most comprehensive offering available to as many people as possible.

ChessCube Cinema: Interactive Chess Videos

Now that the dust is starting to settle on the release of ChessCube version 3, we turn our attention back to ChessCube Cinema.

ChessCube Cinema is a free installable Adobe AIR application. It allows you to buy videos from our store, or to access free videos that we provide.

ChessCube Cinema allows you to manage

your library of videos and watch your videos.

We will be integrating a number of ChessCube tools over time to enhance your viewing experience.

With the World Chess Championships running in Bonn Germany from October 14 to November 02, 2008, ChessCube will be releasing three free videos for all ChessCube members.

That is a lot of free value for our users, namely: free membership to ChessCube, free ChessCube Cinema download and three free videos.

Video 1: Viswanathan Anand - a biography:

Follow the emergence of Vishy's rise to become World Champion, with key games that highlight his playing

style.

Video 2: Vladimir Kramnik - a biography

Photo credit: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/steenslag/3398819/in/photostream/ steenslag] {{cc-by-sa-2.0}}

Follow Kramnik's rise to becoming World Championship, and challenger, with key games that present his

style of play.

Video 3: Anand-Kramnik - previous

encounters.

Anand and Kramnik have played many games before, but this video

shows a series of critical games between Anand and Kramnik - and makes some

predictions on this match.

But wait - there's more! (excuse the heavy marketing vernacular) During the World Chess Championships we will also be giving away a ChessCube Cinema video after each game,

with notes and thoughts on that game from a leading International Master. Totally free.

Finally, a further freebie during the World Chess Championships is the ChessCube SuperLecture system. I will devote a full blog entry to this application in a week or so, but in

a nutshell this application allows spectators to watch a live debate between leading experts live on the web. We will be providing this free service to all ChessCube members. So watch this

space!

ChessCube version 3 is launched

ChessCube version 3 is here - as we hit the 170,000 mark. After a lot of last-minute debugging and 7 (!) new sub-versions released in the same day it was out there.

Most users love the new changes and chess960. Some don't like the changes - but we are hoping it will grow on them.

Most of the team in the office are addicted to chess960 at the moment. It is a great variation of chess

There are some issues with the Flash Player for some users - where they need to flush their cache by holding the SHIFT-key down while they click the Refresh button in their browsers.

We are now finding that US users have about 30 milliseconds latency - whereas countries like India and South Africa have dropped to around 200. This gives a much faster game playing experience than the previous version.

As I write this note I see that there are 227 live games - which is a record.

We are planning more improvements to chat version 3 to accommodate more players and even faster experiences in countries like India, the Philippines and South Africa.

This is a new version and we expect to see some bugs and issues this week. Our aim, however, is to eliminate most of the subtle bugs and issues by weekend. Enjoy!

Version 3 - launch delayed, but imminent

Oh the anticipation. Well 23 September arrived yesterday (on schedule) - but the launch of ChessCube version 3 was unfortunately delayed.

It is so close! We have fixed many, many bugs from small to big. Our testers have been working very hard the last few weeks to help us pinpoint and nail these.

By the afternoon of 23 September the ChessCube team felt that the version was looking stable - but we all felt that we wanted to spend another few days testing - so we shifted the launch date to Monday 29 September.

The last month has been technically very challenging for ChessCube. Our live version 2 has reached the end of its product life-cycle and has recently been beset with a number of very annoying issues:

1. Hardware failure, which lead to 2 database corruptions.
2. Two Database rebuilds, where some players ratings were rebuilt.
3. A media server memory leak which has lead to delayed login at times.
   
4. latency spikes due to scalability issues of version 2.

The team has had to unfortunately focus on maintaining all the issues of version 2 while also preparing version 3. Which is not ideal.

We apologize to our loyal users for the problems they have endured over the last few weeks. While this has been frustrating to you all and to us, we are nevertheless incredibly excited by version 3 which will be arriving on Monday.

Version 3 is very neat, very fast, and appears to scale very well. You can see my previous post on Tuesday 16 September for a more complete description.

Scaling up ChessCube

There comes a time in the history of many a website where its critical to scale up to meet the needs of  a growing user base. 

This is where ChessCube finds itself with 160,000 registered users and close to 30,000 games per day.

This is a double-edged sword - it is a blessing to have a website that is growing so quickly, but a challenge in maintaining a fast-growing service that is pleasant for the users.

Version 2 was a big jump from version 1 and we have made many adjustments to version 2 to ensure that it coped with the expanding user base. With the large number of users we now have on ChessCube, version 2 has been creaking trying to keep up. Our servers are pushing over 1.5 terabytes of data per month - and growing!

On that note, ChessCube version 3 is coming next week! (see the picture top left for an artist's impression).  Version 3 is, once again, a big shift from version 2. 

• Latency will be improved by fewer (and smaller) messages being sent to each user. 
• ChessCube version 3 has a much more scalable architecture, which can allow unlimited games without any loss of performance.
• ChessCube will open up a number of additional USA-based servers to complement our German servers.
• The new architecture also allows us to now set up servers in additional countries where we experience a lot of traffic - especially India, Philippines, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
• The user design has been rewritten to accommodate: Scaling architecture, improved usability, and the Chess960 variant.
• Finally, the user design now allows much better screen use on much smaller resolutions. Using our new maximize feature in conjunction with popout (like YouTube), users with resolutions as low as 800x600 will be able to have a great game playing experience.

One big shift that users will have to get used is the shift of the old tab navigator, which was at the top. This has now been converted to a 'Task Manager', at the bottom of the screen. This was done to simplify the design of the user interface.

This version launches the Chess960 game variant, which has become very popular on the web. Other websites require that users pay for premium membership in order to enjoy Chess960 - but at ChessCube, once again, we will be including this variant as part of our free service. Even when we launch ChessCube Premium in January 2009, we will not be charging for our basic playing services such as Chess960.

We anticipate launching the new version 3 service on 23 September 2008. As always, when there is such a big shift in design and architecture, we anticipate some bugs in the first few days of the launch - but the team will be on standby to swat any bugs that appear.

We hope you enjoy the new version as much as we have in our testing groups and feel free to log any issues you may encounter.

ChessCube Reaches 85 000 users

There has been phenomenal growth in the ChessCube service over the last 2 months - and we are breaking our own internal records on an almost daily basis:

• Registered user base has hit 85,000
• Peak concurrent users hit 440
• Average online users is over 300
• Over 15,000 games being played per day
• Over 2,000 downloads of our ChessCube Cinema application

In order to cope with the increased load demand on the ChessCube servers we have spent a great deal of time optimizing our services on the server as well as on the client (web application). Through a number of optimizations and functionality changes, we have dropped our daily server bandwidth usage down from 50 gig per day to about 32 gigs per day, which is phenomenal. We have also distributed our server across 5 separate machines - and we have plans to increase that to a far greater number as we grow.

Today is an important day for us as we will be launching a commercial version of ChessCube Cinema. We will be launching a series of 3 x Andrew Martin videos over the next 2 weeks at $20 per video.

We hope you enjoy these master-class videos as much as we enjoyed making them.