OTF and my thoughts on its problems.

Yeah some people don't know the consequences of removibg the OTF thread. It's like unlocking a gate that's full of monsters.

No website is perfect, it’s like saying YouTube is brainrotted but every other place is brainrotted to

The difference between youtube and here is the standard: Big sites like youtube, instagram, etc. will always follow trends, therefore there will always be brainrot or trends from the internet, but here this is a smaller site with only a few million players active everyday, much less on forums. The forums should have higher standards due to the fact that they're supposed to be for support and communication. Brainrot and spam does not contribute to that in a meaningful way. Brainrot, in short, defaces chess.com's standards when looked at objectively, and other posts that are just raw spam farms do the same. You can't hold chess.com to the same level as youtube or reddit, because those are megasites with hundreds of millions of people. This site has moldable rules. This site has moderaters that are dedicated to forums. This site is a semi-professional social/chess site, yes, but it isn't capable of being held up to the same standard as the other, bigger sites. It's like if I saw a silver and gold watch. Gold is obviously more expensive, so you'd expect quality and large sums of stuff making it up, but silver is a lower quality material, so it has to make up for itself with design (e.g how it looks, feels, the company/brand, etc). I'm not saying this should be a god perfection site, I'm just saying that we as a community are better and can be better than this.

The main idea of forums is to ask questions related to chess and get answers from the community. Moderators and staff help out with support issues, which is good. Off-topic was only created because these discussions were taking over threads related to chess, I would imagine.

OTF and the regular forums were created for two reasons: 1. Convenience; people don't have to go on other sites to talk about chess or anything else. | 2. Social aspect: this site was made for the social and regular sides of chess, and forums contribute a lot for the social side. I doubt they meant for OTF to turn into a cesspool, but after C-19 pandemic began, intrest in chess skyrocketed, especially among kids. those kids join onto here, and subsequently more and more kids joined and spread their, errr..., child-like wonder(?) which eventually lead to the OTF we know and... well just know today. 

Ik people will compare otf with other social media but the difference is with the restrictions. If you start an insta account you have to get permission from your parents and be 13+ but on otf, parents just think you are playing chess and there are no age restrictions. I didn't realize this earlier but this is one of the main reasons why clubs are superior to otf - they are actually properly moderated.

Most clubs are but there are still relatively unmoderated clubs that are far worse than otf could ever be, especially with kids. They are few and far between and are well hidden. OTF cannot be held to the same standard as other sites, so I agree with you there.

I don't know, a club with a good owner and super admins could be well-moderated, but OTF does a pretty good job of keeping things clean and sticking to the TOS. It's all about who's in charge and how they decide to moderate.

Yeah but some stuff like dating threads or covered swears (******) can't be covered under the TOS while club rules can either

1. Stop them or

2. Make the club 13+ so that children aren't affected by it.

to join the site, u must be over 13 anyway. unless u have ur parents approval

He's not trying to remove OTF, nor does he have anywhere close to the power to do so. He's just pointing out some flaws within it.

I wouldn’t say so many, and we don’t really have lore.

If it would improve the overall quality of the forums in general, then I vote YES.

Fellings notwithstanding.