ChessCube shut it's doors

[Peter Ackley]

Just gone to log in for a quick game/two and noticed the announcement that ChessCube has shut it's doors.

Must admit I didn't go on often, and had noticed that the number of active players had shrunk, but it's still a bit of a surprise as there were no obvious notices about this (that I saw).

[Joey Stewart]

I liked chesscube but it had some sort of fatal exploit in the site code where people could forcibly disconnect you from a game, and a lot of cheats figured this out and ruined it. Was fun to be able to play and win prizes though- I had about $500 worth of their site currency at one point

[Richard Thursby]

...some sort of fatal exploit in the site code...

According to Wikipedia it was running on Adobe Flash, which is disabled by default on modern browsers (Firefox and Chrome). Possibly faced with having to rewrite the site in another language, I can understand why they might have decided to pull the plug.

[David Sedgwick]

... it was running on Adobe Flash, which is disabled by default on modern browsers (Firefox and Chrome).

Adobe Flash is alleged to be dangerous.

I have been using it for ten years without either me or my laptops coming to any harm. I shall miss it when it's gone.

For the moment, however, I continue to use it on IE11 and Microsoft Edge.

[Paul McKeown]

Adobe Flash is a decade past its technological bury by date, and anyone who has ever worked in providing internet mediated front ends to servers is heartily glad that it has not only been killed but a stake has finally been put through its undead heart.

Incidentally, Chesscube is not the only chess server to fold due to the difficulty in the transition from Flash to HTML5.

instantchess.com has also folded for the same reason. No doubt there are others.

[Jon Mahony]

It was a nice looking site, but to be honest I always thought it was crap for playing on.

Blitz games don't even bother - I remember entering tournaments on a Sunday and I would be playing away with a time advantage and eventually my opponents' clock would hit zero but the game would not end and he could still keep making moves. I was never so similarly gifted though, my time would be ticking away and when my flag went I would just loose on time. I always thought it was people with a poor internet connection suffering lag issues, but it may have been the aforementioned exploit in play.

Why anyone would take the trouble to do this I have no idea I could understand if money or something was involved, but not for Chess.

[Michael Farthing]

My memory of the clock problem was that if I made a move the opponent's clock started decreasing immediately but this was being calculated locally on, I assume, a Java script. If I had lost connection to the server then my opponent and the server were still waiting for my move and they were running my clock down. On reconnection there would be a sudden readjustment of both clocks back to the server version.

[Jon Mahony]

Yeah, I'm sure a lot of the clock problems were server related rather than people cheating. I do remember one specific time though when I was playing a Spanish guy and he had about 10 seconds on his clock to my 45, then out of nowhere another 1.30 got added onto his clock out of nowhere. I remember saying in the chat box "WTF?" and he just replied "Jajajaja!!" so I did suspect something funny going on there, and it was around that time I gave up on the site in favour of Chess.com - either way Blitz is unplayable without the fundamental of a functioning clock.

[Steven DuCharme]

https://www.chesscube.org you are welcome

[Adam Raoof]

https://www.chesscube.org you are welcome

Sadly flagged instantly as a suspicious site by my mobile!

Adam

[Richard Thursby]

https://www.chesscube.org you are welcome

Sadly flagged instantly as a suspicious site by my mobile!

Adam

The security certificate is self-signed; hence flagged as dangerous. Switch the protocol to http: rather than https: (so you simply have a warning in the address bar in desktop browsers).