Chess by Message

Adieu

The time has come for Chess by Message to bid farewell.

Sadly, as it turns out, my investment in cyber security was no match for the motivation and resources of today's cyber criminals.

Chess by Message's database was hacked on 10 October, its data stolen and held for ransom. I will not encourage such criminal activities by providing them with funding. Regarding the security of your personal data, by design, Chess by Message stored almost no information about its users. The user information it stored was limited to:

names;
email addresses; and
system-generated hashes of passwords (passwords themselves were not stored).

I feel proud that this little website that I built all the way back in 2006 supported you, its users, to play more than 100,000 games of correspondence chess, to keep in touch with friends, and even to build new connections.

For your online correspondence chess fix, I would heartily suggest the free and wonderful lichess.org.

Thank you all for participating in the Chess by Message community over the years. I hope it had some small positive impact on your lives.

Yours,
George