hicetnunc wrote on 06/30/11 at 11:56:22:

Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me.

Wasn't it Henry Ford saying something: Half of my marketing is thrown out of the window and I would pay excellent for the one telling me which half.

The forum is marketing for the subscription. Without the forum I would not have subscribed and it gives me the feeling: There's a place where I can ask or propose something, when necessary.

A logical business model would be as follow :

- forum access is free for Chess Publishing subscribers
- other members are required to pay a forum subscription to access the great content here (maybe 7€/month, or something like that)
- Tony grants free access to his pick of the best forum contributors who are not already Chesspublishing members 

The forum is great, but the core of chesspub are the regular updates. Therefore you should try to make every forum member a subscriber. Possible ways:

- Only subscribers are allowed to post, use the search functions etc. unlimited. Free members might be restricted to 1 post per day, no search, no diagrams, no whatever.

- Create a closed forum only for subscribers, if only for one thread on each game mentioned in the updates. Exclusive access to these discussions might create a flow toward more subscriptions.
One additional benefit: Due to the copyright of Chesspub so far we rarely discuss the annotations in the forum. Often valuable ideas and comments are only sent to the authors by email. In a closed forum we could discuss freely (though this might scare away some of your authors). 

- Keep the forum free for subscribers. I HATE to pay for any extras ... i´d rather accept a rise for subscriptions in general than have another "forum section" to subscribe to. Keep it simple and clean, this should make chesspub more attractive for new subscribers. 

Hello everybody!

Quote GMTonyKosten: "So we will need to address the question 'how can we make it easier to find that information?'
Although I have been loathe to do this, I am beginning to think that we might need to increase the number of sections, mostly by further sub-dividing the current ones. It might also be possible to add tags, or use ECO codes, but implementing this would be problematic.
On a slightly technical note I would also like to move to a faster, more secure (and unfortunately more expensive!) server with more bandwidth." - End Quote

Tony, I guess the tags you've mentioned are something like key words!? If there isn't a software internal possibility to tag a thread with keywords, anybody starting a new thread might give one or two reasonable key words in the thread's header (Stefan's suggestion about ECO codes has probably the same intention).

It would be in the "thread starter's" own interest to make the keywords as reasonable as possible, as that would increase the likelihood for that thread to be found and / or identified (and consequently commented).

The ECO code has the advantage that it is available to everybody who has internet access, but, as mentioned at different places, the whole system is dated. So another possibility were to use the taxonomy developed inside ChessPublishing - quite general ("1.d4 d5"), more detailed ("QGA"), or highly detailed ("QGA/2"). (Of course, as we don't want to exclude non-members from the forum, they would need a free access link somewhere to this taxonomy, which shouldn't take very long to develop (just copying it from the pdf-books.)

Concerning books, the key words might be author, title, maybe year of publication. Again: The better the key words are (spelling, completeness), the higher the likelihood of being found.

I don't know if there's a possibility to give different priority levels to threads. If there is, threads with a very specific topic (e.g. "QGA/2") could get a higher priority than more generall topics ("Kings Indian") and those a higher priority than totally generell topics (I like GabrielGale's wording, so Quote: "I don't know whether to play the Caro, Sicilian, Petroff, become a Catholic, or flagellate myself with a length of knotted rope. Which is best?" - End Quote)
- they might be higher in the list of threads, they might remain longer in the system (btw, after how many years will a thread be deleted?), they might be highlighted the one or the other way.

The priority status might be awarded by the moderators which shouldn't be too much work (according to my (limited)observation so far, there aren't very many new threads per day), and it would definitely be enough to do that once a day. The rules for them would be quite simple and no subject of discussion: Something like "QGA/2" would have priority A, "QGA" priority B, "1.d4 d5" priority C, no keyword at all priority D (or ZZZ). A combination of keywords might also lower the priority, e.g. "QGA/2, QGA3" would end up with priority B - a reason to select exactly one detailed key word.

To avoid the hijacking of "good" keywords, the moderators might be entitled to simply remove them from a thread, if they don't match the thread's content - no keyword at all, consequently priority D.

So the serious users of the forum would get a tool for improving it's self-organisation, whose results might also attract the "selctionistas'" (I cannot really believe that is their "official term"?) attention who might make better use of it by checking and maybe using some of the analysises provided in the forum.

If all that would work (well, maybe I'm sometimes a little naive concerning both technical possibilities und human behaviour  ), the number of sections might remain the same, which might also decrease the need for a new server - (no new server --> no additional costs --> no horrible blinking adds  ). Coming back to the quote from the beginning, I can't evaluate the security of the existing server, but I don't see a speed problem in the forum.

Best regards,

Zwischenzugzwang

Bibs wrote on 06/27/11 at 00:07:21:

I can only agree with GabrielGale and Bibs. In particular with this observation made by GabrielGale:

Quote:

I had the same impression. The percentage of posts about concrete variations is in decline. - Having to pay a small fee would already keep away many of those 4-year-olds. There should also be more moderators, with clear duties (maybe even adding ECO codes to opening threads, which would make it easier to find a variation?). Clear forum rules would help a lot ("When you start a new opening thread, don't forget to add the ECO code", "no personal insults", "no discriminating of openings", "no spam", "no cheerleading for illegal downloads of copyrighted works", etc. etc.).

Quote:

You forgot the third option: 3) those who are not willing to contribute have to pay (more).

My apologies for the length of this post but I am bit uncertain about this direction that ChessPub Forum is taking. I thought I need to provide some feedback from a novice former and future subscriber. Perhaps Tony can clarify whether the plan is for 1) a totally closed subscriber only (ie only subscribers can view and post); 2) partially closed subscriber only (ie only subscriber can post but everyone can view).

For my part I was a subscriber to ChessPub but no longer as I realised I cannot keep up with the monthly updates and my chessic strength is not at the level where I require such up to date info. But I am planning to subscribe again. However, from day 1,  I have enjoyed the Forum albeit lately the postings are not as interesting as before. (I wnet back to the beginning of most sections and read the threads. Very educational for a novice like me. But I noticed that a number of older subscribers are not postings as much as before. Not sure whether they have moved on or they are increasingly put off by the postings. I would be very sad not to see contributions from Topnotch (still haven't figured out who he is, someone send me a PM), Bibs, Black Widow (?), Alumbrado, Slates et al. But I enjoyed some of the present ones such as those which described in concrete terms openings and variations pitched at all levels (I remember I read about the Archangelsk Var on ChessPub Forum first), eg, the current Modern after I Nf3 thread is quite interesting (thanks to BPaulsen, Glenn Snow, Smyslov_Fan, Kylemeister and also to TN, Amenaitos, MnB, Stigma, Micawber, dom, and even Markovich et al for their contributions). I feel there are not enough discussions of concrete variations as before. If as is being stated by many chess coaches that opening theory is becoming 20-25 moves deep, then I think there is still lots of scope to discuss openings and perhaps now their opening/middlegame plans strategy. Too many "help me to improve including repertoire help" turning this from an opening discussion forum into a chess improvement forum.

Input from sections authors and/or other GMs and IMs are think very much welcomed but not sure whether the economics of return are a sufficient incentive. A suggestion: Perhaps Tony can try to "entice" the younger/more junior GMs who are trying to establish their names/reputations to contribute to the forum? Some of these younger GMs are very concrete in their opening analyses and very enthusiastic as well. For example, Chessbase has Anish Giri, Chessdom had Fabiano Caruana contributing for a while to their discussion board and they also have GM Ipatov et al.

In conclusion, I would opt for the following:
1) My obvious preference is for ChessPub to remain as it is but probably with more moderation in the direction to prevent the proliferation of similar and same threads and perhaps some thought given to organisation of sections and threads. However, if not possible, then,
2) ChessPub Forum should be half-closed ie only ChessPub subscribers can post but the threads are open to general public;
3) A ChessPub subscriber should have free subscription to the sections he/she is a subscriber. A Gold subscriber would obviously have access to all sections.

Daniel wrote on 06/25/11 at 23:40:23:

LOL