There are so many thoughtful and insightful messages in this thread. I’m proud to ride with many of you and know that collectively we can get this fixed! Keep it up everyone!
Chat stopped working properly after the TdZ-related bug fix to improve performance in events with thousands and thousands of riders. Presumably something was done to further reduce the visibility of other riders in the backend (outside the nearest 100) and the chat messages went away as a side effect.
3R ride leader and its pretty much chaos now on the rides I lead. Since the ill-fated update the chat has been funky and the beacon buggy.
I’ve started rides with group ride participants not being able to see the beacon for the first few minutes even though I’m right there with them. Riders not seeing my messages as the beacon and me not seeing there’s. This creates a level of disassociation with the group and I’ve had riders complain about the beacon’s lack of participation. Then I also end up seeing messages from outside the group, even a runners group.
Each time I lead a group with this new chaos makes me just want to stop leading. It’s tough enough hearding the masses when things are functioning, but right now it kind of feels like a waste of time.
Next lead is Sunday at 10am EST, let’s see how it goes…
Hi all,
If you commented here, please be sure to also create a Zwift support ticket.
Chris Snook, Zwift’s Senior PR person, recently said the following in Cycling Weekly:
“The community however, is really what makes Zwift unique. We are lucky to have a highly engaged community on Zwift and it’s this community that brings the virtual environment to life."
“Our community runs the majority of events on Zwift including social rides, training rides, races and even fondo events."
"Indeed it’s largely thanks to our community informally organising these events in game during the early stages of our development that we now have official events pages.”
Let’s ask them to be accountable in making sure the community that they acknowledge helped them become a racing and events platform can continue to function properly.
A ticket is definitely a good idea, but I’m not sure if it’ll be enough with no acknowledgement at this point.
We have 3R, BMTR, KISS, DIRT, Cryo-Gen in this thread, at least — that’s a lot of community riding right there. Can we nab a couple more of the organizers and figure out if there’s a way to get a joint statement/request to ZHQ?
Agreed Rue, I suggested that as well in an earlier post above. I think an organized outreach from event leaders would be most effective, and those of us followers should also submit support tickets.
I’ll add I’ve seen chat issues (as have others) on Herd rides as well @rue
Along with beacon issues - i.e. multiple people haven’t seen me as the red beacon in the ride even though I am showing in game with it over my avatar. Appears to be no rhyme or reason to who sees what these days.
Indeed! Sorry, I missed that entirely — we probably should’ve done that back then already 
Checking in to see if any resolve yet but sadly no. Again on today’s BMTR rides the same chat issues persist. As a sweeper it is extremely difficult and disappointing. Sadly it is taking the fun out of the whole experience for so many of us.
Still seeing the same issues - led 2 REVO rides this week and when its a large group like today’s with over 350, its really hard when i can’t see the chat from everyone. I will see about having us submit a ticket also as people seem to think it might help get traction on the issue. I didn’t have a red beacon today which makes it even harder to take care of anyone off the back.
Adding Herd and REVO to the list — and I know other organizers are not having it any easier — seems like this is a pretty sizeable part of zwift riders represented. There must be some way we can get these concerns raised.
An open letter with signatories from organizers probably won’t quite cut it, but a start unless someone has better ideas?
How many tickets, conversations with staff at zwift and posts in this forum are required to even get acknowledgment from zwift staff on this issue. Even just a, “we hear you…”
Are these forums monitored by zwift staff?
I don’t know of another business that ignores customers like this…23 days since originally posted.
Now experiencing the opposite in the ZRL PD start pens, chat from some unrelated event is somehow leaking through…
I tweeted @GoZwift and within a few hours finally got a response to my support ticket. Probably a coincidence.
"Thanks for contacting Zwift Support!
It looks like you’ve run into the server issues we’re currently experiencing.
Please know that we’re diligently working to get things up and running and hope to have everything back online soon."
I got a less than satisfying reply to my ticket today speculating that the issues might be my internet connection or the possibility that I hadn’t updated my software lately. My Wi-Fi connection is rated “excellent” and it’s the updates that caused the problem. It really didn’t sound like the customer service agent had read my email about what the problems were at all but was simply working off boiler script of how to respond to any tech issues. Doesn’t leave me very hopeful for a speedy resolution…sigh. I will keep my eye on this thread but will likely take time to do more focused workouts until they get the group rides back together, probably the motivation I needed to get a bit more disciplined lol.
Thank you, everyone, for reaching out to Zwift about the issue! I hope what everyone is doing will prompt them to get it fixed sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, I will take advantage of the problem and pretend that I cannot see @M_cRib_servio’s jokes. 
Continuing the theme of incompetent responses, here’s my mine …
I can certainly understand your frustrations with group chat missing but we’re happy to help! I took a look over your account and noticed that you’re using an out of date version of the Zwift Companion app on your phone. I’d like you to try updating your app to see if that resolves your issues.
Phone is on auto-update, always gets updates within hours of a post from Zwift here. And I dont even use the phone much anyway as chat is too small and mini-map rarely comes up.
Chat from a different event showing again today…
On our Saturday BMTR century rides we see chats from runners. It seems that we can see theirs, but they cannot see ours. 
Eric Min joined us at KISS at Base this morning and listened to some of the concerns that regular members of the group had regarding the chat problems. Eric experienced the impact the changes have had on our group rides as well. Thanks for letting us bend an ear @Eric and thanks for your commitment to help fix this problem!