Subject: Site review - Chess Books Forum Date: 1999/06/22 Author: Mark Weeks <100046.2106@compuserve.com> This is the third of these posts, so this week I'm going to review the third Chess History bookmark, which is the 'Chess Books Forum' by Francesco Di Tolla. The forum's charter is 'to exchange information and recommendations about chess books.' The Chess Books site was built using the same tools as this Chess History discussion group. The tools are free from Deja Communities, where 'free' means having to view a large number of advertisements on each page built by Deja (formerly called DejaNews) . While the relation between chess books and chess history may not be obvious, I originally included the bookmark because it uses the same technology as the Chess History discussion group and because historical research depends a great deal on the written word. The centerpiece of the Deja services is a discussion group, called a 'forum' in Dejaspeak, which is modeled after the original Usenet Newsgroups concept. People interested in a particular topic can join in discussions by posting messages to a global bulletin board. The Chess Books Forum is at http://www.dejanews.com/~chessbooks/ and the discussion group address is deja.comm.chessbooks. When I first started to review the site on 1999-06-14, the statistics at the bottom of the page showed:- - Founded by: ditolla on 3/4/1999 - 33 members · 1897 page views (1273 from visitors) - Access: Public - Open (Listed) A week later, the statistics showed '1973 page views (1348 from visitors)'. This works out to 18+ page views per day since the group was started, with almost no activity from the members over the past week. The access 'Public' means that anyone can read the group's messages, but only members can post messages. This is not too restrictive, as access 'Open' means that anyone can become a member simply by signing up. The last member joined on 1999-06-07. At the bottom of the page is a small link to Steve Pribut's Chess FAQ at http://www.clark.net/pub/pribut/chessfaq.html. This is a good idea, which I'm going to borrow for the Chess History site. The page lists six forums, which include the Chess History forum and four rec.games.chess (r.g.c) forums. Clicking on the 'Read' button for the single Chess Books forum returns 'Sorry, there are currently no discussions in deja.comm.chessbooks. Please try another forum.' Using the Power Search for all messages in deja.comm.chessbooks, I found 23 messages, the last dated 1999-05-13. Using the same search, I saw that Di Tolla (the 'founder' in Dejaspeak) has made no posts anywhere since 1999-05-11. If this discussion group isn't dead, it is in a coma. The group should interest people who read chess books carefully, who like to write chess book reviews, who are interested in feedback, & who have no other way to publish their articles. It would not be too difficult for someone to review one book a week as a regular post to the forum. This would help build an unknown reviewer's reputation while stimulating some interest for others to return to the pages. The main page has seven bookmarks listed including the two that the Deja service sets up automatically. The chess bookmarks are well known Web resources -- e.g. the ChessCafe, InternetChess, & The Week in Chess -- which are linked from many other Web chess pages. It is, nevertheless, useful to have direct links to the book review sections of those sites. I have seen many personal chess pages on the Web which feature reviews of chess books. It would not be a huge job to catalog & link the most interesting of these pages. Since the group was created, it has run an interesting poll for 'Which kind of chess books you prefer?'. The current results, based on 15 votes, show:- - Openings: 26% - Strategy: 6% - Tactics: 26% - Endgames: 6% - Biographies: 6% - Game collections: 26% - Matches/Tournaments: 0% which confirms the well known phenomenon that books on openings are among the most popular. An opinion that I share with many other players is that they are also among the least useful, at least for chess players of average ability. It's not completely clear to me what 'Game collections' means, as most of these books cover a single opening/player/event -or- are instructional, and therefore covered by the other poll categories. --- Why should anyone bother using these Deja discussion groups? The newsgroups like r.g.c are based on a technology which predates the Web. Being able to combine group discussion tools with other more recent Web tools offers powerful possibilities to create a different kind of Web site. Along with the discussion group, the bookmarks, & the poll, the Deja toolset includes a chat room, notes, a calendar, a whiteboard, a mailing list, & optional webpages. I haven't tried to use these other resources for the Chess History group and, except for the mailing list, Di Tolla has not used them either, so their value remain untried. The Chess Books mailing list has 18 subscribers, although it's not indicated how much traffic this generates. My own feeling is that these resources are more useful to a closed, tight group of people who have decided to work together on a common project, and less useful to an open, loose group of people sharing a common interest. The Deja pages all offer standard links to some other standard services. These are a 'Community Directory' to find other discussion groups ('communities' in Dejaspeak), a 'Community Help' to explain the various features, and a 'My Communities' to manage your personal preferences. Because the Deja software tools are constantly changing, it is not always easy to figure out how to do something. Having learned how the software works is not enough, because it may change by the time you next access the same function. The software changes are often errorprone. For example, the Deja people recently reclassified their channels, which automatically changed the Chess History forum to an inappropriate channel. When I tried to correct this, the software left the channel blank & refused to change it to anything else. This means that certain other functions don't work properly. There is also a risk that Deja will abandon the concept. Deja has been around for a long time & certainly has a commercial commitment to the non-Deja newsgroups, so they are not likely to disappear. It would be useful to know if this is a a private company -or- a subsidiary of a larger company, perhaps publicly traded. This would give a hint of the staying power behind the idea. I don't know how the Deja toolset & software compare to offerings from other Web providers. I've seen some of the other services, but have never had sufficient motivation to build a site with them. The Deja discussion groups are meant to be set up easily by people without any special knowledge of HTML. This is both a strength and a weakness of the concept. The strength is the ability to get a site running quickly. The weakness is that if it fails, the founder can abandon it as quickly as it was set up -- 'easy come, easy go'. As with any Website, it's not easy to get any traffic to these sites. Chess is already a subject of limited interest & the subject of chess books or chess history is only a subset of chess. Since its inception the Chess History main page has averaged ~29 page views per day, which is not substantially more than the Chess Books main page. The way of the world may simply be that they are doomed to remain obscure. That's enough for this review. I hope the Chess Books forum will be revived and grow into its promise. I also hope that other chess fans interested in building a Web site will consider the Deja toolset. Its advantages far outweigh its disadvantages. Respectfully, Mark Weeks