However back in 1997 there was the World Chess Network. I really liked the interface and even by today's standards it was quite good. However it ran into high cost of maintenance and was sold and  changed hands a couple times. I later found out that Dato Tan Chin Nam himself was a major financial supporter for World Chess Network. It's a pity it was not successful as the initial years it was very promising and looked to be one of the better chess servers.

If it had been successful, we could say that today, it would be the first chess server that has Malaysian roots.

Fast forward to 2017 and the high cost of setting up and running a chess server is severely slashed thanks to the power of programming geniuses like Thibault Duplessis who created lichess and even made the source code open source! Not only that, the older FICC and ICC base codes are built from open source foundation. So in theory, any normal person with some basic technical knowledge can build a chess server.

Malaysia is mediocre in terms of chess performance but we are certainly gila active judging from the multiple weekend tournaments we have EVERY single week. So besides OTB (over the board) chess, it would be nice if we had our own local online tournaments too (hosting on lichess.org is ok but it's NOT LOCAL) with prizes.

Besides hosting local online chess competition, our very own chess server is great for coaches to offer online tutorials to students who they cannot meet face to face seeing that the source codes of lichess can be modified to better customise features like these.


I am waiting for the first Malaysian Chess Server to emerge. Any takers?


Related link:
Holy Grail of Installing a Chess Server