Financing CTS or The London Accord *

Hereby I propose The London Accord, or means of both insuring the continuance of CTS which we all love, secondly protecting to make sure we are not in a situation where in the future the system suffers an outage as happened to the shock of all of us users in June, and thirdly and lastly, acting to restore expanded reporting such as the individual performance in graphic or bar chart form as existed before then. We call it ‘The London Accord’ in remembrance of the efforts of “non-commercial service created and supported by chess enthusiasts from our chess club in Berlin”, or Schachgemeinschaft Hermsdorf, in securing continued sever capacity in London.

This seems like a good time to bring this up, and I have thought about this steadily since early July, but needed time and energy to write it up after sustained reflection. This site has seen prodigious growth and needs to be preserved and protected. Just thirteen days ago, we had 6,820,357 problems solved, then six days ago, 6,976,688 then the 7.0m jubilee, and now today at 7,100,548, we are now easily annualizing 600,000 problems a month, or adding a million every seven weeks. In June, we had 1,000 users registered as “active” or having RD’s <100.0. Today we have 1,481. Of those, the top 20% of those users or 296 have solved 47% of all problems.

While not all users are by any means wealthy, it is evident that hundreds of persons depend upon CTS for their training, and while every effort must be made for this to continue as a free site, many users also are more than willing to also pay annual subscriptions at playchess.com, or internet chessclub.com, and so I propose we open discussion as a group as to fundraising or contributing at CTS. I hope that no one is offended. But if twenty percent of those 1,500 active users each contributed $10.00 or 8.00 Euro’s, we could raise $3,000 or 2,399 Euro’s. Some might give nothing, but others might gladly donate more.

Of the hundreds of active CTS users, much talent exists to contribute skills, resources, and ideas in the furtherance of this site. Let there be a forum of discussion to accomplish this. Surely if the graphics has been cut back while the user base continues to expand, and problems solved mushrooms in size, it is plain to see that the system must be taxed, or if not taxed, must insure this does not happen again, while expanding or restoring all the graphics that we all love. If some of us spend one to two hours a day practicing here, but less on playchess or ICC, how can it be no one would contribute, when this is so dearly valued—as indicated by hours spent on site? Let the discussion begin please and thank you to all the brilliant and hard working users at CTS. Direct comments may be made more public at chessChat.org.

dk