Time to immigrate to another forum?

[swami]

The verification step is a hassle, but I never had problems accessing the forum.

The social media aspect of forums mostly eludes me. Video support (not just YouTube) would be nice, though.

There were times when I had problems to access the forum after verification.
For me it was not stable.

Yes, half of the time I couldn't access the forum. It was throwing in one error or other.

[swami]

Has anyone noticed that Reddit (r/ComputerChess) is picking up speed?

Reminds me of highly advanced version of usenet with ability to moderate.

[noobpwnftw]

If you left, that would be a terrible blow for computer chess and would literally bring a tear to my eye.

Here is the thing, everyone knows that I have my opinions on certain things and I'm quite verbose, but of all the things that I contributed, I'd rather make public rants than doing you a back stab. For example, Stockfish haven't had polyglot books support back, which I certainly don't like, TCEC haven't fixed their crappy GUI for some minor glitches and their GUI "dev" is absent for like 2 years now, bad, Leela people never figured what's their best net or settings, not to mention the current working code is somewhere in a PR that I'll never find, syzygy people never actually verified whether my results are correct, and haven't bothered to refine any of that generator code since a few years ago, so there is that.

Not much else I can do in this particular situation though, what do you want? I can buy you a paid forum software with a hosting plan or a server, something like xenfono, which I already made my offer and there are people who'd do the similar, monetary issue is simply minor, isn't it obvious to you that some people just wouldn't make it easy, and there doesn't seem to be a lack of candidates who is willing to run the forums after all. People will always have some disagreements but we'll have the elections, that's good enough for me. So what more? You want me to lick which ass to get your forum data handed over? Who is the shop people that I'd be supposed to be talking to to buy your domain back? Who'd be the guy that I'll be sending server logins to? Have you even settled on whether such a salvage is necessary or we might just let it go for good?

My suggestion, if you really want to do this, is to start new elections right now and form a new board which going to take charge of the migrations, then we have a basis to talk about details.

[Rebel]

My suggestion, if you really want to do this, is to start new elections right now and form a new board which going to take charge of the migrations, then we have a basis to talk about details.

For migration we need a new owner and you would have my vote.

[Dann Corbit]

Whoever takes ownership is also accepting a long lasting workload.
So it is not something to be done on a whim.

[hgm]

I don't know about that. Quentin does't seem to spend much time on the forum. He had the provider do a surprise update to phpBB 3, with as a result that the real-name database was destroyed. (Or perhaps it is still there on the server, in the old directory; we might be redirected to forum3 for a reason.) And he let it redirect through CloudFlare. As far as I know that were his only actions in the last 15 year.

A question we should ponder is whether we want the forum to be owned by someone. It seems a recipe for getting the same problem in the future. I am not sure about the current ownership of the forum data; did members agree to transfer the copyright of what they post to anyone? If not, everyone owns the copyright on his own postings. This might give legal problems for imposing a deadline on deleting, and even for quoting it in the forum context, so each member should at least license the forum for indefinite display of the posted text.

The most important issue is the domain name, though. It would be nice if an agreement could be struck with the legal owner of the domain name that he will give it up if a majority of the forum members desires so.

[Rebel]

A bit of history for a good understanding.

The forum was founded by a group of people called the founding-fathers in November 1997. Current active members are Chris, Thorsten and me. We made an agreement with ICD Corp. they would supply the forum software and maintain it as only obligation and no further rights. The forum, its ruling and its contents are the sole property of the forum members protected and maintained by elected members called moderators. ICD profited massively from the deal, I know the REBEL numbers they ordered during the years. So far so good, a win-win situation.

During the years the rights of the forum members have been trampled, it goes too far to go into detail but the current main beef is that the current owner (Quentin) is unwilling to hand over the domain name but most importantly he is unwilling to handover the data. This while no single byte written by members is his.

For a solution Quentin need to be contacted again, a previous try by HGM and me almost succeeded (HGM did a lot of work setting up a server) till Quentin started to question the rights of the data hinting for a money deal. He has no rights. What IMO needs to happen is :

1. New elected moderators, robust people able to make a deal with Quentin.

2. New server, new modern forum software, all data transferred.

3. Discussion (or election) who becomes the new owner (or owners) of the new forum.

4. The new moderators make an agreement with the new owner(s).

[noobpwnftw]

I don't want any of your stuff. That's why I think you should vote for it, at least that'll settle your majority concern. The elected ones be given all access to everything, they'll run it day to day and I only fix the billing problems(these people can demand that we need to have X, Y and Z, and we can discuss it publicly, see them done, no problem). As for the domain name, in my opinion, it would be nice if everyone will agree that as soon as the new forum is in place, DNS records will be pointed to the new forum. We'll cover the future renewal costs plus going back a decade if they want. Or they can point it to their shop, sell it to someone else and we will get a new domain. If they want a one-off ownership transfer deal, here is the appraisal. As a good gesture, although I think it is probably overestimated, I will save my time bargaining.

As for who will be the "legal scapegoat" for all the stuff, I think that's the easy part. We have no lack of lawyers/witches, ask them to see if we can bind it to a rock or something. If not possible, have a vote for someone.

[Rebel]

New server plus forum software plus redirect from talkchess to new server is one day work, the problem is the transfer of the database that contains all the postings since 2006. Without that data I (personally) see no good reason to move. But that's just me.

[towforce]

It's entirely possible to "scrape" the posts: the code would, as a "browser client", systematically copy each post in each thread. Obviously it would be quicker and easier to be given the data.