"American Chess Review," et al.

Ok.

what

 jugamos una partida

I can't deny some sense of schadenfreude that Batgirl's qualtiy post is met with one word replies and zero word replies (emojis) and kids saying "what"

Did you think the chess.com forums were a fertile ground for discourse @batgirl? How optimistic.

The problem is mods are given training to recognize posts that are against TOS.

But there are no guidelines or training or methodology to recognize posts that are of value.

In other words you allow things to fall down to the lowest common denominator while at the same time you don't recognize anything of value.

This is the result.

Have fun lying in the bed you've made. I know Erik's bank account is not unhappy.

It's my belief -whether that belief is realistic is perhaps questionable - that forums have potential.  Realizing that potential may be a Sisyphean task, but sometimes the value of something lies more in the road than the destination.  At any rate, to elevate something, one must be the air beneath the wings, so to speak.   Some people get something out of these threads, some don't and feel the need to display their ambivalence. It's all ok.  Maybe one of those people decided to look a little deeper into Morphy.... who knows?   It's no so much optimism as it is planting seeds.  

I guess my animus stems from feeling that there's less potential now than there was before.

Maybe that's not true. I'll have to think about it.

"Ambivalence" is a big word for toddlers who fart out of reflex. These eyesores post emojis for reasons they themselves can't fathom much less explain. It's a sideshow. Humans acting out of reflex. In the past the genetic defect may have been dwarfism. In this case it's 12 years olds whose brains are comparatively deficient.

But I should stop the rant there... I understand it's easy to whine about low quality posts, but most of the time these forums are a chat room for children. This generates many clicks, and may satisfy the majority audience... I guess I'm lamenting that there's so little thought given to considering shaping the audience. If you ban childish posts you drive away children, it's true, but at the same time you create something that's closer to the ideal of a chess forum and further form a daycare. The audience becomes chessplayers... seems fitting for a chess site, if you ask me.

Yeah, the internet is a harsh place.

Humans are pretty pathetic in the sense that instinct causes people (including me) to use these crude techniques... I mean face to face an adult will either give a kid a dirty look, or the two will separate themselves into different rooms.

But online we're all together, and we can't tell people apart. You might be 70 years old, or 7 years old. So we're both dissatisfied with the interaction and give each other negative feedback which in prehistoric times would have effectively moderated the situation... these days it's more artificial and no one has it figured out yet.

In any case, at the end of the day, maybe the truth is that chess is a children's game, and I shouldn't be here... that's one possibility.

hi

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No notification again! GRR! Nice find! - the reward for hard work is coming up with such things. I know nothing about Allen, apart from having been through his book on Phiidor.

Lovely little posting - genuinely enjoyed it. Wish I had Morphy's memory!!