Is Talkchess still the centre of computer chess programming?

[CornfedForever]

Where did you get the idea that (1) would be the case? I register several new accounts daily, almost always within a day from their application. Most of these accounts never post, (one assumes they only register to be able to use the search function), but some post the next day. I almost never receive mails of people complaining their account (or an account of someone who approached them) was not activated.

Maybe it improved recently, but I heard the complaints about it in late 2020/early 2021. Some data points:
- It took me 3 months to get approved to the forum in 2018 (and it required finding people who have contacts of the forum admins),
- Some of the Lc0 core dev (namely, Tilps), wasn't able to register, and gave up,
- Anton from TCEC/Chessdom wasn't able to register either.

Let me give this a BIG thumbs up!

Why?
Previously (and I forget the order at the moment...) I was leavenfish on this forum. I had to reinstall everything and - not being able to recall the password, I tried too many times. Then I was told there was ALREADY an email address attached to my leavenfish (yahoo) email address so...I sent emails...nothing.

I gave up...briefly.

I had to get a NEW ACCOUNT and had to NEW EMAIL address (gmail) as Cornfed. After a year or two passed my hard drive gave out... or something...still cant get the PC to start.

So, I turned to my trusty old 13 yr old Dell XPS laptop. Again, I went to the forum and could not remember the password....same situation and after several attempts (including please via email...), I gave up. Yes...(my) old (well, 2nd) username was associated with THAT email address.

After a couple of months, I wanted to ask about a possible new PC build. So...I had to go out and get a THIRD email account (AOL...of all things since it was free and a new username CornfedForever). I applied for a new account...and in short order, I am here again...

I have NEVER had this problem with any forum or site. I would wager I am NOT the only person to ever have this happen here...and when people complain about the number of people posting continuing to drop, I just want to shout that THIS is surely part of the reason.

[hgm]

I looked at the joining dates of the names you mentioned, and Leavenfish and Cornfed were registered before I became responsible for activating the accounts. Which was around early 2021. 'Cornfed' is listed as joining April 26, 2020, and made his first posting on May 5, 2020. So it did not take excessively long to register as a new user, albeit longer than it would typically take me to do it. CornfedForever joined June 20, and made his first posting June 22. So it appears joining as a new member is not especially difficult or slow. (Which was the original complaint.)

Indeed it is not possible to register a new account with an e-mail address already in use for an existing account. I think this is a sensible policy. I see no reason for the same person to have multiple accounts, (the charter even forbids that), and I see no reason for different persons to keep using the same e-mail address. Creating a new account is NOT the remedy for a forgotten password!

I never received any e-mails. The forum does not seem to have a standard procedure for resetting a lost password. In the logon screen there is a 'contact' link, though. So I suppose people that have lost or invalidated their password would use that link. It brings up en e-mail form for mailing to 'the'administrator. I suspect that e-mail would not go to me, though. (There are actually a number of people with admin rights.) That is indeed a serious flaw, because I don't think that any other of the admins is active. I will look into that to see if I can configure the board such that these e-mails go to me.

As long as new registrations are swiftly handled this should not be a big obstacle though. If I recognize the real name of a person registering for a new account, I usually e-mail him myself to ask if he has a problem with the old account (which might be a forgotten pasword, or an e-mail address that no longer works), and I fix the problem there. When I don't recognize the application as a duplicat, it would be activated, and the first thing the person could do is PM one of the mods to ask if he can get his old account back. An annoying work-around, for sure. But hardly a reason to leave the board forever.

[hgm]

Ughhh! Now that I changed the contact e-mail address to go to me, I immediately start getting spam on it ("hot Chinese girls")... Apparently bots are roaming the net in order to use the phpBB contact feature to dump their garbage.

If this problem gets too severe I will have to undo the change again.

[Ovyron]

Ughhh! Now that I changed the contact e-mail address to go to me, I immediately start getting spam on it ("hot Chinese girls")... Apparently bots are roaming the net in order to use the phpBB contact feature to dump their garbage.

If this problem gets too severe I will have to undo the change again.

Create a new email specially for this purpose and let it get the spam and block it while legitimate mail goes there for this purpose.

[hgm]

The problem is that there hardly will be any genuine traffic through that channel. So it would get easily swamped by spam, if there are 10 spam messages a day, and only a genuine contact once a month.

[noobpwnftw]

Does the board not feature a function to send password reset emails at all?
Now since it is behind a proxy from Cloudflare, you also don't seem to have properly configured session persistence, that causes people usually needing multiple attempts of logins before they can post anything due to being logged out randomly. And I recall the days of those country blocks and mod election seemingly put on a permanent hold.

This situation reminds me of two Chinese proverbs that I will just quote literally and untranslated, I think it can at least be helpful to someone who wants to learn a thing or two: "占着茅坑不拉屎" & "皇帝不急太监急".

[Ovyron]

Does the board not feature a function to send password reset emails at all?

Since this is the only forum in the whole internet with this problem, I don't think it's a technical problem (if different people were in charge we'd have solved these problems long ago.)

[hgm]

Oh, I was wrong. There is an "I forgot my password" link right below the password field in the logon page.

I don't dare to try it myself, because when the change would require reactivation by an admin, we would be in deep sh*t. But I would expect the procedure to be fully automatic. (When people change their e-mail in their profile they do seem to require reactivation by the admin, however, so I cannot be entirely sure.)

Anyway, since I would typically do reactivation within a day, this whole issue appears to be a nonsense complaint.

[noobpwnftw]

I did try just now, and I do receive an email with a link and a new password, only if you click the link will the new password become effective, and then it is possible to change the password without any reactivation.

However this "it works for somebody"(funny that people appears to know better and dared to test this and that) has nothing to do with calling a complaint nonsense.

To properly classify a nonsense one could find proof that the board actually sent those emails successfully and it was the receiver who did not manage to finish the process and so on so forth. More so that you already found all his accounts one could try and ask if he wants to get any of those passwords reset and see what exactly the issue is.

[hgm]

Nonsense is the claim that this forum would be shunned by engine developers because it is in general not possible to register or recover from a lost password. There doesn't appear to be anything systematically wrong with the way these issues are handled by the board software and the admin.