I acquired chipguide.com along with the other domains AND all the data/images a few months before the MoGH project was born and simultaneously took over the copyrights of the various names and logos associated.
At that time I informed Carol I would not be able to maintain/update the chipguide images (aside from perhaps NV which I was going to do jointly with Paul Hegge) so the images would remain but be 'static'.
I didn't think right then that anyone would be able to take it over.

A little while later Neal contacted Carol to discuss whether she would be happy with the MoGH taking over the data and after some discussion between them, you, me and Mike Skelton it was agreed and the following press release was made indicating the MoGH project would be called The Greg Susong Digital Media Center (GSDMC). See here:
http://www.thechipboard.com/archives/archives.pl/bid/320/md/read/id/992625/sbj/mogh-press-release-vbg/

For some while the project bore that name before it suddenly became 'chipguide' without any further discussion with me. After later discussion amongst the various parties I agreed the MoGH could use the chipguide name (NOT the other way round). There was a statement to that effect on the MoGH guide at some point but that no longer appears to be there. That all came about as Carol only donated the data contents and not the name.

Anyway, that's all water under the bridge and everything is operating to everyones liking I think so back to the original question of 'why'.

About 50% of the running costs for the forums (including 'subsidy' of the related sites) comes from external on-line advertising primarily being links on chipguide.com
The reason such advertisers - almost all are online gaming sites - are prepared to pay reasonable fees is the the chipguide.com domain has a very high page ranking on google and that is the sole criteria they seem to use. If I change the content of that page (and the domain only consists of a single home page) then I risk losing all that. Similarly, if I had created a different domain to fulfil that function then it would have taken 10 years to achieve the same google page ranking (if at all). The forum domains (like this one) don't get ranked in google as they have insufficient static data so they can't be used to the same effect. Also, there are a number of pieces of licenced software that control the various forums. Greg's original structure of having those forums all link to chipguide.com behind the scenes meant only one instance of each licence was required. As I sought to keep it as simple as possible that structure has been maintained.

Theoretically, the only difference between the two 'homepages' (chipguide.com and the mogh route) is that mine shows those adverts. In practice there are a few subtle differences. Firstly some functions require either a member login or a direct connection to the database for searching) so links from my version would not work. Secondly, I don't compare both on a daily basis and only tend to update chipguide.com when I notice a difference, or someone points it out. In general if something no longer works because of changes to links, or the map, then Charles has been pretty good at shooting an email to let me know.

So for users here it really doesn't make much difference which route you take. Both have links at the top of the forums. I'd obviously like to maintain the page ranking but I doubt many of you are clicking all the online poker links. They are effectively supposed to be the same. There is only one database whichever way you access it, just the home page that is slightly different.
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