Dear Chessable members,
Today we would like to announce the removal of a couple of features to combat feature bloat. Don’t worry though, there are many positive things on the flip side and I would like to tell you a bit more about this.
Throughout Chessable’s history we have released quite a few features. Some have been very well received, but some others have lacked the adoption and impact we thought they’d have. As our learning community grows, it is important to have a feature set that makes sense for all. This doesn’t always mean adding new features, but also deciding which ones to keep, which ones to remove.
The problem is that every feature adds extra complexity in many different ways. This complexity can make it harder to develop new features, features that may be better received and more useful.Moreover, having a lot of features can also make it harder for users to understand the platform and for us to explain the possibilities.
Because of these reasons, we had to take these steps today. First, FastTrack – a feature that allowed you to skip some spaced repetition levels is now gone. In it’s place we have the Custom Scheduling for you to customise spacing between your repetitions to your heart’s content. The features are not exactly alike, but they are very similar. We wanted to keep only the more powerful one, custom scheduling.
Second, Ask a Master (for rubies) is now gone. The rationale for this one is twofold. It was never used by more than a handful of people. Sometimes when it was used, it was misused as people thought the actual authors would be there to reply (this was never the case). It simply was not working out. If you had any pending questions, your rubies would have automatically been returned to you.
We at Chessable really would like that all the comments on EVERY course get answered, whether they get an “ask a master” or not. Therefore, instead of investing more resources to improve the Ask a Master feature, we will invest more to encourage and making it easier for authors to reply. We will also invest more resources to grow our in-house team of titled players that can answer your question (regardless of Ask a Master status or not).
We grew the team from a single non-titled team member to three titled players that are making the rounds and answering comments in a systematic way. Currently this process is being ramped up for all Publishing House material, where our team is hard at work answering all your comments. For any popular course where the authors maybe overwhelmed with demand, we will upgrade that course (or author) to Publishing House status so that our team may help the author address comments. We are very excited about being able to do this, essentially, any comment on the majority of popular Chessable courses, becomes an Ask a Master comment. We are here to help you on your chess journey.
