Why not some sort of a compromise:hgm wrote: ↑Thu Sep 16, 2021 7:01 pm As I see it, the only thing that needs a blessing is if we would permanently want to move the forum to another host. Which, to succeed, would obviously require Chess U.S.A.'s permission, as they would have to be willing to transfer registration of the talkchess.com domain to 'us'. (Or they might want to keep it, and just assign it to the I.P. of a new server.)
"We" (the community) set up the forum on a different server, with ChessUSA keeping the Talkchess.com domain name, and paying for the hosting. In return, we replace "Hosted by Your Move Chess & Games - chessusa.com" by a more noticable linked sponsor banner at the top; replace the entire PHPBB-logo for all I care.
A "server" for this forum could just be a shared hosting account. We have a few hundred active members, with some logged in at the same time; I assume that can be handled easily by most shared webhosts. I've installed and helped admin forums on photography and role playing games (also using phpBB) that were bigger than Talkchess, which ran fine on shared hosting 15 years ago.
And, assuming "the forum" (or more accurately, the database) is indeed the property of the computer chess community, it could even be put in the public domain, with backups of the database being hosted for download somewhere. (Free Google account, for example.) But, I know, we could end up with 20 TalkChess "forks", which wouldn't be that nice. (There are other chess programming forums, such as OpenChess, but compared to Talkchess, they are barely active. Outskirts seems extremely active, but seems to be about engine releases mostly.)