New Chess Site

Chesshood is a new correspondence and forums site that has only just recently launched.  The site says you can play correspondence chess, share photos and videos and create your own group or join others. I did not see much activity on the forum or in the games section.

The playing section:

From the Admin: Hello all, I would like to tackle an extremely sensitive subject as far as online chess is concerned! What to do with engine users? Well i have come up with a solution that may resolve this issue. Rather than banning them straight away, I have decided that Engine users will be allowed to play ONLY in specific tournaments! and against other Engines. So to put this in place, members wishing to use their software will see apposed next to their username a little icon. Now however anyone caught using an engine and not been honest enough about it (not displaying the icon) will be banned fair enough?

      At present there appears to be only 9 active players with 23 active games but they have been online for playing chess only a couple of days.  Also, there areno tournaments active at the moment and 20 or so players have open challenges and none of them have played any games yet.  Why don’t they play each other?!  From what I was able to gather, only two games have been completed and in both cases one of the players resigned without playing any moves. You start out with 1500 points with a gain/loss of 18 points.  As of today only two players are shown on the rating list, both rated 1500.

      They also have a chat room on the playing site that auto-refreshes every 5 seconds no matter what you set the refresh rate to; this makes it very difficult to read the comments.  This is a known bug that the admin will fix. 

      All in all, the site appears to have potential if enough people decide to participate in the forums and, more importantly, play there.