Thanks - we are taking a look now.
We are having an intermittent issue with game seeking on certain accounts and it is now #1 bug to fix. So we will get it resolved soon and post an update when you should expect the fix to publish.
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Awesome thank you Jeff.
The last 5 days have been flawless for me Jeff. Just wanted to pass along. Not sure if something was done on back end or anything.
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Thanks for reporting. Our software team is actively working on this now so yes some changes have been made. Still more work to come.
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Jeff, just wanted to let you know I am happy with search the last few weeks. Sometimes it seems long still and Iāve restarted a few times but it could be on the chess.(com) end. Hasnāt slowed me down from using the board.
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Good to hear - thanks for reporting back
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 āstarting soonā 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 āstarting soonā 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 āstarting soonā 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 āThis connection was closed. Please continue on another deviceā message. ā This is the interesting part to me, as it seems there are some communication issues with the server(s). I donāt think my internet/wifi is the problem. Iām 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
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Thanks for the detailed report - that helps us troubleshoot.
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Hi, I have also had this issue since I got the board 2 weeks ago and it makes it borderline unusable. Iāve tried waiting for the green pawn and it is not helping. Perhaps Iāve been added to the bad sportsmanship pool due to previous confusion. FWIW, I have never switched off the board mid seek, although the account I am using with the board is brand new.
I have a few suggestions as a fellow engineer (and would love to help for free if I got access to source):
- If the user needs to wait to see the green pawn before issuing a seek, perhaps the UI should block the user from doing so (or, show some kind of error to the user).
- It might be helpful to show the status of the seek while it is ongoing, and the userās connectivity during the seek (the seek in progress UI hides connectivity status). Does chesscom allow you to query that the seek was actually received on their servers, and the current seek status? In the event that a game was started but the board somehow missed that signal or had a broken websocket, does chesscom allow you to set up a new websocket or query if the game was started after the fact? I have waited several minutes before and concluded that the seek was either no longer active (timed out/game started) or was never issued. I think this state should be queried and reflected in the UI so that the user is not left waiting indefinitely.
- Does chesscom have rate limits, and are we possibly hitting them? The UI can easily block the user from hitting rate limits if so.
- Does hitting the ācancelā button during a seek actually cancel the request with chesscom? I am worried that it does not, or that the cancellation is lost whenever there are connectivity issues, leading to being added to the bad sportsmanship pool.
- When the game starts, it might help to flash the lights on the board once. After waiting for 1 minute+ and becoming distracted, it is easy to miss the game start leading to the game being aborted. Also, it is confusing that the timer is not shown as started when you have white, even though it is ticking down on chesscom.
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I think Iām having a similar issue. I can get games instantly on chess.com on my iPad. But on the chessup2 50% of the time I just get a āconnecting soonā screen but nothing happens, or a game launches and then crashes and I get a message to continue on a different device.
Sameā¦more often than not, I am stuck on the āstarting soonā screen indefinitely
Dear @Jeff,
Hope you and your team are all doing fine, and many thanks for all the great work you are all doing, i love my ChessUp 2 board, and all the improvements you are doing 
.
Iām actually trying to have an on-line Chesscom game with an opponent, and the board is into aāStarting Soonā loop since over 30 minutes. This behavior happens 90% of the time, and it also happens wanting to play against bots, not all the time for bots, but quite often.
Question : Would it be possible to include a āreturn to menuā button, on the waiting screen, instead of having to power off the board and having to restart over ?
With kind Regards,
Sam
@SamCodfish this is happening for me as well, except for me it is 100% of the time. I have not been able to start a single chess.com game through the board 
- and when I try to do Chessup games, the connection keeps dropping between me and my opponent to where one of us ends up resigning. I love the hardware, so I hope these quirks will get worked out 
Team is working on the recent connection issues right now - This is getting fixed ASAP.
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@Jeff this seems to be rock solid now, thanks for the fast fix!
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I am having the same problem described originally with games not happening after itās been searching for several minutes. I was happy with the game I got to play yesterday which took a minute to load up but have had no luck once I got home today.
If I can send any information over let me know.
after about an hour off following a couple of the YouTube videos I reset my board and forced the same update to it. Then I re-logged into my chess account and waited to join a match that said unable to be found, backed out fully to the main screen and waited for the chess piece to pop up clicked on chess .com and have been able to get somewhat consistent matches. Only thing I need to do between matches is leave and wait for the chess piece to appear.
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Have you tried to logout from the chesscom app before using the board? I noticed some improvement since i did that (android app). Maybe the app, as itās connected all the time, makes some disturbance when you connect chesscom using the boardā¦
I had a new issue today.
The game connection on board just randomly shut down, but the game was live via chess.com - this time the board didnāt even tell me to use another device, it just closed the connection and asked if I wanted to search again.