Hints at the right moment

The platform has grown a lot of features — game analysis, pre-move, Puzzle Rush, mistakes journal, opening trainers. Some of them are easy to miss: they're not on the home screen, and when you actually need them, no one is around to point them out. The usual fix is an onboarding tour at first login — but tours are annoying upfront and forgotten within a day.

We went a different route — contextual hints. A small popover attaches to the element it talks about, and it appears exactly when that feature is likely to help. Not on every screen, not «on first login», but based on what you're doing. You've played three blitz games in a row — a hint about pre-move in settings. You opened your own game and stared at it for five minutes — the «start analysis» button gets a one-line nudge. You came back to puzzles after a week off — a reminder about Puzzle Rush.

A concrete example from this release. On the analysis page there's a built-in Stockfish engine that runs directly in your browser (WASM). Convenient — no external software required — but the browser caps how fast it can think. If you start the built-in engine three times in a row, a hint appears: «there's a faster way — connect a bridge to local Stockfish on your computer». That option used to be easy to miss entirely; now the suggestion shows up exactly for the people who would benefit from it.

Technically the hints work on a «rules are data» principle. The admin stores a short description: under what conditions to show, which element to attach to, what text to display. Product and marketing edit the rules themselves — no releases, no deploys. Your behaviour — pages you open, features you use — goes into a separate analytics channel, and the rules engine matches that against the configured conditions.

This channel only runs with your consent. The cookie banner has a dedicated checkbox — «Analytics for personalised hints» — off by default. Without it, hints simply don't show, and behaviour events aren't stored. Whatever was collected can be wiped — there's a button in profile settings; for guests, a separate «forget me» request. So hints don't turn into spam, there are platform-wide limits: at most one hint every ten minutes, no more than five a day. Any hint can be dismissed with a cross, and it won't come back.

One thing to be clear about — this analytics channel is strictly for hints. Games, moves, chat messages, FEN positions, comments — none of that lives there, and none of it depends on the consent checkbox. That's how the platform works regardless: your game is played, your rating is recalculated, your history is saved. The consent is only about the extra channel — the one needed to make a popover appear at the right time.