In Chrome most of the recent posts show up as little ticky-tacky boxes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littl...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2...

(Anyone know if there's a setting for that?)

I do like the way the t's get pushed up (or would that be down?) in <WannaBe> and <chancho>'s posts.

* * * * *

<Chessgames> can we perhaps also have an indication of what move a game link has (similar to kibitzing numbering)?

E.g.

A Lastin vs V Milov, 2003

would be nice to see a 40 show up somewhere.

<killjoy (n.) also kill-joy, 1776, from kill (v.) + joy. Formerly used with other stems (such as kill-courtesy "boorish person," kill-cow "bully, big man," etc.).>

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php...

<Stony> So long as they get them up in the next three to five billion years, before the sun dies.

That way there'll be some point to all the hard work you do, in terms of cultural longevity.

I doubt any website is a good place to publish work, because they are not as reliably persistent over time as a library is.

I realize paper is dying and maybe all libraries will digitize their collections in future, but I think about website death all the time.

I published some stuff on Chess Cafe, for example, that's no longer accessible- to me, that is.

They didn't die, but they did put up a paywall. I'm not going to pay them money to see my own work. Seems kind of counter intuitive.

I have to monitor my youtube uploads all the time because new (and usually bogus) copyright claims keep limiting their access. Also, youtube's terms and conditions make it clear they have the right to delete any member account for any reason, with no appeal. This could happen if a copyright claim is made by a powerful enough source- I've read many horror stories about this on the Google Youtube "help" boards, which aren't really any help. No surprise there.

These kinds of thing never happen at a library.

On the other hand, I suppose if the global power grid fails, and all our work disappears into the ether, then everyone will die anyway. No electric power, no live.

So then people won't be able to read our work in a library in any case, because they'll be too busy dying. I suppose cave people could start over on a "rock based" culture that might play out on similar lines as <The Flintstones>.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-env...

But there is no doubt that paper has a proven track record of being the best storage medium (if properly maintained, BPL recently discovered an infestation of mold that cost $325k to clean up. Quite topical, the Rare Book Department just reopened the other day:

<My Dear Bishop> I had occasion to go through my thousands of bookmarks a few months ago so as to organized them better. Around 90 percent of my bookmarks are chess related.

I was horrified to see that over half of those bookmarks linked to dead web pages. So in the five years since I've had GOBBLE CHROME, many hosting chess related websites had to have closed somewhere in that span of time.

Longer ago than that I was horrified to find that <chessmetrics> had gone down. <The Focus> was kind enough to inform me that I could email the webmaster and he found the email address and name for me.

So a few days later the <chessmetrics> webmaster kindly replied with an apology-

<Paraphrase> I'm sorry but I wasn't aware it was down. I don't maintain the website any more, but a friend of mine does it for me. I guess he forgot or didn't have time to notice either. <End Paraphrase>

Imagine if a library full of paper chess materials suddenly closed without warning. Would the city government fail to notice, and then respond later with "We don't manage the library anymore, so we got a friend to look after it. I guess he forgot. Hang on then..."

<chessmetrics> is the example I remember the most but there are other scads of other examples of this. <Roger Paige> and the <Tidskrift> have gone down repeatedly and then come back recently as well.

Digital is all good and all, but let's say my chess videos were on loan in a proper library, instead of on <youtubb>.

Some copyright "robot" (yes, robot- copywrong bot crawler) wouldn't come to the library and change the sound track to my video, or make a note that my video could not be loaned out to citizens of 246 countries. I once took out a <Yasser Seirwan> DVD from my Mom's local library. They have a good selection of various DVDs that have bee donated by the community. A copywrong robot isn't going to go into the library to smash the DVDs because they are "in breach of copywrong."

I doubt the world electricity grid is going to go down any time soon, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Websites are vulnerable to copywrong raiding and to a shorter lifespan than a library. Some libraries have been open for hundreds of years.

I wonder if the <chessmetrics> webmaster would have thought to establish a fund in his will to pay for future "friends" to take over the upkeep of the website for hundreds of years.

https://archive.org/web/

I've found some otherwise missing batgirl posts there, etc.

Thanks <z> but that's useless brah. That's not going to keep the work alive because nobody is ever going to go to those lengths to find it. Also, they'd need to know what it was and where and when I published it, all in the dark.

I'm not worried about "content creep" at <cg.com> work I've published because <Daniel> has enough sense to enlist capable experts to become content administrators- the "chess biographers" here at our website. I'm worried about the whole website going down, or not lasting longer than a few years without provision for some kind of "legacy continuation."

And don't forget priceless manuscripts that were lost because some merchant needed a bit of papyrus to write out a bill.

The visual world of film has had preservation issues from its birth. One of the earliest movies ever made, the electrocution of Topsy the elephant, was only preserved due to the frame-by-frame paper copies of the images preserved by the Library of Congress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)#Electrocuting_an_Elephant

<Alexandria never had any server issues, either... ;s>

They didn't die, but they did put up a paywall. I'm not going to pay them money to see my own work.>

This stuff happens. I've written stuff that's gone behind paywalls, and I agree that paying feels wrong. But I've also written for paper-based publications that have simply disappeared. Stuff vanishes.