Figle,

You really are bitter, aren't you? Or is it really true?

Well his high production costs are probably real. He needs to pay professional programmers, whereas we the benevolent Kestas and people who help him, like you figlesquidge.
One good thing about playdip is that there are a few differences. Some of these are quite good, and Kestas could alway use these ideas if it takes his fancy.

typo... we *have the benevolent Kestas...

To those who don't know the history, playdiplomacy is based on Kestas's code, and it took a while before they would give him credit.

What are you asking Steven? As Spyman said it was very closely based on code from here, and they took a long time to credit him. But yes, he's on there now.
The reason I mention it each time this comes up is I'm still surprised how many players over there don't know and assume it was entirely his work. Moreover, near the end of the summer a post went up on their website from him talking about how much he'd had to spend on it, and that if they didn't all donate more money to him he'd have to close down. Those figures seem very unlikely to me: how on earth can he need $25,000 just to keep going? http://www.playdiplomacy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7087

Programmers don't come cheap when you pay them by the hour. Plus I suspect his system uses a greater band width (or something like that I am not a computer geek), and thus has higher server costs. Plus if he chooses to make a buck, well good on him - let the users decide if they want to pay him. I really doubt anyone is going to make much money from running a diplomacy site.

Programmers & Band width - those are fair points, but even so I can't quite believe he's spent that much. Still, I guess you have a point.
As for making a profit, again that's a fair point. But if he's trying to make a profit he shouldn't claim its to match costs.
Also, I don't see how he can claim he did it as a hobby? He knew this place existed, and created that one anyway. I could understand him calling it a hobby if he wrote the code personally, but paying someone else to do it: Where's the fun in that? Then, as well as denying any of it was based on this code, he did some other things such as changing the wikipedia entry on diplomacy, just to get more interest. Those don't strike me as the sort of things you do just for a hobby, those are clear moves to try and take over a market.

imho, I've seen his site and it is NOT worth $25,000. He had "professional" developers design it and it is more buggy and less user friendly than this site. Additionally, they took Kestas's code and used a standard forum layout, so most of the difficult work was done for them. Either the programmers conned the owner, or the owner is conning his users.

Do they share the code, as the license of webdip force them to do?

No, they took an earlier version released on a different license.

And are refusing to update- so much for the "hobby".

I tried a game at olaydiplomacy. I much prefer webdip and goondip. I couldn't play anything except regular dip unless I paid. The site layout was not ppealing to me. I prefer the traditional board. Since I played on dip2000, I've even gotten used to England being pink.

Who cares about playdiplomacy...?!
It sucks...

But I think it's great that every time there's a problem on playdip, people complain about it on webdip. : )

It is amusing, to say the least.

Webdip doesn't crash, it only has updates :). And then its better afterwards :)