Time to immigrate to another forum?

[towforce]

...Perhaps the common sense thing to do is create a 2nd forum and let the two co-exist. If the 2nd forum offers more, more might pack and migrate to it as their sole choice.

To be honest, this forum has weakened in many ways (e.g. quality and quantity of posters/posts). I don't think it can survive a split.

[CornfedForever]

...Perhaps the common sense thing to do is create a 2nd forum and let the two co-exist. If the 2nd forum offers more, more might pack and migrate to it as their sole choice.

To be honest, this forum has weakened in many ways (e.g. quality and quantity of posters/posts). I don't think it can survive a split.

Possibly. Possibly not. If so, who would want it...so maybe the 'history' would be useless and could be obtained at an even cheaper price.

[Eelco de Groot]

Maybe it is a good sign. It is like elections in Turkey. No matter how bad it got, the majority still voted for the Status Quo. Because they were used to it, and it got so bad that they were even afraid of any change. And the Turkish people abroad did not suffer so much from the inflation etc. It is a kind of loyalty too.


On the subject of unstable Windows (from Brian above), recent version caused troubles with me. An unwilling harddisk froze everything, probably when the virus checker did not get access. Even the on/off button did not react. Only when I physically uncoupled my harddisk was it possible to reset. Then suddenly new versions of Window viruschecker and an update of Windows were available when I checked and I quickly installed the latest. Yesterday, now everything is running but I do not know what exactly happened. Still my advice to update Windows. I have never used the sleep function of Windows though. Often restart Windows instead of just shutting it down, I use the 'Opnieuw opstarten' function more often now.

This is getting maby a bit off topic to the thread.

To stay a bit on topic, the Donation function, in the sticky thread from Quentin Turner, top of the page, from 2018, is still functioning as far as I know. I donated 10$, a few days ago. A drop in a bucket, I had not donated any before, but every little bit could help now. It was more difficult before to donate for me, and am not used to PayPal and such.

[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.

So I wrote on 17/05/2023.
To my surprise ( I had plain forgotten by then) : on 02/08/2023(!) I was contacted by a person who claimed to have been told that I had offered to make a „donation“ of 350$ for some „public effort to get the naming rights for talkchess.com“. While this is obviously not exactly the truth if you read my message above, I decided (given that I didn’t want to be personally involved with a new board anyway) – AND given the names of the trustworthy people involved mentioned) - I should play nice and along.
Getting rid of my money turned out to be a pretty painful procedure though requiring multiple emails. Anyway – by the middle of August this seemed to have been achieved ( I never got any reply to my email asking for a confirmation message for the money transfer by the former(?) owners).
But I was informed by the person who had first contacted me for my „donation“, that some agreement had been reached indeed and substantial progress had been made – all were good.
When I some time later asked him/her about progress ( jokingly mentioning that I should probably considered to be a major shareholder of the naming rights, until the board were (finally) set up somewhere else), I got no response.
This sounds very much like your typical scam story. I don’t think this is the case though.
My message will sound strange as I don’t want to send or receive ANY more emails on this topic and I also very much don’t want to be involved with any discussions AND I am German and lack the vocabulary and English knowledge to word this thing so carefully to not piss off people I don’t want to annoy. BUT: I am also pretty unhappy with progress, to put it mildy.

The board is still nearly unuseable for me. As someone will ask anyway – YES, it is possible to get some message posted, but it takes forever, with zillions of error messages – most of the time I simply get the message that I am not allowed to even look at the board. Searching for my old message took more than an hour e.g. (!) – I don’t have that much time to waste.
Also I suppose the board is losing members in the meantime who lack my patience.
So: no personal messages or emails to me – but I would very much appreciate some public progress report on the future of talkchess.com
To those, who read all of this: thanks for your patience.
Peter

[Rebel]

Peter, thank you in the first place for your donation. I can't help ChessUSA did not confirm your payment. It must have been since the deal was closed. In private I told you which organization we are talking to become the next owner to ensure stability, for years, decades.

We reached a deal with the organization in question, we send them a draft contract and waiting for a reply. After that the repair / rebuild job can start.

Hope that helps.

[mclane]

IF they answer. Big questionmark.

[Rebel]

They did.

[Peter Berger]

They did.

And?

Ed, you know me pretty well. We are talking another month without visible progress now. So, what's the deal, the plan?

My darker half is considering to get a lawyer to sort things out - while this is obviously a bit useless progresswise, it would certainly guarantee me getting some answers.

Good solutions take time I suppose. My next message will be in 2024.

[Eelco de Groot]

I don't know any details but my guess would be if any of the "Task Force" is still willing now would be as good time as any to do anything. I have no idea what but in a year or so who knows how many of us will still be here? That includes Quentin Turner I suppose. He probably has lots of things to bother him and he does not have this as a priority. Why would he. The fees for the domain name were already paid in advance so right now we don't have to worry the domain will be pulled. There was an agreement to transfer the domain name to Ed and all others, at least to my understanding, so probably legally Ed would be the domain name propietor by now. If only on base of the results of negotions so far. There is no real need to conserve the domain name IMO. It could have a totally new name. If you want to preserve the database, to me that would be the only importance of being the domain name owner, you could replace all the links in the database with new ones. That is just a guess I know, but why not. The programmers WIki etc would have to change all the Talkchess references/links as well to any new ones and any other interested party, ICGA I don't know but is that really a big deal. Talkchess will still be here for a while anyway. See quote below just for reference. But the people here may not be here by then. I don't know if Chris will still be here, I guess not. That is sad, but many others may go and I don't know if right now anyone has any interest in doing anything.

From the thread in the General Forum:

Well, the community is split in this regard, you can not serve both parties. The best thing would be if TC would be just in working condition, but according to this poll for more than half of the members the site is not working proper, since years?

I offered my tech expertise to the elected moderators, I offered it to the founders, now, @ChessUSA:

Grant me FTP, database and phpBB admin access and I will implement:

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

on talkchess.com, for free (as in beer). A nice "thank you" in form of:

https://www.chessusa.com/product/SW-765.html

would be appreciated though

--
Srdja

This would be my personal favorite, to be honest because it does not seem to involve new contracts, transfer of rights, and Quentin would still be sharing some of the financial burden so it seems. He would still own the domain so he could sell it at a later time. But he would give up the leverage of owning the data for instance.

So it is maybe wishful thinking on my part and too easy and not really fair to you Srdja, you would also be on the payroll of ChessUSA in a way, and working for the forum. It may not be for a long time if the forum does not hold together, but still quite a responsibility.

I am not terribly worried, just for tomorrow or the day after;

talkchess.com expires on:

Wednesday 5th of March 2025

1 years, 8 months and 27 days

or 637 days

This was a few days ago and we do not know exactly who holds these rights, GoDaddy won't tell you and I hope it is not GoDaddy itself because they are much harder to deal with than Quentin. You would not want GoDaddy to hold the rights to TalkChess.com

I want to share some of the costs for sure but I have honestly no idea what to expect. What did Quentin pay to Steve Schwartz for instance, at a time when computerchess, and even the Internet was so very different from now. It may have been at the time of all the Internet bubbles that subsequently ruptured leaving nothing but traces of soap. We really need to hear from Quentin.

[Rebel]

We have reached an agreement with the CSVN as our new host and new stable partner for years, decades. This week or next week we are going to meet and sign the contract. Thereafter the FG (HGM, Chris and me) will write a public document to be posted here about the inner work of the FG, the role of the admin, the role of moderators and more.

The idea is that when the new forum arises from the ashes the FG for the time being will be the moderators and when the forum is working smoothly the FG will call for moderator elections.

FG = Founders Group.