Dear friends,
In recent years I have been, and unfortunately will continue to be, less present on the forum than I would like.
Work commitments have inevitably occupied much of my time, but in these summer days, when even work slows down, I have finally been able to dedicate myself to a project that I have held within me for several years.
I have decided to give new life to pianoconcerto.it
This is not simply about a new graphic look or a few extra features.
You will witness a true rebirth!
We live in an era in which it is continuously repeated that forums are now tools of the past and that everything takes place on social networks.
For a while I thought so too, then I asked myself: "Is it really like this? Or do forums continue to safeguard precious information that cannot be found on social media or is submerged by the mass of new messages? Is it perhaps a technological problem? Is it possible that the technological obsolescence of forums prevents them from attracting an audience now accustomed to much higher standards?"
All very legitimate questions...
Social networks are places where information flows quickly, is consumed within a few hours and then disappears, submerged by new content. Content that, almost always, privileges immediacy over depth, entertainment over knowledge, and the pursuit of consensus over cultural value.
A forum is something profoundly different: a forum preserves memory.
Every question, every answer, every shared experience continues to be useful even after many years.
In over fifteen years of activity, this community has built something extraordinary: over 50,000 posts, distributed across more than 7,100 discussions, written by approximately 11,000 people. This means having collected almost 78 million words, equivalent to over 1,000 books.
Seventy-eight million words are not simply an archive: they are the story of the passion of thousands of people, the fruit of years of study, experiences, doubts, errors, advice, and friendships born around music and a wonderful instrument like the piano.
It would have been an unforgivable mistake on my part to allow such a heritage to remain confined within old and obsolete software!
For this reason, I have decided to undertake an extremely ambitious project: to completely replace the old forum engine and integrate artificial intelligence into practically every component. Not to replace people, but to put technology at their service.
From today, pianoconcerto.it will speak two languages.
Every discussion will be available in both Italian and English. Every user will be able to write in their own language and the system will automatically provide the translation, making our cultural heritage accessible to an even wider community, an international community, thus allowing search engines to enhance this immense historical archive, even abroad.
I also wanted to break down another barrier besides the linguistic one: accessibility.
Every new piece of content can be listened to through high-quality speech synthesis, allowing visually impaired people to follow forum discussions as well.
Similarly, it will be possible to dictate a message instead of writing it, making participation easier even for those who have difficulty using a keyboard, or simply for those who want to speed up the writing process.
Accessibility should never be considered an additional feature. It should be the norm.
The quality of discussions will also take a huge leap forward. Every new message will be automatically analyzed by artificial intelligence systems capable of recognizing spam and content that does not comply with community rules. This means less noise, less unwanted advertising, and more space for conversations that truly matter.
The forum will also become accessible to those who are at least 14 years old, thanks to an advanced filter based on artificial intelligence that automatically obscures swear words and inappropriate terms.
Furthermore, search will completely change its philosophy. In an archive containing thousands of topics, one cannot continue to use a simple keyword search: this has always been one of the major limitations of forums.
From today, you will no longer have to remember a precise word. You can simply write what you are looking for, just as you would when speaking to a person.
For example:
"I am looking for that discussion in which the correct shaving of the Hammers was discussed."
The system will be able to interpret the search intent, selecting truly relevant conversations within an immense archive in just a few moments.
It will no longer be necessary to read hundreds of posts
to understand the sense of a discussion: thanks to the "Maestro" tool, you will be able to easily query the Chatbot to request a summary or find out how far the conversation has progressed.
To achieve all this, it was necessary to process the entire forum archive using artificial intelligence technologies. It was an enormous task, but I am convinced that a community like ours deserved it.
A similar project would usually require very costly investments for the use of external artificial intelligence services, an unsustainable expense for an online forum that normally has little or, as in our case, no economic conversion. We are therefore proud to provide a technologically cutting-edge portal and, one might say, unique in its type on the web.
We managed to realize it and offer it for free thanks to the investment I made last year in my professional activity, purchasing a proprietary infrastructure for AI model inference at a cost of several tens of thousands of euros. I therefore decided to make the computing power of the servers available during times when it is not busy with my clients' requests, to evolve pianoconcerto.it, believing that this was the best way to give something back to a community of people who, in over 15 years, has built a unique wealth of knowledge and deserved to be projected into the future.
One last important note concerns the automatic transcriptions of historical discussions.
The forum archive is immense and the processing queue is extremely long. To avoid saturating the servers and to ensure the stable operation of the platform, I have dedicated only one node among those available solely to this task. Transcriptions will be processed progressively over the coming days. You will therefore see them appear as the system completes the work. I only ask for a little patience: the process is completely automatic, but inevitably requires time.
I would also like to ask you a small favor.
What you are using is the first version of a completely new system. The old forum engine (based on IPB) has been entirely replaced by a new application developed entirely from scratch. A project of this size cannot be considered perfect from day one, and it is therefore possible that, during use, small bugs or unexpected behaviors may emerge.
If you notice any anomaly, I ask you to report it. Every report will be precious and will allow me to correct problems as quickly as possible.
This, moreover, does not represent a destination, but only the beginning.
Over the coming months, new features and many improvements will continue to arrive. Part of these is already in development, but I would like the evolution of the forum to also stem from the ideas of the community.
If you have in mind features that you find useful and wish to see integrated in the future, propose them without hesitation. I will read them all with great attention and, when I have a little time to dedicate to them, I will try to implement them. This forum has always been built by its community, and I would like it to continue to evolve technologically as well, following the needs of those who live it every day.
Perhaps some will continue to say that forums belong to the past.
I believe, instead, that the future belongs precisely to places capable of preserving memories and knowledge.
Because artificial intelligence itself feeds on information, and we, in over fifteen years, have built one of the largest collections of knowledge on the piano and classical music available in the Italian language.
This heritage must not be lost.
It must be guarded, protected, made accessible, usable by everyone and, above all, shared with those who come after us.
pianoconcerto.it is not just a website.
It is a part of the history of the piano on the Italian web; it is an archive of expertise built for free by thousands of people who chose to dedicate their time to helping someone they didn't even know.
This is the greatest value we possess, and that is why I felt the duty to accompany this community into the future, while trying not to betray its identity.
Technologies change, tools evolve, but there are values that remain unchanged: passion, curiosity, the desire to learn, and the generosity of sharing what one knows.
As long as there are people driven by these values, pianoconcerto.it will always have a future.
Welcome to the new home of our community, as always, 100% free.