Polish users cut off from TalkChess

[PK]

Most of the time I cannot log in through my VPN. This is a rare moment when I can. And I am going to use it to write that as long as this situation persists, I will not post on this forum. My lifelong habit was to avoid discriminatory environments, and TalkChess became one of them. I will never accept "solutions" such as being forced to send my IP for verification or using additional tools in order to post.

[mclane]

Pawel this is a very sad news.
IMO an international computerchess forum needs open access for people from all over the world.
The situation as it is in the moment is not acceptable.

The problem is IMO that those members who Have access here seem not really much interested in the fact that others cannot access talkchess.

Thanks for your message. Maybe we can find a solution .

[Daniel Shawul]

Most of the time I cannot log in through my VPN. This is a rare moment when I can. And I am going to use it to write that as long as this situation persists, I will not post on this forum. My lifelong habit was to avoid discriminatory environments, and TalkChess became one of them. I will never accept "solutions" such as being forced to send my IP for verification or using additional tools in order to post.

Totally understandable. I hope talkchess finds a better solution than blocking whole IP of a country.

[BrendanJNorman]

Most of the time I cannot log in through my VPN. This is a rare moment when I can. And I am going to use it to write that as long as this situation persists, I will not post on this forum. My lifelong habit was to avoid discriminatory environments, and TalkChess became one of them. I will never accept "solutions" such as being forced to send my IP for verification or using additional tools in order to post.

Totally understandable. I hope talkchess finds a better solution than blocking whole IP of a country.

As someone who lives in China, and who is also good friends with Pawel, I know how he feels.

It seems people extend their political opinions to the existence of the very forum itself.

If your country is not a good friend of the Western blob of "Allied" nations, you're blocked.

I didn't know the forum was at risk from Polish or Chinese hackers?

P.S. I use Astrill VPN to access this site for a long time already.

[chrisw]

Most of the time I cannot log in through my VPN. This is a rare moment when I can. And I am going to use it to write that as long as this situation persists, I will not post on this forum. My lifelong habit was to avoid discriminatory environments, and TalkChess became one of them. I will never accept "solutions" such as being forced to send my IP for verification or using additional tools in order to post.

Totally understandable. I hope talkchess finds a better solution than blocking whole IP of a country.

As someone who lives in China, and who is also good friends with Pawel, I know how he feels.

It seems people extend their political opinions to the existence of the very forum itself.

If your country is not a good friend of the Western blob of "Allied" nations, you're blocked.

I didn't know the forum was at risk from Polish or Chinese hackers?

P.S. I use Astrill VPN to access this site for a long time already.

Run the forums off three or so mirror sites scattered around the world, no reason one of them can’t be in China (hint), one in US and one in Europe, for example. Are there willing technical members in South America or Africa? Even better. That’s basically a no-ownership situation, which basically has the side effect of returning the forums to the community.

[MikeGL]

Most of the time I cannot log in through my VPN. This is a rare moment when I can. And I am going to use it to write that as long as this situation persists, I will not post on this forum. My lifelong habit was to avoid discriminatory environments, and TalkChess became one of them. I will never accept "solutions" such as being forced to send my IP for verification or using additional tools in order to post.

Totally understandable. I hope talkchess finds a better solution than blocking whole IP of a country.

As someone who lives in China, and who is also good friends with Pawel, I know how he feels.

It seems people extend their political opinions to the existence of the very forum itself.

If your country is not a good friend of the Western blob of "Allied" nations, you're blocked.

I didn't know the forum was at risk from Polish or Chinese hackers?

P.S. I use Astrill VPN to access this site for a long time already.

IMO, using a VPN to coonnect at this site makes us safer since this site is not yet using SSL.
So I don't take it as an offense when some people blocked a bunch of ISP's (mine included) for the past year.
Recently back to normal just a month ago, in my case.
I think they (the forum host managing the server/s) just wanted us to connect with our passwords, posts or
private messages being encrypted first before travelling down the line.
They probably figured out that connecting to a non-SSL server from other continent is risky without using some kind of encryption.
Hence, forcing almost everybody to connect via VPN. Otherwise an impostor, pretending to be you, could be posting damaging messages on this forum.
Nobody wants that.

So blocking some members, while counter-intuitive, is actually a friendly gesture in my opinion because this would force them to use a vpn.

p.s. I know the counter argument to my above post would be, "But my VPN provider located at US (or other country not blocked by talkchess firewall) can also sniff my secrets too" which would make the above security gesture useless. Well, that's a different topic and therefore requries you to chose your vpn provider wisely.

[yorkman]

Still not fixed it seems. It sounds like talkchess is prejudice against Poland and other countries that can't access this site. There is no excuse for this not to be fixed for this long. Well, I say the hell with talkchess. There are other chess sites that don't have problems like this.

[mclane]

It’s horrible. It has to do with the company that hosts the talkchess forum. They block whole countries.
We don’t really know how many computerchess enthusiasts are blocked by these actions.

All complains did not work.

IMO the idea of an international (!!) computerchess forum is now ad absurdum by these circumstances.
We founded this forum in 1997 to allow ALL computerchess enthusiasts to read write into the community.

I still don’t understand why participants accept this kind of handling.


In Covid 19 times computerchess in internet should be OPEN to all friends and enthusiasts.

It’s a pity that people are blocked.
Not all people register that they have to use a VPN .

[Madeleine Birchfield]

Still not fixed it seems. It sounds like talkchess is prejudice against Poland and other countries that can't access this site. There is no excuse for this not to be fixed for this long. Well, I say the hell with talkchess. There are other chess sites that don't have problems like this.

Ed Schroeder has created a new forum at prodeo.actieforum.com that you could visit.

[peter]

Still not fixed it seems. It sounds like talkchess is prejudice against Poland and other countries that can't access this site. There is no excuse for this not to be fixed for this long. Well, I say the hell with talkchess. There are other chess sites that don't have problems like this.

Ed Schroeder has created a new forum at prodeo.actieforum.com that you could visit.

A fine forum for sure, but what does it have to do with this one here?
A problem that's regarded too seldomly in this thread, as far as I read it anyhow, is this one:
If members from here simply join another one forum to meet there instead of here, all the threads, postings, data would get lost, if CCC is just closed.

Think e.g. only about the much information that can be found here by forum- search.
Does really anybody want to give that up?

And what for?
A new one forum started from scratch?
Nothing against Ed and his new forum, but can it really replace this one here without migrating the data from here too?
Can any other new or old one forum?

Just my two cents regards