Time to say thanks to ChessUSA for all the good years and move

[hgm]

We seem to be losing focus by addressing hypothetical problems and coming up with impractical solutions for them.

We have to learn to live with the fact that the hierarchy of actual power (which we have lived with for more than a decade) is authoritarian, so that a democratic structure can only be maintained through the willingness of those who do have the actual power not to abuse it, but stay within the mandate the charter assigned to them. The safest way to prevent abuse of power is to have a desinterested party at the top who can be called upon to enforce the rules when someone lower in the chain starts abusing his powers.

In the democratic scheme of things the board admin is responsible for executing the orders from (the majority of) the moderation team. There is no direct interaction between an admin and the members; it is the moderator team, and only the moderator team, which can decide whether the admin serves them appropriately. So it makes little sense to involve the general membership in the decision on whether the admin abuses his powers. The moderators should decide that, and should have the right to order the admin to resign.

Such a right would not be enforcible by them, though; in the case of a rogue admin who refuses to leave voluntarily, the only resort is to go up higher in the hierarchy, (i.e. to the webmaster) to remove the admin from power.

To guard against a rogue moderator team, however, it seems wise to have some impeachment procedure for moderation teams before their 6-months term runs out, where the membership aided by the admin can send away a disfunctional moderator team.

[smatovic]

We seem to be losing focus by addressing hypothetical problems and coming up with impractical solutions for them.
...

Hmm, people complain since when about IP blocking? Your proposal was once that somebody could set up a proxy somewhere for them. Now You are blocked from TC and now there are negotiaions about an own server with the sponsor? Hmm. I do not intend to make any trouble in here, TC is for free for me, hence I can not complain about anything...but if the founding fathers say that there is a misdoing going on we should listen to them imho. I see that talkchess.com is meanwhile hosted by Cloudflare, so there should be no more IP blocking going on, maybe you can clarify a bit on the current situtation?

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Srdja

[hgm]

I am not really aware of the current situation. It is nearly impossible to connect for me (no idea why it isn't either always impossible or always possible...). I am not sure what Quentin has done. I know CloudFlare only from the hosting of chessvariants.com, where it acts as a proxy that buffers the actual website. I am not sure whether it is used this way in the TalkChess case, or how that would even help. I haven't had any word from Quentin since my last mail to him; neither has he shown up on the forum.

[Rebel]

From another point of view, if the founding fathers would have established a kind of registered society, the Computer Chess Club r.s., then you would have a hierarchy like this:

members -> CCC registered society -> hosting or hosting sponsor -> TC board/forum moderators/admins

There are members of the r.s, the r.s. has representatives, the r.s. decides about any hosting or hosting sponsors.

Now it is a kind of upside down, the hosting sponsor can pull the plug, and we as TC members can only vote for board/forum-moderators.

If the founding fathers intend to fix this, they should do it the right way imho.

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Srdja

Moderators have the daily lead. Only in extreme cases, like the recent closure of CTF the member hierarchy plays its role after loud member complaints. The closure was not decided by the moderators nor by the admin but by the members by democratic vote. As it should be.

[hgm]

A good organization should be resistant against malfunctioning at any level. So there should be standard procedures for impeaching a moderator team as well as an admin or a webmaster. And these procedures should of course be enforcible, or they would be useless.

[Rebel]

I believe it was in 2008 that the CCC moderators fired the CTF moderators after complaints of CTF members. So it has happened.

But that is removing moderators not the admin. Thorsten was also removed as a CCC moderator by the other 2.

Admins never caused trouble.

However in the hypothetical case an admin does the forum is in big trouble in case there are no rules.

[Rebel]

A good organization should be resistant against malfunctioning at any level. So there should be standard procedures for impeaching a moderator team as well as an admin or a webmaster. And these procedures should of course be enforcible, or they would be useless.

Exactly.

And also how an admin and webmaster are chosen.

[hgm]

Yet the charter is completely silent about this. I would like to see this repaired.

It makes sense to have the admin be appointed by the moderators, as they are the only ones who have to deal with him. An alternative is to have the moderator candidates propose any change in admin they want to implement, as part of the program they run with. That way the members would have some say in it in a more explicit way.

Webmaster is a more tricky issue. It seems very much related to hosting. If someone is offering hosting, it is unlikely he would be willing to transfer control of his server to someone else. For this reason it seems good to distinguish root access to the server from ordinary user access; the webmaster should be able to maintain the forum as an ordinary user, while still being at the mercy of the superuser. In that case it would have great advantages to combine the function of admin and webmaster. So that the admin can really manage the forum software.

[mclane]

I believe it was in 2008 that the CCC moderators fired the CTF moderators after complaints of CTF members. So it has happened.

But that is removing moderators not the admin. Thorsten was also removed as a CCC moderator by the other 2.

Admins never caused trouble.

However in the hypothetical case an admin does the forum is in big trouble in case there are no rules.

This is funny because i was “removed” because i allowed something the admin did NOT want.
In the case i was “fired” he had thought his power is above that of the moderators.
IMO the hierarchy was different.
Te admin has to do what the moderators want, not opposite. Because the moderators have a mandat while the admin has NOT.

I also want to remind you on the situation when the moderators (the majority) wanted that the admin deblocks a member and the admin said he is NOT doing it.
In BOTH situations, the one i was fired and the later, the ADMIN saw his “power” above the power of the elected moderators.

How can you say the admin makes no problems when we have 2 cases where the admin saw himself ABOVE the wish of the moderators ?!

[mclane]

Yet the charter is completely silent about this. I would like to see this repaired.

It makes sense to have the admin be appointed by the moderators, as they are the only ones who have to deal with him. An alternative is to have the moderator candidates propose any change in admin they want to implement, as part of the program they run with. That way the members would have some say in it in a more explicit way.

Webmaster is a more tricky issue. It seems very much related to hosting. If someone is offering hosting, it is unlikely he would be willing to transfer control of his server to someone else. For this reason it seems good to distinguish root access to the server from ordinary user access; the webmaster should be able to maintain the forum as an ordinary user, while still being at the mercy of the superuser. In that case it would have great advantages to combine the function of admin and webmaster. So that the admin can really manage the forum software.

I appreciate that there is a rule that tells the Admin that he has to fullfill what the moderators decide.

The charter is “silent” about the hierarchy concerning the Admin because we never thought a situation could occur where an admin refutes to follow the decisions of moderators.
We mainly made CCC to have a moderated forum.
Because RGCC was spammed and stalked.
We thought we need an alternative.
A forum for all chess programmers and fans that can be moderated while RGCC could not.

Chris mainly defined and wrote the charter because his english was the best.
But for some situations we never had an idea that a problem could occur.
E.g. we would never had thought that racism and antisemitism could be main topic in CTF.
And that nobody “moderates” it because U.S. american moderators see racism and antisemitism not as problematic as the value of free speech.

Here in europe we think different about this. But when we founded CCC and later CTF to have a place to talk OFF TOPIC , we never imagined the situation USA would ever have a racistic president with a mass movement of right wing guys.

When we founded the forum in 1997 we could have never imagined that.