Author: Dave Gomboc
Date: 18:25:08 12/23/98
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On December 23, 1998 at 19:13:05, Fernando Villegas wrote: >Hi: >No, I am not saying we must replace the purpose of this place by another one; I >just say we must tolerate without so much discussion and without an special >tolerant and gracious attitude of the moderator in carge that day the off topic >post when it appears. Your post about my post and this one about your answer to >mine is an example as how you can communicate a lot more even for the very first >day here. No, no danger of killing the goal of this place anyway. Off post are >no more than a fraction, but when some days they are more than that, there are >good reasons to that thing to happens anyqway. >Merry chritsmas and welcome >fernando It's true that some off-topic threads are more tolerable than others. We have many posts about computer chess. Occasionally something will head off into a purely chess topic, and it's generally all right, most computer chess lovers are chess players, so this works out not too badly. The thread usually dies in a few days. The same happens with computers. Perhaps someone is attempting to optimize the performance of their software, and someone throws in a comment about overclocking the CPU in the computer. :-) This spawns a little thread of its own, and that also usually dies after a bit. And, because it's the holiday season, a few people usually say "Merry Christmas", "Happy New Year", or whatever. I mean, what are you going to do, sue them? :-) But then there's these other kinds of threads, threads of the type which I haven't seen too much of on the CCC, and hope that it stays that way. If you've been involved in the online computer chess community for a few years, you'll no doubt remember a few things that happened in rec.games.chess.computer over the years. One example is that the decision to hold a WMCCC in Jakarta, Indonesia spawned a vitriolic debate, if I may use the word "debate" loosely. I think it's fair game to criticize the decision, to state why you think it's wrong, to back up your opinion (e.g. no university in Indonesia should not have been chosen, because of the country's terrible human rights record) by giving an example or two (e.g. Amnesty International reports that there have been xxx human rights abuses this year alone.) But you know, it didn't stop there. There was a person posting historical AP press releases several times a week about the mistreatment of the East Timorese, over a period of months. The "discussion" failed to stay constructive, it was just a call for the heads of whoever had made such a horrible decision. Others started with the head-hunting, they didn't even bother justifying the why. But my point is, there were a huge number of messages being posted that amounted to someone grandstanding their political views. It ceased to have much to do with the WMCCC at all. And I think it's wrong to deluge a computer chess group with this sort of thing: if we wanted to read it for months on end, we'd be reading the appropriate political newsgroup. Another large brouhaha occured as a result of the unfortunately-aborted World Man-Machine Checkers Championship between Chinook and Dr. Marion Tinsley. Sure, it was checkers, but for the purposes of developing an algorithmic (computer) player, checkers is similar to chess in many respects. Indeed, the main author of Chinook once tied for first place in a WCCC with his chess software (I think this was 1983, with Bob et al.'s Cray Blitz winning the tournament on tiebreak). There was some bigtime personal attacking going on then, mainly done by a few people who didn't really know what took place at the Chinook-Tinsley match, but refused to believe those that were actually on-site, preferring their own invented, hatchet job version of events. This thread couldn't have gotten out of hand on the CCC today like it did then: it would have been blown away by a moderator, and the appropriate people chastised or booted. That's a plus for the CCC. Some people fail to appreciate how destructive their behavior can be. Others appreciate it perfectly fine, and choose to be destuctive anyway. Just a few days ago, we heard Don Dailey say that "we lost good members because of [Sean Evans]!". Yep. And the computer chess community has been losing good members for a long time now. For every person who is willing to wade through the crap, there is another who packs it in and says "enough is enough, I'm not going to bother with this shit anymore". We lose casual chess players with an interest in computer chess. We lose computer chess afficianados. We lose computer chess software developers. There was a time when you would see a post from, say, Jonathan Schaeffer, or Hans Berliner, more than once in a blue moon. Feng-Hsuing Hsu was never a frequent poster, but it was really interesting to read his posts about the Nolot positions. The best we do today is to hear about a "source" from Bob, which may or may not be him for some particular information. And for every champion-class computer chess software developer, how many hundreds of other, normal people have decided that they too have something better to do than to wade through hundreds of posts of animosity? Will we ever get these people back? Maybe. Probably not. Some people feel that a moderator should have a light hand, or that it's a good idea to give people third and fourth chances. IMO, this is baloney. We have the CCC for a reason, it's because r.g.c.c. doesn't work. If people prefer r.g.c.c. to CCC, fine, but the last time I read r.g.c.c. it was a cesspool, and I doubt it's changed much. CCC exists because people want an alternative, so I hope that when you're voting, you're not voting for someone who's going to take that alternative away. Dave Gomboc
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