*** TALKCHESS SERVER TO BE SHUT DOWN ***

[Uri Blass]

Without the community aspects of chess programming I would probably not bother developing Leorik any further. This forum plays an important role and I don't think that Discord alone could compensate. Discord is great for short term communication (chatting) but no place for something like a devlog or preserving the results of hundreds of tournaments. If this forum goes away I'd probably move on to some other hobby, too.

I think there are other sites that we can write in if this forum goes away.

For example
What is the problem with this forum?

https://open-chess.org/index.php?sid=2b ... b6030bb5ff

[Sylwy]

I think there are other sites that we can write in if this forum goes away.

For example
What is the problem with this forum?

https://open-chess.org/index.php?sid=2b ... b6030bb5ff

.....the paradise of clones and piracy...
.....Anton101, ZamChess & co...

[Graham Banks]

Without the community aspects of chess programming I would probably not bother developing Leorik any further. This forum plays an important role and I don't think that Discord alone could compensate. Discord is great for short term communication (chatting) but no place for something like a devlog or preserving the results of hundreds of tournaments. If this forum goes away I'd probably move on to some other hobby, too.

I think there are other sites that we can write in if this forum goes away.

For example
What is the problem with this forum?

https://open-chess.org/index.php?sid=2b ... b6030bb5ff

This one is more active:
https://outskirts.altervista.org/forum/index.php

[towforce]

Great little game! I played it in 2.5 ply. It made an illegal move (resigning in checkmate) - or was that your humour?

Resigning is not a move, and it is never illegal to resign.

I don't want to dwell on this - it's a really minor thing, and I do like the applet very much - but once a checkmate occurs, the game is over - so it's not then possible to resign.

To be clear, though, I'm not asking for a bug-fix - it was just a quip.

[lithander]

Saying there are other forums is like suggesting to buy a new notebook to someone who's lost their diary.

Edit: but it looks like hgm & smatovic are on a good path to save the forum! <3

[smatovic]

To give an update:

We cloned the forum with an database dump from Monday, running on the new VPS server, applied several updates/mods/fixes. Now the open question is when the time slot for the live migration will be, and how this will happen in detail. Time will tell.

--
Srdja

[smatovic]

FYI:

The new forum is now up and running for 8 days, the live migration was a bit clumsy, we just hat too lil time before the shutdown. to test everything proper and do it all right. It looks like all forum features are working and people start to make feature requests. The server load and traffic look good. We had our first lil DoS attack, and hardened the Linux server further, still no DDoS attack. We limited the crawlers and scrapers, so the load is distributed and service can be ensured. I am going to observe the current setup for ~one month, monitor the load and take a look into log files, if green, then 2024-04-01 we are ready to allow the good robots via robots.txt, to let TC be indexed by search engines again. If that goes well for another month, then I fulfilled my duty and will 2024-05-01 drop out of this operation again.

"Thank you for observing all safety precautions."

--
Srdja

[towforce]

...If that goes well for another month, then I fulfilled my duty and will 2024-05-01 drop out of this operation again.

After saving the town, the hero rides off into the sunset...

[smatovic]

Maybe to document the 4 different forum incarnations:

################################################################################
1. 1997 - 2006 www.icdchess.com, self-written forum software, hosted by
ChessUSA, "Steven Schwartz", archive hosted on https://www.stmintz.com/ccc/
2. 2006 -~2012 www.talkchess.com, phpBB version <=2.0.19, hosted by ChessUSA,
"Quentin Turner", cos of update to phpBB v2 all old posts were lost
3.~2012 - 2024 www.talkchess.com, phpBB v 3.0.11 to 3.2.2, hosted by ChessUSA,
"Quentin Turner", update to phpBB v3 lost the "threaded view", v3 only with
flat view, adds a pgn viewer, from 2020 to 2024 IP blocking and issues with
Cloudflare CDN to prevent presumed DDoS attacks on TC, causing collateral
damage on ChessUSA shop hosted together on same server
4. 03/2024 - www.talkchess.com, phpBB version 3.3.11, hosted by 2nd Founders,
with modded Absouluton v3 and old ProSivler styles available, fen-diagram +
interactive-diagram + pgn-viewer .js scripts working, >3800 members, >800K
posts, ~2.5GB DB, https only, server as hardened Linux w/o Cloudflare as
proxy in front
################################################################################

--
Srdja

[Rebel]

Excellent summary.