Questions for the FG about the organization of the election

[chrisw]

My question is: can we get a list of the people who decided to step up and want to run for moderator so far while registration is still open?
My reasoning:
1. I assume most posters have a busy life. The post of moderator is not over-attractive.
2. People who are eager to run may not be the most qualified ones. I assume good moderators would be people who'd be aware of the challenge and accept it more or less reluctantly, for the good of the community.
3. If you see a list of candidates you are OK with in parts this can strengthen people's belief that there will be a good solution and in the process.
4. If you are not so happy with the list of candidates, this may help your decision to run yourself, given you feel you may be fit for the job.
Thanks for your consideration.
Peter

Saturday December 14th. The list (if any) will be kept closed until then. Potential candidates should apply based on their considered suitability and willingness and not on the basis of who else may or may not be applying. Equality.

[AndrewGrant]

@Andy, ever since the restart of Talkchess I only saw an endless stream of negativity from your end, what happened?!

I want the old Andy back, a valuable member, the one who posted quality stuff.

I found a nice website which I posted in the sticky Computer Chess Programming from the Ground up thread from programmer Marcel Vanthoor and his Rustic chess engine. IMO a good starting point for writing a chess program from scratch.

I remember you once contributed a quality post about SPSA testing, however I can't find it any longer, do you still have it?

What happened? I can give an honest answer, without any intention on being mean, but it has us running in circles. I'll try again in good faith, since you were kind to me in the above post.

Talkchess used to be the center of things. I have read just about everything that Mark Lefler has ever posted on here or on CCC. As time went on, Discords took over as the main place for sharing of engine commentary. Not because of any sort of problem with talkchess per se, but just as a natural continuation. Stockfish developers migrated from fishcooking forums to discord. chess.grantnet.us was the first big OpenBench instance, and so that saw the creation of the OpenBench discord, which had a lot of dev talk at the time. The Leela community is very much the generation of people who were already using Discord.

So you have this partial exodus of chess engine developers from talkchess. What does that leave on talkchess? You have the rating list guys, the hobbyists who are mostly just engine users who find great interest, you have the people who are not so active in development anymore but still stick around because it is what they love, and then you also have the trolls.

Due to the volume of people that left, the proportion of posts coming from trolls grew. Perhaps the # of trolls grew or shrunk, who is to say. So the forums now have less signal than before, and also seemingly more noise. Not good. So people like myself, like many others (they can attach their names if they like), start calling for moderation. Well at the time, the forum is in chaos, I don't know the specifics, but for a while no one has the reigns and it takes a long time before power gets handed back.

Then what happens (This is my opinion, and of course as such is not entirely accurate, and is skewed to make my claims look better) is the moderation returns, but instead starts moderating those who were calling for moderation against the trolls. Some of it is fair, some is not. People got pretty heated through the months of total non-moderation (not anyone's fault) shit posting. Skip ahead a bit, and it seems (again, my opinion, and not the point of this post) that the moderators exist to punish otherwise law abiding citizens, and to grant free reign to the trolls. Anarcho-tyranny.

Then the final sort of catalyst for a lot of people was the Simex post, which falsely claimed that Viri and Stormphrax shared neural networks, with some irony thrown in for CSTal and Rebel being largely the same entity. Not to rehash this -- but regardless of correct vs incorrect vs intent vs non-intended. This got a TON of people, who already had talkchess accounts but just lurked, to start showing up in droves with pitchforks. When you combine all of this, you have the appearance of a moderator group that 1) thinks their engines to be of greater quality than the new kids; 2) Is doing very little to stop the rampant trolling on the forums; 3) Is punishing the victims. Again, all of that opinion.

So what is the remedy? Probably not what is happening right now, where the most vocal opposition has been banned from these elections. And also probably not what I am doing, where I am just complaining about it endlessly. Should probably be some apologizing from both sides. A statement from the moderators highlighting they see the problems and want to fix them. Statements from us non-moderators who are so vocal, acknowledging that we have over stepped in our quest to fix the problem, and that we need to pull back.

Wipe the slate clean as of {{Insert day}}. Moderators will remove obvious troll posts, and issue increasing timeouts to users. Moderators will also be removing posts from those attacking the trolls, and issuing similar timeouts. Moderation requests should be through reports, and moderators should either step into the thread to note their actions, or reply the the report with some clarity. We all agree to move forward with our lives -- not rehash this thread, no rehash the simex thread, not rehash he said X and got banned but when she said X she did not, etc etc. Those of us who have been around for many years will stop assuming the newcomers don't know anything -- the newcomers will stop assuming the oldies are too out of touch to know anything.

Now does this bring talkchess back to life? Probably not. But it at least gets us somewhere stable. We've gone from stable, to a troll-apocalypse, to now an all out war. Stable would be good, and is a necessary precondition for revitalization.

[hgm]

The problem is that virtually everyone who newly appears here is immediately attacked as a troll, demanding him to be banned. Even if it is just for announcing the release of a new engine. I don't know about this simex stuff, but the problem is much older than that. It started around the pandemic. People started reporting virtually every posting of some users they had it in for, demanding its deletion for apparently no other reason than the identity of the poster. In the large majority of cases by the time I saw the report the 'offending' posting, even though in itself perhaps not very interesting or even incorrect, had already grown into a constructive and interesting discussion, in which many members participated. Which would not have been there at all if it wasn't for the original posting.

What you want has nothing to do with moderation. It is censorship plain and simple. Where the censor would delete every posting he does not consider interesting, or correct, or mainstream, or that was from a member not having an engine to his name that is 3000+ Elo, or when they do because they are labeled cloners... And where only selected people are allowed as members in the first place, barring access to those that are considered too stupid. Of course this would then all require very subjective judgement by the censor.

Well maybe there is a market for such an exclusive discussion club, but it is not the role I have in mind for TalkChess. This should be a place where all computer-chess enthousiasts can exchange their ideas, being corrected by more knowledgeable people when these ideas are wrong. So they can learn in a safe environment.

A solution for this is to have forum sections, so that people who have relatively little of interest to contribute can be kept away from the more technical high-level discussions. But this solution has been implemented for a long time. Engine developers have the Programming section, where there virtually is no noise from low-level posters. The General section has always been the domain for simple questions about engines or GUI use, which are of little interest for developers. The problem is of course that by keeping the so-called trolls out of the Programming section means that there are virtually no postings at all there. So the deveopers get bored stiff there, and then start to invade a section that is not intended for them. So to no surprise, although there is stuff there, they don't like much of it. They then try to kick out the posters for which this section was intended. Which, if they would succeed, of course would make the section, and eventually the entire forum, just as dead as the Programming section.

As soon as a moderator would start to base decisions on the technical merits of the postings, he would no longer be moderating, but censoring. If you don't like the qualty of the postings you find in a forum section, this just means you are in a section that is not intended for you. You should then leave there, and go to the section that is intended for you. Not bother the original dwellers of that section.

[AndrewGrant]

What you want has nothing to do with moderation. It is censorship plain and simple. Where the censor would delete every posting he does not consider interesting, or correct, or mainstream, or that was from a member not having an engine to his name that is 3000+ Elo, or when they do because they are labeled cloners... And where only selected people are allowed as members in the first place, barring access to those that are considered too stupid. Of course this would then all require very subjective judgement by the censor.

I appreciate the response, but I don't view this as an accurate characterization of what I am hoping to see. I also don't think it is the same thing desired by others. I don't have any desire to block the average person from being a user, so much so that I don't actually see a point for some of the forums being behind a user login.

The only part of the characterization I agree with is the comment regarding cloners -- people who have openly violated licenses attached to projects of our users should be removed or banned for periods of time. There is historical precedent for that -- a certain user was banned for one year by then moderators over selling an open source engine privately as his own, and/or offering multiple times engines that were closed-source that were based on open-source projects with licenses that were being violated. Being respectful and not naming names, but if its not clear I can clarify, and probably find the post announcing said ban.

[chrisw]

@Andy, ever since the restart of Talkchess I only saw an endless stream of negativity from your end, what happened?!

I want the old Andy back, a valuable member, the one who posted quality stuff.

I found a nice website which I posted in the sticky Computer Chess Programming from the Ground up thread from programmer Marcel Vanthoor and his Rustic chess engine. IMO a good starting point for writing a chess program from scratch.

I remember you once contributed a quality post about SPSA testing, however I can't find it any longer, do you still have it?

What happened? I can give an honest answer, without any intention on being mean, but it has us running in circles. I'll try again in good faith, since you were kind to me in the above post.

Talkchess used to be the center of things. I have read just about everything that Mark Lefler has ever posted on here or on CCC. As time went on, Discords took over as the main place for sharing of engine commentary. Not because of any sort of problem with talkchess per se, but just as a natural continuation. Stockfish developers migrated from fishcooking forums to discord. chess.grantnet.us was the first big OpenBench instance, and so that saw the creation of the OpenBench discord, which had a lot of dev talk at the time. The Leela community is very much the generation of people who were already using Discord.

So you have this partial exodus of chess engine developers from talkchess. What does that leave on talkchess? You have the rating list guys, the hobbyists who are mostly just engine users who find great interest, you have the people who are not so active in development anymore but still stick around because it is what they love, and then you also have the trolls.

Due to the volume of people that left, the proportion of posts coming from trolls grew. Perhaps the # of trolls grew or shrunk, who is to say. So the forums now have less signal than before, and also seemingly more noise. Not good. So people like myself, like many others (they can attach their names if they like), start calling for moderation. Well at the time, the forum is in chaos, I don't know the specifics, but for a while no one has the reigns and it takes a long time before power gets handed back.

Then what happens (This is my opinion, and of course as such is not entirely accurate, and is skewed to make my claims look better) is the moderation returns, but instead starts moderating those who were calling for moderation against the trolls. Some of it is fair, some is not. People got pretty heated through the months of total non-moderation (not anyone's fault) shit posting. Skip ahead a bit, and it seems (again, my opinion, and not the point of this post) that the moderators exist to punish otherwise law abiding citizens, and to grant free reign to the trolls. Anarcho-tyranny.

Then the final sort of catalyst for a lot of people was the Simex post, which falsely claimed that Viri and Stormphrax shared neural networks, with some irony thrown in for CSTal and Rebel being largely the same entity. Not to rehash this -- but regardless of correct vs incorrect vs intent vs non-intended. This got a TON of people, who already had talkchess accounts but just lurked, to start showing up in droves with pitchforks. When you combine all of this, you have the appearance of a moderator group that 1) thinks their engines to be of greater quality than the new kids; 2) Is doing very little to stop the rampant trolling on the forums; 3) Is punishing the victims. Again, all of that opinion.

So what is the remedy? Probably not what is happening right now, where the most vocal opposition has been banned from these elections. And also probably not what I am doing, where I am just complaining about it endlessly. Should probably be some apologizing from both sides. A statement from the moderators highlighting they see the problems and want to fix them. Statements from us non-moderators who are so vocal, acknowledging that we have over stepped in our quest to fix the problem, and that we need to pull back.

Wipe the slate clean as of {{Insert day}}. Moderators will remove obvious troll posts, and issue increasing timeouts to users. Moderators will also be removing posts from those attacking the trolls, and issuing similar timeouts. Moderation requests should be through reports, and moderators should either step into the thread to note their actions, or reply the the report with some clarity. We all agree to move forward with our lives -- not rehash this thread, no rehash the simex thread, not rehash he said X and got banned but when she said X she did not, etc etc. Those of us who have been around for many years will stop assuming the newcomers don't know anything -- the newcomers will stop assuming the oldies are too out of touch to know anything.

Now does this bring talkchess back to life? Probably not. But it at least gets us somewhere stable. We've gone from stable, to a troll-apocalypse, to now an all out war. Stable would be good, and is a necessary precondition for revitalization.

A couple of days ago on the discord, you called the FG members "fucking retards". Which is the real Andrew Grant or is it Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

"Fucking retards" is a beyond the pale comment, so far as I'm concerned. It says so much about a person that he can refer to other humans as "fucking retards". Don't you think?

[AndrewGrant]

@Andy, ever since the restart of Talkchess I only saw an endless stream of negativity from your end, what happened?!

I want the old Andy back, a valuable member, the one who posted quality stuff.

I found a nice website which I posted in the sticky Computer Chess Programming from the Ground up thread from programmer Marcel Vanthoor and his Rustic chess engine. IMO a good starting point for writing a chess program from scratch.

I remember you once contributed a quality post about SPSA testing, however I can't find it any longer, do you still have it?

What happened? I can give an honest answer, without any intention on being mean, but it has us running in circles. I'll try again in good faith, since you were kind to me in the above post.

Talkchess used to be the center of things. I have read just about everything that Mark Lefler has ever posted on here or on CCC. As time went on, Discords took over as the main place for sharing of engine commentary. Not because of any sort of problem with talkchess per se, but just as a natural continuation. Stockfish developers migrated from fishcooking forums to discord. chess.grantnet.us was the first big OpenBench instance, and so that saw the creation of the OpenBench discord, which had a lot of dev talk at the time. The Leela community is very much the generation of people who were already using Discord.

So you have this partial exodus of chess engine developers from talkchess. What does that leave on talkchess? You have the rating list guys, the hobbyists who are mostly just engine users who find great interest, you have the people who are not so active in development anymore but still stick around because it is what they love, and then you also have the trolls.

Due to the volume of people that left, the proportion of posts coming from trolls grew. Perhaps the # of trolls grew or shrunk, who is to say. So the forums now have less signal than before, and also seemingly more noise. Not good. So people like myself, like many others (they can attach their names if they like), start calling for moderation. Well at the time, the forum is in chaos, I don't know the specifics, but for a while no one has the reigns and it takes a long time before power gets handed back.

Then what happens (This is my opinion, and of course as such is not entirely accurate, and is skewed to make my claims look better) is the moderation returns, but instead starts moderating those who were calling for moderation against the trolls. Some of it is fair, some is not. People got pretty heated through the months of total non-moderation (not anyone's fault) shit posting. Skip ahead a bit, and it seems (again, my opinion, and not the point of this post) that the moderators exist to punish otherwise law abiding citizens, and to grant free reign to the trolls. Anarcho-tyranny.

Then the final sort of catalyst for a lot of people was the Simex post, which falsely claimed that Viri and Stormphrax shared neural networks, with some irony thrown in for CSTal and Rebel being largely the same entity. Not to rehash this -- but regardless of correct vs incorrect vs intent vs non-intended. This got a TON of people, who already had talkchess accounts but just lurked, to start showing up in droves with pitchforks. When you combine all of this, you have the appearance of a moderator group that 1) thinks their engines to be of greater quality than the new kids; 2) Is doing very little to stop the rampant trolling on the forums; 3) Is punishing the victims. Again, all of that opinion.

So what is the remedy? Probably not what is happening right now, where the most vocal opposition has been banned from these elections. And also probably not what I am doing, where I am just complaining about it endlessly. Should probably be some apologizing from both sides. A statement from the moderators highlighting they see the problems and want to fix them. Statements from us non-moderators who are so vocal, acknowledging that we have over stepped in our quest to fix the problem, and that we need to pull back.

Wipe the slate clean as of {{Insert day}}. Moderators will remove obvious troll posts, and issue increasing timeouts to users. Moderators will also be removing posts from those attacking the trolls, and issuing similar timeouts. Moderation requests should be through reports, and moderators should either step into the thread to note their actions, or reply the the report with some clarity. We all agree to move forward with our lives -- not rehash this thread, no rehash the simex thread, not rehash he said X and got banned but when she said X she did not, etc etc. Those of us who have been around for many years will stop assuming the newcomers don't know anything -- the newcomers will stop assuming the oldies are too out of touch to know anything.

Now does this bring talkchess back to life? Probably not. But it at least gets us somewhere stable. We've gone from stable, to a troll-apocalypse, to now an all out war. Stable would be good, and is a necessary precondition for revitalization.

A couple of days ago on the discord, you called the FG members "fucking retards". Which is the real Andrew Grant or is it Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

"Fucking retards" is a beyond the pale comment, so far as I'm concerned. It says so much about a person that he can refer to other humans as "fucking retards". Don't you think?

Talkchess != Discord. I do not censor my opinions when I do not have to. Although even Discord is censored a bit. Nevertheless, this insertion is not helpful to the attempt at a peaceful conversation here, that Ed opened up with what I interpreted as a genuine question.

[mclane]

I am in no way interested in discord. I let this completely to others. I began with computer chess in 1979.

[chrisw]

@Andy, ever since the restart of Talkchess I only saw an endless stream of negativity from your end, what happened?!

I want the old Andy back, a valuable member, the one who posted quality stuff.

I found a nice website which I posted in the sticky Computer Chess Programming from the Ground up thread from programmer Marcel Vanthoor and his Rustic chess engine. IMO a good starting point for writing a chess program from scratch.

I remember you once contributed a quality post about SPSA testing, however I can't find it any longer, do you still have it?

What happened? I can give an honest answer, without any intention on being mean, but it has us running in circles. I'll try again in good faith, since you were kind to me in the above post.

Talkchess used to be the center of things. I have read just about everything that Mark Lefler has ever posted on here or on CCC. As time went on, Discords took over as the main place for sharing of engine commentary. Not because of any sort of problem with talkchess per se, but just as a natural continuation. Stockfish developers migrated from fishcooking forums to discord. chess.grantnet.us was the first big OpenBench instance, and so that saw the creation of the OpenBench discord, which had a lot of dev talk at the time. The Leela community is very much the generation of people who were already using Discord.

So you have this partial exodus of chess engine developers from talkchess. What does that leave on talkchess? You have the rating list guys, the hobbyists who are mostly just engine users who find great interest, you have the people who are not so active in development anymore but still stick around because it is what they love, and then you also have the trolls.

Due to the volume of people that left, the proportion of posts coming from trolls grew. Perhaps the # of trolls grew or shrunk, who is to say. So the forums now have less signal than before, and also seemingly more noise. Not good. So people like myself, like many others (they can attach their names if they like), start calling for moderation. Well at the time, the forum is in chaos, I don't know the specifics, but for a while no one has the reigns and it takes a long time before power gets handed back.

Then what happens (This is my opinion, and of course as such is not entirely accurate, and is skewed to make my claims look better) is the moderation returns, but instead starts moderating those who were calling for moderation against the trolls. Some of it is fair, some is not. People got pretty heated through the months of total non-moderation (not anyone's fault) shit posting. Skip ahead a bit, and it seems (again, my opinion, and not the point of this post) that the moderators exist to punish otherwise law abiding citizens, and to grant free reign to the trolls. Anarcho-tyranny.

Then the final sort of catalyst for a lot of people was the Simex post, which falsely claimed that Viri and Stormphrax shared neural networks, with some irony thrown in for CSTal and Rebel being largely the same entity. Not to rehash this -- but regardless of correct vs incorrect vs intent vs non-intended. This got a TON of people, who already had talkchess accounts but just lurked, to start showing up in droves with pitchforks. When you combine all of this, you have the appearance of a moderator group that 1) thinks their engines to be of greater quality than the new kids; 2) Is doing very little to stop the rampant trolling on the forums; 3) Is punishing the victims. Again, all of that opinion.

So what is the remedy? Probably not what is happening right now, where the most vocal opposition has been banned from these elections. And also probably not what I am doing, where I am just complaining about it endlessly. Should probably be some apologizing from both sides. A statement from the moderators highlighting they see the problems and want to fix them. Statements from us non-moderators who are so vocal, acknowledging that we have over stepped in our quest to fix the problem, and that we need to pull back.

Wipe the slate clean as of {{Insert day}}. Moderators will remove obvious troll posts, and issue increasing timeouts to users. Moderators will also be removing posts from those attacking the trolls, and issuing similar timeouts. Moderation requests should be through reports, and moderators should either step into the thread to note their actions, or reply the the report with some clarity. We all agree to move forward with our lives -- not rehash this thread, no rehash the simex thread, not rehash he said X and got banned but when she said X she did not, etc etc. Those of us who have been around for many years will stop assuming the newcomers don't know anything -- the newcomers will stop assuming the oldies are too out of touch to know anything.

Now does this bring talkchess back to life? Probably not. But it at least gets us somewhere stable. We've gone from stable, to a troll-apocalypse, to now an all out war. Stable would be good, and is a necessary precondition for revitalization.

A couple of days ago on the discord, you called the FG members "fucking retards". Which is the real Andrew Grant or is it Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

"Fucking retards" is a beyond the pale comment, so far as I'm concerned. It says so much about a person that he can refer to other humans as "fucking retards". Don't you think?

Talkchess != Discord. I do not censor my opinions when I do not have to. Although even Discord is censored a bit. Nevertheless, this insertion is not helpful to the attempt at a peaceful conversation here, that Ed opened up with what I interpreted as a genuine question.

Ed asked a genuine question. Question is: is your answer genuine? Since you're now admitting that your opinion actually is (you didn't have to self-censor it when you didn't have to, you wrote) that the FG are "fucking retards", why should we pay such a person any more of our attention?
Advice: go away and self-reflect on what sort of person uses the expression "retards", let alone "fucking retards" about other humans. Explains much of your behaviour.

[hgm]

I agree that license violators should not be aditted here from advertizing their 'products'. This hasn't been much of an issue, lately. But there is also legal cloning, or making of minimal derivatives under the GPL. And the demand for treating these the same way is large, or at least very vocal. Most people branded as trolls who should be banned by demand had nothing to do with cloning.

[hgm]

Advice: go away and self-reflect on what sort of person uses the expression "retards", let alone "fucking retards" about other humans. Explains much of your behaviour.

Being a fucking retard is much better than just being a retard, not?