The very popular It's Your Turn online play site suffered a serious meltdown on Friday, August 19, 2005. This site, highly rated and highly recommended on our site ratings page, hosts turn-based play, counts among its membership many top-notch players, and offers a number of checker tournaments every month.

Due to a faulty backup strategy, both main files and backups were lost, and the site suffered a 10 day outage before coming back on-line on August 29, 2005. Site operator Patrick Chu spent quite a bit of money to hire a data recovery service, and they did their job well: everything except game moves was fully recovered from the crashed storage devices.

During the crisis, site management provided frequent informational updates. and presented a balanced and forthright viewpoint. They have "confessed" to less-than-stellar business practices vis-a-vis backup and recovery, and have offered to make good on lost membership time due to the site outage.

It's Your Turn has been a great place to play both casual and serious checkers, and members now have a choice: they can castigate Mr. Chu for his faults, and abandon the site; or they can realize that It's Your Turn remains a good place to find a good game.

We ourselves have been critical in the past of the site's unfortunate lack of attention to customer service. We expect that this recent experience may have turned that situation around.

It is our hope, and our recommendation, that if you are a checker-playing member of It's Your Turn, you will stay on as a member and keep playing. There is a real danger of the site losing enough membership to cause serious harm. We would surely not wish to see that happen.