Forum Migration - Community Proposal

[hgm]

It is a prediction.

[BrendanJNorman]

Why not form a non-profit company (merely a paperwork game) with the trusted/legit parties as shareholders, open a bank account in the companies name and do things that way?

Have a clause in the charter that although shareholders are in legal control, decisions will be made via the vote of community members of good standing (no bans, more than 1 year of membership @ talkchess or something).

(The "1-year membership" requirement is to prevent mob-voting via conveniently new accounts for one decision)

If the above clause is broken, the company dissolves via some "deadman" switch or similar.

Quentin can be paid by this company.

I believe we have some legal ppl in the community. They could probably do the papers in one afternoon.

[smatovic]

My local chess club around the corner (Union 1871) has ~70 active members and they get things done as a registered society, it is really up to us TC members.

--
Srdja

[Modern Times]

Yes, some sort of non-profit legal entity might be best for the long-term future.

[chrisw]

Yes, some sort of non-profit legal entity might be best for the long-term future.

Does seem the way, indeed. If Quentin accepts the crowd-funding proposal, then for the act of the crowd-funding we'll need an entity to accept the funds (obviously) and that entity could then also become the Board of the Computer Chess Club/Forum or whatever it gets called. It just needs a few sensible people to form it. What we have in mind is that this Board would be the executive function, sysadmin, domain holder and so on, and we'ld then propose a separate elected moderator group to do the usual mod things. Ed thinks the Board should be three and in place semi-permanently for stability reasons. Anyway, it's all up for discussion.
Incidentally, different Euro countries have different laws for these kind of non-profit groups, depends on whether English common law or the Napoleonic code is the base, it seems. English is very simple, I don't think one even has to register officially (unless its becomes a 'charity'), whereas France demands official registration and reams of documents for even the smallest association.

[Steve Maughan]

I'd be happy to help and contribute in some way.

— Steve

[chrisw]

I'd be happy to help and contribute in some way.

— Steve

That's great, Steve. I think we have pretty much everything in place, indications of crowd fund support, tech aspects and so on. We need to know the community supports the idea (thank you!) and then it's largely a question of whether a goodwill deal can be struck, or we need to work from fresh. When all the facts are grounded, we can then collectively decide ....

[smatovic]

Just to keep this thread up to date:

There is a demo for the new forum up and running:
https://computerchess.club/
user: guest
pw: guest1234

Feature set:
https://computerchess.club/viewtopic.php?t=5

Question remains open if/how to take over old TC domain+DB. WIP.

--
Srdja

[chrisw]

Just to keep this thread up to date:

There is a demo for the new forum up and running:
https://computerchess.club/
user: guest
pw: guest1234

Feature set:
https://computerchess.club/viewtopic.php?t=5

Question remains open if/how to take over old TC domain+DB. WIP.

--
Srdja

You can probably assume now that:

The shop has no intention at all of letting the forum go. The forum is their desperately needed traffic source that funnels punters into their shop.
The probing from Quentin, followed by total silence, is to discover if there's any likelihood the community tries to move the forum and does not imply he is interested in letting the forum go.
The Cloudfare "are you a robot" has zilch to do with alleged server attacks and much to do with preventing scraping of the posts prior to a move.
Plan A is dead.

Plan B is to create a new forum. This is already done and ready to go. Only problem is the data, for which I have a suggestion ....

Instead of getting hold of the database and duplicating it and its functionality, why not: build a chat interrogation look up based on ChatGPT type opensource LLM with Computer Chess Wiki plugged in and as much or as little of the posting history from here as possible/necessary. That kind of chat window would actually be superior to a standard forum "search".

[Modern Times]

Plan B is to create a new forum. This is already done and ready to go.

Definitely the cleanest and easiest way. You just have to convince people to stop posting here and use the new forum instead. Then this one will die a natural death.

All the existing data is public domain isn't it, so no permissions would be needed to extract it, if that is even possible by some clever method ?