Pawnstructures: Angry and disappointed Lichess Coach

I am extremely disappointed with Lichess's decision to remove all coach reviews without any prior discussions between the Lichess staff / Coaches. I received an email today informing me about this change, and I must say that I am quite frustrated. Although coaching is not my full-time occupation, I have dedicated a significant amount of time and effort over the past three years to accumulate positive reviews on this platform. It is disheartening to see Lichess erase three years' worth of hard work simply because they couldn't find a more suitable solution to address this problem with fake reviews. I they had given some kind of notice i would have saved the reviews to publish on my own website. While I personally can cope with this situation, I can't help but empathize with full-time coaches who have made a substantial commitment to working on the Lichess platform. For them, this change could be truly devastating. It is disappointing that Lichess did not provide an avenue to respond to their email or establish communications with coaches, so I feel compelled to express my sentiments here. I want the Lichess staff and users to understand the profound impact this action has on dedicated coaches who have put in countless hours of hard work. A more effective solution would have involved deleting reviews from closed accounts and manually removing positive reviews lacking clear motivation. For affected coaches wishing you all the best. For Lichess staff: do better. Regards, Richard.

It was like all those celebrity signed pictures are gone, who had dined in that Burger house. Just like that.

"simply because they couldn't find a more suitable solution to address this problem with fake reviews"

I mean what should they do instead? You offer the solution to hand pick reviews, are you willing to go over them and spend your time on this? Or do you expect that they allocate resources from donations to pay someone doing it?

Sharing your frustration seems ok, but picking on the lichess staff, I don't know man...

I would expect them to allocate resources to automate that when an account is closed all reviews from that account is deleted. Let's say all Coaches would pay let's say 50 USD yearly to maintain a listing as a coach and that fee would be earmarked to cover costs to solve some basic issues like this. I wouldn't be against that and without knowing the exact number i would guestimate there are around 1000 coaches listed here. / Richard

Hmm I start to see how valuable this is for you. I hope that the staff picks up on this constructive approach and you get a response. All the best!

(Side thoughts: Not all coaches will want to pay, but on the other hand it's not a huge task to care for the entries. But it's tedious, so I get lichess why they want to avoid bloating their operations)

Very disappointed too. Harming the good actors blindly can't be a solution.
Why don't just to initiate a move, threaten to close the bad actors acccounts ? It's not a perfect solution neither, but it's a start.
Then there are some variants to be explored (ID check to submit a review, minimum number of games to submit a review etc.).

Anyway, a useful reminder that once again, one should diversify.

It would have been helpful to have 1-day notice so coaches would have been able to save their coach pages into the google time machine.

Let's hope they still have the errased data.

Hi, I don't know if it can be of any use, but I found a snapshot of your coach profile from august '22.
http://web.archive.org/web/20220818071420/https://lichess.org/coach/Pawnstructures

Thanks, i appreciate the effort, i don't think Lichess staff understand the value if you work with a student for months and then get a detailed review and Lichess decides with a push of a button to delete it (all of them) without prior heads-up. / Richard