I'm Quentin, and I run ChessUSA / host the talkchess and computer chess club forum. I've tried to maintain a hands off attitude with the forum and its management but I believe we're at a place where the state of the current forum needs to be addressed.
As some of you might have noticed, the forum has become fairly outdated and has had a few problems this past year and recently. After the outage the other week I thought it was time to explain a bit about where we are and what we need to do. Last year I had my developer attempt to update the board to the most recent phpbb - and it was unsuccessful. This is largely due to being A) very old and B) an absolute mammoth in size.
We save all the old posts, and it's made the database so large it can't update via the traditional means. My host/developers tried a number of things and after spending about 8 hours working on it gave up, because other methods would take a lot of time and there was no guarantee it would work. While I could prune a lot of old messages and it might cause it to transfer better, my feeling is no one wants to do that.
The other week we experienced a brief downtime and it was due to attacks on the talkchess site - it turns out the older versions of phpbb are much more susceptible to this sort of thing. Worse still, that impacted my retail website as well, and my host more or less gave me an ultimatum:
I need to either convert phpbb to a different forum (I believe he recommended Xenforo) or potentially move it to a completely different server. These solutions (as currently quoted) are relatively expensive - he suggested around 800.00 or so to convert the forum, and that's barring unforseen problems due to the database size, etc.
So, i'd like to ask for your help. I do not make any sort of money off of talkchess currently, and if this is going to be a sizeable project I simply can't budget for it. If you've enjoyed talkchess or the computer chess club and want to show your appreciation, any donations can go a long way to help, both for this project as well as continued support down the line.
If you'd like to donate, please click on the link below:
Respectfully and Greatfully,
Quentin Turner
Your Move Chess & Games