Hello, people of r/chess! We, your friendly neighborhood tyrants moderators, would like your thoughts and opinions on the present rule titled "Low-effort submissions are not allowed." This rule is used to remove a variety of things such as: Memes, unannotated games, pictures of chess sets, rating graphs/achievement posts, screenshots of chat logs or questions about basic rules. With the recent rise in chess popularity, our subreddit has experienced tremendous growth in the number of users, (We recently hit 600k members!!). Thus it is the perfect time to revisit this rule so that the mods are better equipped to deal with the increase in traffic. More specifically, we would like your thoughts on the following types of posts.

1) Repetitive posts

The situation: A lot of people want to post questions like "How do I get better at chess?", "What openings should I play?", "Why does the engine say this move is bad/good?, "What should I do in this position?" as well as post about their achievement/milestone: "I just hit (X) rating" or "I just beat a strong player/GM/My dad".

The problem: When the posts are just a screenshot or an image, it's a fairly easy call to remove them as low-effort. But some text posts spark some discussion, so we (mods) occasionally find ourselves disagreeing over what falls under this category, since we have no strict definition of what constitutes low-effort.

Possible solutions: Adding clear, coherent parameters on what counts as low-effort, expanding the FAQ, having mega-threads/discussion threads where people can ask these questions or share their achievements.

2) Unannotated Games

The situation: A lot of people naturally want to share their games and /r/chess seems like an obvious choice. By far most want to post either an animated GIF or a link to the game on chess.com/Lichess with no commentary on moves, alternative lines, etc.

The problem: Our current requirements ("If you post your own games, you need to provide your own analysis, for example using the Lichess study feature. Automatic computer analysis does not count.") make it so that only a few people ever go through with it. Beginners are unlikely to know what an annotated game looks like.

Possible solutions: Lowering the threshold for what counts as "Annotated", specific threads/days where people can share links to their games.

3) Art and Chess Sets

The situation: Even if people don't play chess, the natural place they come to with chess-related artwork or pictures of nice chess sets here.

The problem: We currently remove any chess set that doesn't seem to have historical value and redirect people to /r/chessporn (Safe for work). Yet this post had 100 upvotes when it was removed. So should we allow chess sets? (which may mean there'll be many posts of similar looking chess sets).

When it comes to artwork it's also tricky. Is a simple pencil doodle the same as the work of a professional illustrator as far as what should be allowed? How about AI art?

Possible solutions: Having specific days of the week where people can share art/chessboards.

4) Chess.com Support Complaints

The situation: We've recently been inundated with complaints from Chess.com users regarding the website's recent server issues.

The problem: These posts tend to be repetitive and fill up the subreddit 'New' queue very quickly, and as a subreddit we are in no position to do anything about the complaints since we have no affiliation with Chess.com. But in a larger sense, this becomes an issue whenever users post to the subreddit asking about a Chess.com-related support issue. And if there is a major outage / event outside the norm, people will want to discuss it.

Possible solutions: Removing such posts and telling people to contact the Chess.com support team, or leaving one post up and redirecting subsequent complaints to it, or allowing everything.

​

These are the stuff that we need your opinions on. Feel free to share your thoughts on all these topics, or general complaints/suggestions for the mods. After two weeks, we will be conducting a vote to decide on the updated rules.

Cheers!

• The Mods