Virus Kills chess.ca / Reborn!
— — Don Parakin
Because of viruses and malware, the old CFC website was being blocked by many browsers. Fixing it was too difficult. So an emergency re-write of the website was started.
The initial launch on July 23 had mostly the core requirements: For players, a list of upcoming tournaments. For organizers, the list of CFC members, membership expiry dates, and the latest ratings.
Additional function and content will be migrated from old to new website based in priority sequence. Ideally we would have migrated it all before the initial launch. But since the old site was 100% blocked, it was better to have a partial site early than a complete site much later.
Brief History
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Blocked: On July 3, 2020, most browsers started blocking chess.ca because of malware.
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Repair #1: A few suspicious things were found and removed from chess.ca. We requested a review but, on July 7, we were told we had failed the review. There were still many malware issues to be found and fixed.
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Repair #2, #3, #4, … or Replace: After some more work, we eventually realized that amount of skill and work it would require to fully fix our almost 10 year old website exceeded the amount of work to just re-write it.
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Decision: On July 14, an online meeting was held and the decision was made to replace chess.ca.
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Launched: On July 23, the new chess.ca was launched but with many parts still “under construction”. Ideally, we would have everything ready but having something was better than the nothing we had with the old blocked website. The initial launch had the basic framework as well as two essential functions: (1) list of upcoming tournaments and (2) lookup of players’ latest rating and CFC expiry dates.
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Migration: Over the next few months, the remaining content and functions of the old website will be migrated to the new chess.ca.
Thanks for your patience!