English Chess Forum

Is anyone aware of a cunning method to send an email to each member of one's Lichess Team?

Hampshire Junior Chess Association has 115 members but it would appear that one may only message them when they are logged on to Lichess.

Hopefully I will be proved incorrect!

John Upham wrote: ↑

Sun Jan 16, 2022 6:08 pm

Is anyone aware of a cunning method to send an email to each member of one's Lichess Team?

Hampshire Junior Chess Association has 115 members but it would appear that one may only message them when they are logged on to Lichess.

Hopefully I will be proved incorrect!

I use "MESSAGE ALL MEMBERS" which is on our team homepage although not all players accept incoming messages.

It's a bit of an ongoing issue using chess servers which are not at all designed for team events to do competitions on and end up putting a load of unnecessary extra work onto captains having to relay messages and information manually- the best places to play matches would actually be correspondence chess servers if they were willing to reduce their time limits, as neither lichess nor chess.com are really suitable for the task in their current state.

Yes, have to agree there. It wouldn't be remotely hard stuff for them to add either, they just clearly (still) don't think its at all important.

It would seem to be a breach of data protection - joining a lichess team doesn't constitute permission to release a personal email address. And given there are many teenage and pre-teenage children on the site I can think of lots of good reasons why lichess or similar sites should not facilitate the ability to send messages to personal email accounts.

Joseph Conlon wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 17, 2022 11:02 am

It would seem to be a breach of data protection - joining a lichess team doesn't constitute permission to release a personal email address. And given there are many teenage and pre-teenage children on the site I can think of lots of good reasons why lichess or similar sites should not facilitate the ability to send messages to personal email accounts.

I suppose that if team members refuse to confirm that they are eligible to play for that team then they should be removed from the team.

We are attempting to make contact potential new members of our EPSCA and other OTB teams and its important that we know who they are and that they are eligible to represent Hampshire. They would be contacted by a Team Leader. Perhaps this is far too risky and dangerous?

An easy fix in this case would be if lichess made it so all messages sent by team leaders get received by their team regardless of privacy settings - obviously we live in a digital world where we are bombarded by spam and nefarious messages so have to be guarded but it feels like too many people have taken this to the extreme by blocking all incoming messages which causes more problems then it solves.

John Upham wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 17, 2022 11:39 am

Joseph Conlon wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 17, 2022 11:02 am

It would seem to be a breach of data protection - joining a lichess team doesn't constitute permission to release a personal email address. And given there are many teenage and pre-teenage children on the site I can think of lots of good reasons why lichess or similar sites should not facilitate the ability to send messages to personal email accounts.

I suppose that if team members refuse to confirm that they are eligible to play for that team then they should be removed from the team.

We are attempting to make contact potential new members of our EPSCA and other OTB teams and its important that we know who they are and that they are eligible to represent Hampshire. They would be contacted by a Team Leader. Perhaps this is far too risky and dangerous?

With LiChess or chess.com clubs I ask anyone applying to confirm their full real name, ECF membership, eligibility to join the relevant team etc After that, messages are informing them of the weekly team battles, albeit that information can be found on the team homepage. I/we don't have access to a personal e-mail address unless requested for a specific event. For OTB events then a personal e-mail address may be necessary but probably best that it's a parent if the player is under 18.