Talkchess Is Talking Again

Let's go back almost three months to Talkchess Is/Isn't Talking (August 2021). At that time I wrote,

I went back to the Talkchess forum once a week while preparing my weekly TCEC/CCC post and had the same message ['403 Forbidden'] every time. For this post I decided to look into it more deeply. [...; Unfortunately,] I ran out of time for working on this post. Maybe I'll tackle [the recommended workaround] later if I really, really need Talkchess. I can live without it for now.

A couple of weeks later the TalkChess admins -- the people who keep the site up, running, and interesting -- decided to tackle the problem themselves. A pair of forum threads documented their progess:-

• 2021-09-06: Task force TalkChess access
• 2021-09-11: On the ownership of TalkChess

The admins set up a copy of the software and data behind the system, then used it to isolate and debug the cause of the problem. The entire process took only a few weeks and appears to have achieved a resounding success. Kudos to all who participated. Now I'm able to go back to an older post, Stockfish vs. ChessBase (July 2021), where I wrote,

Talkchess.com is currrently returning '403 Forbidden; You don't have permission to access...' messages, so I'll come back to that forum another time.

For the record, the relevant thread was:-

• 2021-07-20: Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

That thread started almost four months ago and petered out nearly three months ago. The original complaint is likely still being litigated.

There have been other developments involving chess engines since then, so my time would be better spent looking into those. I'll save that task for another post.