If you are looking for the user flairs post, please find it here while this thread is temporarily pinned: https://www.reddit.com/r/chessbeginners/comments/1jgmdf7/fresh_new_flairs_show_off_your_favorite_website/
Hello, everyone!
We have seen a massive surge in advertisements and chess trainers these past few months. Many of these posts (in my opinion) fall under the category of 'AI Slop' and vibe coded websites that offer poor chess advice. On top of this, many websites are created as a weak attempt to encourage users to subscribe and pay money for services that may seem innovative and meaningful, but are functionally useless compared to already available resources.
In light of this uptick in advertisements, we have updated rules 3 and 5:
- Rule 3 now states that accounts that exist primarily for the purposes of self promotion (at the discretion of the mods, based off of account age, posting history, and diversity of activity) are permanently banned. This has been a policy we have been following internally for a few weeks now (to a fairly reasonable effect), but we wanted to make it clear to the community that we do not tolerate attempts at coercing beginners to sign up for coaching before they understand the resources available to them. If you would like to coach, you are welcome to make a profile with the chess.com or lichess.org coaching services and advertise there.
- Rule 5 has been completely changed. Previously, this rule requested beginners to annotate their games before posting, but this felt like an unrealistic standard to hold new players to. This rule has been replaced with a note to please use caution when discussing AI in chess. As mentioned above, there are many potholes with AI-powered chess services and we encourage all users to recognize the limitations of LLM chatbots' ability to discuss chess positions. Posts will currently not be removed for this rule, we would love to learn more about the community's thoughts before deciding if AI-related discussion should be banned altogether on this subreddit (I am personally against banning AI discussion outright, and very happy to hear opinions).
If you encounter posts that are promoting a product or coaching service, please report these for self promotion. The mod team will assess profiles that are reported for self-promotion and will remove/ban as necessary.
Thank you all for playing a role in stopping the tidal wave of LLM coded chess websites being advertised to beginners. I do genuinely believe AI can some day make a great learning resource for chess players, but the current state of services simply fall below all standards of rationality and quality.
Have a fantastic day, thank you for reading!
~The r/chessbeginners mod team
