Doesn't make sense to me, and it seems like it would exacerbate the trolling/crappy conversation problems. Why not just load the open games, active games, and help tabs?

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When you think your opponent has made a mistake, that's when you should be the most cautious.

To open a custom game, or resume a game, you need to have a room as active tab. Thus joining no rooms by default, would lead to a bad user experience. Or one could allow roomless games.

btw the automatically joined room depends on the language of your client. For example a German client will join "Deutsche Ecke" and not EGR by default.

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Sanity is for the weak.

I knew there was something I was forgetting to say. Yes, this is an issue, but you have the obvious solution. I don't see an obvious barrier.

Yes. I have no knowledge about whether the other rooms are equally messed up.

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When you think your opponent has made a mistake, that's when you should be the most cautious.

I kind of like it because it makes it feel more social--one of the reasons I like KGS. True, it comes at a cost, though I think it's worth it. Of course, that's just me.

The first time I downloaded KGS I thought it was incomprehensible and deleted it. If the EGR didn't load automatically, I might have never figured it out.

I opened the South African Game Room and closed the EGR and I am happy to announce that I no longer see the EGR when I log-in. Good riddance.

Not only that, but Auto-match still works! Yay! KGS is just better outside of the EGR.

(And I haven't had a single escaper with this new account - now at 7 kyu. I am seriously starting to love KGS.)

Jts: there's now a help room. Do you think that's not enough?

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When you think your opponent has made a mistake, that's when you should be the most cautious.

Well, maybe I should start hanging out in the help room again before I pass judgment. But my recollection is that it's a very, very quiet place, with something like two questions a day, which an admin generally answers by pasting a link to www.gokgs.com... whereas in the EGR there are actually people, who have conversations with each other, and answer newbie questions with a bit of empathy. Okay, empathy and condescension. (There are also bunches of people playing Go, which is convincing evidence that there must be some way to start a game!) I also tend not to ask for help when I'm convinced I'm making a really stupid error (like not knowing how to create a game).

I'm 7 kyu on KGS, have been using it since 2008 (with a several-year absence) and I still don't know how to invite someone to a game.

I know where the auto-match button is, though, so I can play games.

That's perhaps because KGS has no such functionality. You can set up a game using the "Custom game" button to receive game invitations or find a game with automatch. If you want a game with a specific player the usual way to do it is for one of you to set up a game and put the name of the other player in the comment field.

The lack of "invite to a game" is intentional. I used IGS before I wrote KGS, and it used to drive me nuts to have to fend off game invitations that I wasn't interested in. So on KGS I made sure to set it up so that it isn't possible to send a game invitation. Sometimes it is good to be king.

I don't think having no game invitations is too big of a problem (it leads to a pleasant sort of room-tag along the lines of "I made it in the ASR" "Where?" "Oops, no, it's in the KTL"). The real problem is that "Custom Game" seems to imply you want to play on a 37x37 board or use green stones or something, and "Autoplay" is not the most intuitive concept. If instead the gui said "Create a Game" and "Join a Random Game", I at least would have probably started playing go in 2007.