In the last few weeks this problem started cropping up for me. Before that, the board always gave me a chess.com match within reasonable time (few seconds). Lately, there are times that the board gives me a match just fine, other times it just keeps stuck on the “starting soon” message screen.
I make sure that I have the wifi symbol + the green dot before starting a match. When this problem occurs, I cancel out of it after a few minutes. When I then retry, it never seems to give me a match and just repeatedly shows me the “starting soon” message. The only way out of this is to switch off the board and to try later. Normally, 15 minutes later or so, the board will give me a match just fine again. So, not completely broken, but annoying to be unable to connect when you want to play.
Then, today, I encountered the following scenario. This might help to shed some light on the problem:
- Switched on the board, waited for wifi + green dot, started a chess.com match (rapid 15:10, which is my normal time format)
- Got the “starting soon” screen.
- Cancelled after 2 minutes or so.
- Tried to start a match again, did not work.
- Switched the board off and on again and started a match.
- This time I got a match. I was black. I never saw whites first move, but got a “This connection was closed. Please continue on another device” message. → This is the interesting part to me, as it seems there are some communication issues with the server(s). I don’t think my internet/wifi is the problem. I’m on a fiber link with a decent wifi setup. My network dashboard showed no disruptions or signal issues at the time of the match.
- I left the board on, and played the match on my Android tablet.
- Now comes another interesting bit: I played the match and won (yay!). When I did, the board did its LED animation. Which is very interesting, as it was still showing the message that the connection had been closed. So apparently there was still a connection?
And then comes the other interesting thing: While my tablet showed correctly that I had won the match, the board shows that I lost. This is probably a separate, unrelated, bug. But it could also be that a failure in negotiation of what side I was playing could have caused the disconnect?
See the attached pictures for what the board and the tablet showed. The chess.com match ID is Chess: Rostami_amir054 vs Caelarius - Chess.com
