Time to immigrate to another forum?

[hgm]

I know there is a legal distinction between owning and posessing. It seems Chess USA at least is the current posessor. The domain name must somehow be registered with the high-level domain, to make their name server translate it to the IP address of the talkchess hosting company, and will only accept orders from the latter to redirect it to another server as long as they keep paying the fee. Quentin has no doubt that he owns the domain name, bought as asset from the company he took over.

But my remark was not an idle one; it was inspired by an e-mail Quentin recently sent me.

[Rebel]

But my remark was not an idle one; it was inspired by an e-mail Quentin recently sent me.

How does this translate, is Quentin finally willing to hand over the forum against a price?

[noobpwnftw]

IIRC noobpwnftw, Bojun Guo, made an offer to the community some time ago, did send him an pm with this thread as link.

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Srdja

I'm open to the proposal, however I think the situation is quite messed up: if they just need the servers and domains to be handled with professional hands, which was the context of my original offer, then sure I can do a favor. However, I do not have any particular interest in running(as in, making calls for) any of their stuff, and I think the current management is shit at multiple levels, that is probably why people ended up getting it sold to themselves. So while I can fix some of the problems, I haven't seen any concrete progress towards addressing the core issues, for example, what's going on with the moderator elections? If nothing changes, what prevents the next blackmail, your captcha?

[hgm]

How does this translate, is Quentin finally willing to hand over the forum against a price?

]Well, Quentin is a business man, and based on how often he appears here he seems to have little emotional ties to this forum. To him it is mostly of financial value. (Although one can of course wonder how much of that value has been destroyed by the level of service we have been experiencing lately...) In any case he is not very happy that overloading and cyber attacks on TalkChess interfere with the commercial website through which he does most of his business.

So I guess the answer is 'yes', and probably always has been 'yes', but that the price at this moment is probably lower than what it would have been before. I have no idea whet price he would have in mind, though. If there is another way to earn more on divesting the talkchess.com domain, I am pretty sure he would opt for that.

[chrisw]

How does this translate, is Quentin finally willing to hand over the forum against a price?

]Well, Quentin is a business man, and based on how often he appears here he seems to have little emotional ties to this forum. To him it is mostly of financial value. (Although one can of course wonder how much of that value has been destroyed by the level of service we have been experiencing lately...) In any case he is not very happy that overloading and cyber attacks on TalkChess interfere with the commercial website through which he does most of his business.

So I guess the answer is 'yes', and probably always has been 'yes', but that the price at this moment is probably lower than what it would have been before. I have no idea whet price he would have in mind, though. If there is another way to earn more on divesting the talkchess.com domain, I am pretty sure he would opt for that.

So, basically, a community asset, set up by the then community, has, even though the then community still exists and still owns it, some business guy's finger in it, and he'll only remove his finger if he gets paid some money. Where remove finger = hand over a domain name which cost about 10 euros. Meanwhile all the posts are a community asset, the name ComputerChessClub is a community asset and the "right to host subject to conditions" is a community asset where the conditions have been multiply breached by the shop owner, whoever they are, and that's a secret owner (HGM knows or has a good idea about, but he's not telling). HGM is sort of offering to negotiate on the community behalf, but it seems HGM is also in shop's pocket for some reason or another.

[smatovic]

...but it seems HGM is also in shop's pocket for some reason or another.

I generally agree, but no need to shoot at HGM, all he said is pretty reasonable.

If the founding fathers of TC forum did set up a contract with the previous shop owner as hosting sponsor it is up to them to clarify the situation with the new shop owner. Shooting at the elected moderators who try to mediate won't help.

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Srdja

[smatovic]

IIRC noobpwnftw, Bojun Guo, made an offer to the community some time ago, did send him an pm with this thread as link.

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Srdja

I'm open to the proposal, however I think the situation is quite messed up:
[..]

Thx for the quick reply, I agree, the situation is quite messed up.

I tried to engage as webmaster once, to help fix some tech issues, got caught in between the founding fathers, the elected moderators and the site-owner/hosting-sponsor. Further, according to this poll the community is split, won't interfere this time again, I had my take.

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Srdja

[noobpwnftw]

Well if the last "elected moderators" got us sold, and we somehow expect the same people to mediate a deal, that's quite messed up indeed.

[Peter Berger]

As I belong to the group of people for whom the board is absolutely messed up right now, I have no idea where and how my message will show up, so please bear with me.

I'll make an offer: I offer 350$ for the naming rights to talkchess.com. I probably also offer about a week of my own working time to get this thing set up somewhere else. Given the environment here, I assume I won't have to deal with pure technical problems, like making a backup useable for other people ( so I assume to have volunteers to deal with that).

I won't be involved with any future board that may come up from this personally - once it is set up and working.

[smatovic]

Well if the last "elected moderators" got us sold, and we somehow expect the same people to mediate a deal, that's quite messed up indeed.

And as soon new elections are initiated people claim these are null cos the technical issues prevent some people from voting. Stalemate.

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Srdja