Polish users cut off from TalkChess

[mclane]

I find it sad that people from all over the world are blocked . They are interested in computerchess and should be able to reach this forum without any limits.

We did this forum for computerchess enthusiasts.

[Dann Corbit]

I am not seeing the "Your Move Chess And Games" as the bad guys here.
They have been hosting this forum for decades with no compensation.
When was the last time you purchased something from them?
Hosting a server costs real money and effort. And what is their return?

To me, the real enemy here is whoever it was that hacked them so bad they had to cut off a giant range of IP addresses.

Nobody want to deal with a denial of service attack or worse for day after day. They would not have cut off a giant swath like that if whoever the winging twit/twits were had not been a moving target.

We're lucky they didn't just kick the plug out of the wall and call it good.
Sure, there are lots of ways it could be better. But the staying power says something about its value.

IMO-YMMV

[chrisw]

I am not seeing the "Your Move Chess And Games" as the bad guys here.
They have been hosting this forum for decades with no compensation.
When was the last time you purchased something from them?
Hosting a server costs real money and effort. And what is their return?

Some percentage of their turnover, obviously.

To me, the real enemy here is whoever it was that hacked them so bad they had to cut off a giant range of IP addresses.

Nobody want to deal with a denial of service attack or worse for day after day. They would not have cut off a giant swath like that if whoever the winging twit/twits were had not been a moving target.

We're lucky they didn't just kick the plug out of the wall and call it good.

There was a highly active forum for computer chess before the retailer here hijacked it onto their site in 1997 (as the internet replacement for control of the marketplace via the Computer chess reports thing) and there would be a forum if the retailer “pulled the plug”. If they did it without warning, users would engage in a flurry of addictive activity and migrate or establish something else.
Your concern for the retailer is touching, if misplaced, and “hacking” activities, if any, take place because it is a commercial site with transactions taking place.

Sure, there are lots of ways it could be better. But the staying power says something about its value.

IMO-YMMV

[mclane]

Exactly. The forum belongs to the participants and computerchess enthusiasts, chess programmer, freaks, testers, ...
The host , the commercial company, is allowed to put it onto its server as long as the participants want it.

But if the access of computerchess enthusiasts and programmers is not guaranteed anymore and people are blocked,
the whole situation makes no sense anymore.

[Ovyron]

If people want a free VPN to access Talkchess I recommend SoftEther VPN, I've been able to use it to bypass blocks of videos in my country, and yes, when you can watch videos it's because it's very fast and transparent.

[yurikvelo]

If it would be my decision, and I am one of the founders who founded the forum in 1997,
I would evacuate the whole forum to a host that is not blocking IP addresses.

USA is no country anymore that guarantees freedom.

If you see HTTP message 403 Forbidden - it is guaranteed that host is not blocking your IP address.

it is web-site admin configuration:
* either in phpBB PHP scripts (header('HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden'); exit;)
* either in .htaccess (or other equivalent if not Apache)
* httpd.conf or it's include parts

It's pure founders' decision to add lines of this code into web site configuration, not related to hosting

possibly there were some kind of abuse from some IP (e.g. creating multiple accounts for scam or DDoS) and person in charge of website just added IP/mask to web-site configuration

[Ras]

It's pure founders' decision to add lines of this code into web site configuration, not related to hosting

I think what you're missing is that talkchess.com is side-hosted for free on the webspace of chessusa.com instead of a paid dedicated webspace hoster. That's where the hosting issues come from. It's also why Talkchess ridiculously still runs without https (blasting the login passwords around in clear text) although the free Let's Encrypt has been available for years.

[nabildanial]

I can't browse the site thru my Singapore-based VPN.

[nabildanial]

It's pure founders' decision to add lines of this code into web site configuration, not related to hosting

Weird if this is intentional, as you can prevent most DDoS attacks using free tier Cloudflare anyways and all people around the world can still reach the website.

[Alexander Schmidt]

There are so many methods. Where's the problem ?

Blocking IP ranges will always prevent some from joining here. And it is more or less useless, because the "bad guys" do also know about the "methods".