GoGameGuru-dot-com (domain taken over by spammer) was a website dedicated to promoting go. From about 2013 to 2016, they also distributed go books/equipment internationally, and even published at least one original book (Relentless: Lee Sedol Vs Gu Li).
Unfortunately, after they closed their store in Dec 2016, they never resumed making additional content, and as of recently, their webpage seems to be down. I miss this website. It was reliable place to buy a large variety of books and equipment, and they had nice articles, problems, and commented games.
Does anyone know what might have happened to them?
They have released some of their commented games and go problems via GitHub under an open CC license:
What happened is that the creators were too ambitious. What started as a personal blog grew into a news and commentary site, online retailer, global event organizer (Learn Go Week), and book publisher (Relentless). It all just collapsed under its own weight, and the creators realized that running the place wasn’t really what they wanted to do as a career.
Thank you for sharing that for additional context. I had actually seen both of those posts before. I am still a bit surprised that they have completely vanished, given that they said in their last blog post that they planned to continue posting articles. However, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that they decided to completely walk away from the go scene, given the level of stress that they describe in that update on reddit.
Does anyone have any recommendations for online retailers of go equipment?
The only comparable store that I know of is Yellow Mountain Imports (which also sells through Amazon), but unfortunately their selection of equipment and books is not quite as broad as GoGameGuru’s was.
For Europeans there is Chess and Go shop ‘Het Paard’ www.schaakengo.nl/?language=en. They are a shop in Amsterdam and have a webshop shipping at least to Europe. Don’t know if they also send outside Europe.
Yeah, I just saw that as well, when a new article appeared in my RSS feed. Unfortunately, the new post is just some poorly written spam bait and it looks like the site has been taken over by a spammer.
The WHOIS lookup shows that it was pseudonymously registered via the DomainsByProxy company.
Does anyone know how to reach out to the former owners? I think they should be made aware that a spammer has taken over their domain with an imitation site.
Personally, I feel quite bad about the situation. Perhaps it is just coincidence, but since the spam site was setup within days of my initial post, I fear that this forum post might have attracted attention to the unattended domain and inadvertently tipped off the spammer to snatch it up.
