CHESS is free?

@zembrianator re being able to play on chess.com for free. There's free and there's free. Lichess's free is different to chess.com's free.

Chess.com lets you play without directly paying money, but you pay with your data and privacy. They track you, collect your data and sell it via ads.

Lichess doesn't track you or collect your data.

@h2b2 Wait, what the... are there supposed to be ads? I usually just jump on chess.com app and play blitz games. Either that, or from computer, login, browse forums, play some blitz in the browser and never noticed any ads.

Apparently there is a spot for them top right in forums (see screenshot, it even says "remove ads"), but i see it as blank. I'm on a windows comp, mozilla firefox, (never installed an ad blocker, just whatever Firefox already comes with).
I have a free account on chess.com

Oh wait I just figured it out. I have firefox set to "Never remember history" and that apparently stops the chess.com ads. I changed it to "Remember history", restarted firefox, and there were ads.

No need to pay for a diamond membership when you have 1) ad-block and 2) lichess, which has all diamond membership privileges minus the money.

@zembrianator firefox has some anti tracking protection on by default which might block some ads i guess, I'm not really sure, but it's an arms race and it's never going to be perfect. The ad companies job is to track you and collect data about you and they're pretty good at it.

I don't know how remember history being set to off would block ads.

My point still stands, you pay for chess.com with your data and privacy, so I don't consider it free. If you're happy to pay their price then go for it. I just wanted to mention how it wasn't really free.