GMTonyKosten wrote on 08/20/17 at 12:33:00:

In 2014 http://kenilworthian.blogspot.de/2014/09/the-end-of-chess-blogging.html already wrote that professional writers made amateurs increasingly irrelevant. So I am not at all surprised that the professional chesspub writers are doing much better than the amateur writers of the forum.
In general people believe that the more you pay, the more quality you can get. I see this behavior also around me. My opponents buy expensive books but don't read the free published analysis on my blog which I use against them to score some easy points. 2 of my most recent articles contain examples about this phenomenon see
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.de/2017/08/the-open-games.html
http://chess-brabo.blogspot.de/2017/08/matches.html
This season I even beated my own captain/president/20 year teammate, former belgian champion with a refutation which was published on my blog. In the post-mortem I just gave him the link to the article.
If you encounter such experiences then I very well understand why amateur-writers give up. However things are not all negative. There are still every day dozens or even hundreds of visitors interested in non-professional posts or articles. I notice this at the statistics of my blog but also by strangers regularly telling me that they follow my articles. So I refuse to accept that there is no place on the internet anymore for amateurs.

I agree with the concern.  In the "old days", there were forum members who were interested in engaging in debates about theory above and beyond the basic questions of repertoire, impressions of latest book and how do I improve?  This forum was a big influence to me as I rejoined competitive chess toward the tail end of my business career.  I was drawn in by people like the late  Mark "Markovich" Morss (and many others like MNb, Ametanoitos (Ntirlis), ErictheRed, etc...) who had strong opinions and were willing to back them up.

I recently posted on the French thread about trends in the Tarrasch partly in response to this thread about the forum.  I was "secretly" hoping to stimulate some more substantial discussion about the variation by putting a few of my own observations out there and seeing if anyone wanted to engage.  As you will see if you look at the thread, we didn't get very far.

So, what to do?  Perhaps it's just a phase and new forum members will join and add to the activity and content.  An idea that occurred to me would be to have the moderators play a more active role and suggest a current game or tabyia (ideally with a question(s) to focus responses) each month for input and discussion by forum members.  Then if the GM/IM writer for that section could cover it in their monthly update, it might increase forum activity while still providing an incentive for members to subscribe to the main site to see the GM/IM "final verdict."   This may be impractical or should be done less frequently than monthly, but it would be interesting to try if there was sufficient support particularly by the moderators.  Just a thought.... 

Reverse wrote on 08/18/17 at 09:59:58:


I imagine he advertised the main ChessPublishing.com site, rather than this Forum?
We do some advertising for the main site, probably not enough, though.

RoleyPoley wrote on 07/21/17 at 20:36:27:


OK, I've stickied it, thanks

Keano wrote on 07/21/17 at 23:35:10:


Just to clarify, I have no issue when a respected, (titled also helps) member posts engine analysis. An "engine warrior" would be a class-type player with little understanding of the game relying excessively on the engines and claiming to be an automatic expert analyst. 

On engine warriors I think people in general need to avoid decalarations such as this line is "just nothing", "just a dead draw", etc. I have noticed a strange type of poster crop up, no names obviously. But this type of stuff, with little respect for the game, does discourage genuine posters from contributing.

Jesse Gersenson wrote on 07/08/17 at 14:05:45:


It usually works fine, the only problem i've noticed is that my android can't load the posted games/analysis at all. I don't visit all that often so not a biggie, but maybe others have the same problem?