Important notice

If You found out about Rodent at Talkchess forum, please be aware that I, and other people from Poland, cannot access that site , because host decided to block the ip numbers coming from that country. This situation persists for half a year. And that hurts me greatly. I no longer believe that chess programming community is an inclusive circle it once was. Apart from a few select people (and they know who they are), hardly anybody speaks up against this discrimination.

In case You don't know me, here is some background. As a former academic (PhD in mediaeval literature) I care for sharing information. My stint with open source code lasts for at least 15 years. Not only chess stuff, but also a program that modernizes spelling of Polish texts printed somwehere between 1850 and 1936. For 10 years I worked for a NGO whose main activity is publishing books that are in public domain (sadly only 1 of them is in English, but here it comes: https://wolnelektury.pl/katalog/lektura/argonauts-of-the-western-pacific.html). Situation when I do something for free and then need to go through jumps and hoops to even access the content I created, or when I cannot reliably share a link to such content, is simply against my core values.

Not sitting behind an arbitrary, discriminatory wall created by forum host, you cannot even see the amount of damage this decision caused, especially for the new users. Links that direct to "Forbidden" page severely limit the usefulness of Chessprogramming Wiki. They destroy the value of Google/DuckDuckGo searches related to chess programming. They even make my current job more difficult, since I have to explain stuff to my collegues instead of pointing them to more reliable sources.

Soem people told me to use VPN. But it does not solve all the problems - the software may scramble links to freely accessible content, hide chess diagrams etc. Beside that, it constantly reminds me that I was made a second-class user.

What can you do?

- Please consider writing to the admins of the discriminatory site of Talkchess about the issue. Please ask them politely when and how they are going to fix this issue. Or please do away with the politeness and remind them that they participate in something utterly immoral. The choice is yours. Please do that often.
- Please consider not posting at Talkchess forum, because your content will be inaccessible in some parts of the world.
- If you care for spreading information about computer chess, please look for other venue. Talkchess no longer guarantees that.
- For Your own good, please backup any stuff you posted there, because you can lose access to it on a whim.
- If you happen to posses technical ability, resources and spare time, please consider backing up technical information from Talkchess. Replacing links at Chessprogramming Wiki with actual quotes might be a good way to start. Reposting it somewhere else will work too.
- All of the above is especially important if Your work is in any way connected with open source. The discriminatory site of Talkchess goes totally against that spirit.