<"It was cg who did me wrong. I will not come groveling to it to beg or apologize. If cg will not reinstate me, so be it. Go tell bw-gets that I'd rather die for the cause of freedom than to submit to tyranny.">

First of all, please note that nobody is demanding an apology from anybody.

What we do demand is this: that people who violate rules pledge to not violate our rules in the future. It's not asking for a lot, in fact it's only asking them to promise what they've already promised when they signed-up in the first place, and agreed to our Terms and Conditions.

But that's not the only possible outcome. It is possible that you are on probation by accident. By that I mean an unfortunate coincidence of IP addresses, or simple human error. We are not necessarily denying the assertion "it was cg who did me wrong" -- perhaps that is exactly right, and we are the ones who owe an apology!

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fi...(UdSSR)_gegen_Fischer_(USA).jpg

Oh yeah, that cute cat bothers me, it stares.

Per Brian Krebs' article about DNSChanger Trojan at least half of the Fortune 500 still has infected hosts. I thought I'd post this quick one-liner that may help some folks find these infected hosts in their networks. http://trustedsignal.blogspot.com/2...

A reckless (and probably malicious) kibitzer - a premium member in fact - insulted a couple of members of long standing in this place with the following comment after they posted photos of Aleksandra Goryachkina on her player page:

<Why are you guys posting pics of a 13 year old? Pedos>

This clearly contravenes guideline 3 and possibly even 4 (violation of US law) and can't be mistaken for a joke, however weak, unless the kibitzer is a complete cretin.

I'd suggest such kibitzers think <very carefully> of accusing any members of this place of pedophilia for following the long standing practice of posting photos from the public domain of chess players and which are no way provocative or pornographic, just because they are young. If they're being "pedos", so is the editor of every online and hard copy chess publication and column on the planet, starting from chessbase.com and onwards through to FIDE itself.

This is a truly nasty accusation, and I suggest admin issue warnings about this, possibly directly to the poster and possibly to the extent of placing them on probation. I don't believe deleting their post is sufficient.

The kibitzer in question has appointed me the honor to speak on his behalf. I now hold a lawful power of attorney which grants me the authority to reveal his user name...no other than the runner-up of the most funny kibitzer award- the controversial <nanobrain>.

In his explanations of his posts:

<Jul-08-11 nanobrain: <Pyke>, I am aware of the reasons of those among us here at CG who are itching to either nuke this page or do some "less radical" control over it. Tell me if I've missed anything with this enumeration-- 1. we are like a cult; we treat Mr. So like some kind of a deity, calling him chairman, messiah, etc.;

2. our language is coarse, we use foul language against people we don't like;

3. we use our own language/dialects solely for mischief, especially against those like you who do not understand them;

4. our posts here are almost all nonsense, the frequency of which is designed solely for the purpose of getting the distinction of having the most posts or pages here at CG;

5. we hate foreigners. We call them outsiders or interlopers, etc.;

6. we do ridiculous things like talking about Mr. So's personal life, giving him unsolicited advice, putting unnecessary pressure on him, obsessed with his elo, mistreats his opponents, threating him as the next world champion whenever he wins and giving phony excuses whenever he loses; and

7. we are unreasonable, undisciplined, alcoholic, insane and are quick to anger.

There are others, but they can fall under any or these major categories of our "faults."

Now let me next talk about the Philippine carabao...

Jul-08-11 nanobrain: In most western countries perhaps the most loved pet is the dog, followed closely by the cat. In the Philippines, and I speak for myself and those like me, we eat dogs. Sometimes we eat cats too.

Our most beloved animal here since time immemorial is the Carabao, in English, the Philippine water buffalo. Those who have one treat this animal like a member of the family. Just like what the westerners do to their dogs and cats which however are always well-groomed, with perfumed smell, whereas the Carabao...

Well, the Carabao's favorite pastime is to wallow in the "tubugan" (basically a mudhole). It can do that all day. This mudhole is always smelly, and when the Carabao is there flies descend over it like Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor. But it's heaven to the Carabao. It lies contentedly there, in this abomination of mud and flies, munching regurgitated grass like chewing gum, flicking its tail once in a while to swat the flies.

We love this animal. Yet the dog-loving westerners would see it and say yuckky, how can anyone like this beast and how can it be better than our cute, cuddly, clean little poodles, cutchie, cutchie...

That's an analogy <Pyke.> You see us, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM YOU, and without exerting any effort to UNDERSTAND us, you condemn and think of naughty things to do to us. I would like to tell you that on Nos.1,2,3,4,5 and 7 of my enumeration above, you are flat out WRONG. There may be some truth in No.6 (except the "ridiculous" part which is a matter of personal perception) but often we are just carried away with our good intentions or belief in Mr.So.

I often make jokes but i do not do what the others are very fond of doing here (listed expressly or impliedly in No.6) yet when i look at these guys or their posts I do not find any reason at all to hate them. Or supress their right to express themselves. Precisely the same attitude I have when I turn my gaze on those outside this page.>

Please note that my argument is in defense of his posts in general. This is necessary because CG has not informed him of any specific violation which warranted his expulsion from the CG pages. How could I justify or offer an explanation to something I do not know?

I would like to speculate at this juncture that given my client's proclivity to tell jokes and engage his compadres in an enjoyable discussion, the words he uttered deemed violative of the guidelines were plain benign statements of jest in the spirit of fun bereft of any malice. Sadly, CG has viewed it in a different light.

Certainly these posts do not amount to a personal attack against other users...it pales in comparison to the sentiments expressed by the AJ bashers which are an affront to human decency and dignity. The AJ bashers has gone unreprimanded...neither were they banned.

CG, the balls are in your hands. You can not hope to rectify a mistake by neglecting to mend the root cause...which in this case is the denial of due process to my client.

You should stick to the rules drafted by our forefathers when they made our constitution. CG's rule relating to the outright bannishment without hearing is a bane to any civilized society and online community.

In the meantime, can you reinstate his privileges as long-time member (i.e. he is presumed innocent until he is incarcerated)?

Understand, we have a log on the homepage E-Z Search to see what people are searching for. This helps us see the kinds mistakes that people make, so we can hopefully correct them or at least improve the help document.

One thing we've always noticed is that people type things in like "1.e4 e6 2.d4" expecting to get games back, but it doesn't work like that. We do have such a feature -- it's called Opening Explorer Move Lookup -- but we never intended anybody to type chess moves into EZ Search.

So that got us to thinking... why not?

So now we're experimenting with a new feature which simply does redirects searches to the Opening Explorer if they look like a chess opening.

Let's try it. One of the main lines in today's opening of the day (Queen's Indian) is <1. d4 Nf6 2. Nf3 b6 3. c4 e6 4. Nc3 Bb7 5. a3 d5>. So I type it into the EZ Search:

search "1. d4 Nf6 2. Nf3 b6 3. c4 e6 4. Nc3 Bb7 5. a3 d5"

Suddenly I find myself at the relevant page: Opening Explorer

Uh, sorry. ;)

First of all, if you think you are going to play out a court trial on our support forum with you pretending to be a bannister and Daniel playing the judge, you are mistaken.

Second, <hatsis> was incorrect when he wrote <CG knows who the subject is. ...Pretending we don't know who the guy who was banned is an insult to intellegence.> Honestly I had no idea until just now when I read the latest posts on this forum. In retrospect it seems obvious, but believe me, there's more than one person placed on probation in the past few weeks.

Third, for purposes of computer account security, we shall not take your word that you have the "power of attorney" over nanobrain's account until we first receive a confirmation from nanobrain himself, from the very same email address which is tied to his CG account. I can address your statements as your personal opinion, and would like to do so, but be aware that this has no impact on the case of nanobrain at this time.

Now, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think your main complaint here is that the accused (nanobrain) was never explained what it is that caused their probation.

I gather this from posts such as <The accused has the right to know what the charges are> and <our friend was not even informed of the accusation against him> and <CG has not informed him of any specific violation which warranted his expulsion from the CG pages> and how you speak of an <impetus for CG to send him a notice to his email informing him of any breach of posting guidelines>.

These notions are all very meritorious. If CG honestly placed people on probation and did not tell them even what rule they violated, we would be jerks deserving of the sternest ridicule. But let's be honest--that's a far cry from the reality of the situation, isn't it?

We are perfectly willing to discuss with nanobrain the exact posts that triggered his probation and the rules that they violated. All he has to do is email us. How you compare this procedure to some sort of Stalinesque gulag is beyond me.

It seems to me that your main complaint is simply that we didn't proactively email nanobrain first. We could have written him FIRST, and listed the posts of his that we deleted, and told what rule they broke, etc. No, instead we place on his computer screen "please email chess@chessgames.com" and it's up to him to initiate the discussion.

Why is this? Well, as a business we are not really obligated to explain ourselves, we just find that this is the way that works best for us. But since you really seem so curious, let's discuss some of the finer details.

For starters let's talk about those email addresses in people's accounts. What do you suppose the odds are that the email address on account <N> is a real address for the person who uses that account? 99% chance? 90%? 50%? No, it's more like 40%. People use throw-away emails for websites, or intentionally give us bogus ones, or made a typo, or they simply changed ISP since they first signed up. As a rule of thumb, if an admin is emailing a customer based on their original email they signed up with, that admin is wasting his or her time.

Next point: to follow your plan of proactively contacting everybody on probation, this would mean that we would be emailing EVERYBODY. After all nobody is undeserving of their civil rights, not even the most blatant spammer. So CG will pay an admin to type up a nice personalized email to Viagra4u@trashmail.net that will explain that while it's against our rules to post their website on 100 pages, we still would love hear their opinions of the Modern Benoni. Yeah, right.

In summary, we don't normally initiate the email exchanges with users on infraction because we (1) we often are incapable of doing so due to nonfunctional emails, and (2) in many cases the person has no intention of ever coming back and therefore it would be a waste of effort to reach out to them.

I like this new approach towards the problems of this site. I realize its a difficult task, but I think the more active attitude will pay dividends towards a saner, more chess-oriented website. There's no perfect solution, but hands-on beats absentee every day.