For some reason I am unable to figure this out. I don't even know if it's possible at all. But are you able to pull up a past game of yours so that you can save it or re-visit it? When you go to 'Users' and you click on 'games', is it possible to open those games back up so you can review them?

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question but for some reason I can't figure it out.

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Right click a game -> 'Load in...' -> pick a room.

I even saw those options. Don't know why I thought they wouldn't work. Thank you for such a fast reply!

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Or right-click one of the games and select "Copy game to disk." Save it where you want, and view/edit in KGS (or any other SGF editor).

The KGS UI only lists games from the recent past (I don't remember the exact range, I'm guessing somewhere from 2-6 months). If you want to look up even older games, you can find them on the KGS website, here.

Another, even more interesting option for finding old games is KGS Analytics.

It is six months. Being available in the UI means they are still saved on the server. This is also why six months is the length of time that they will affect your rating, count for tilde calculations, etc.

Not 180 days? IIRC, another feature - account expiration - happens in 180 days, which makes a difference between 6 months when more than one person wants an account.

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be immersed

You'd have preferred if he said 182 or 183 days instead of six months?

Not sure if you are being pedantic, or joking. Hoping for the latter...

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Nah, if the actual time period is 180 days, I would've preferred he said 180 days instead of six months

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be immersed

It's my understanding that it's actually 180 days plus a few days until the next time the housekeeping routine runs, where "a few" ranges between "zero" and "several" or maybe as long as a week. But that would be too complicated to write out each time, so "six months" is a good shorthand way of saying it.

Seems somewhat consistent with my experience, but I still usually go for 180 days when I'm account sniping. If I wait for 6 months, someone always beats me to it. In this case, better to be too early than too late!

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be immersed

Yeah, well, there was one time a certain account-sniper got very impatient at 180 days, and kept PMing me to ask why the account hadn't been released. It seemed like I received a week or so of nagging before the name was available again.



Or maybe it just seemed that long.

So certainly start hovering at 180 days, but don't bug admins if it takes longer....

crontab understands the concept of months as a unit of time. I don't understand why you want to know the number of days instead.

Because 6 months is greater than 180 days. And if I want to snipe an account, if I wait for 6 months, it's possible that someone else takes the account before I do after it expires. Like Nyanjilla said, it could technically be greater than 180 days if the "cleaning" task doesn't happen, but since 180 days seems to be the earliest an account can be sniped, I recommend using this.

This is a concern with account sniping, and not so much for game expiration. But my assumption is that the same time period is used.

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be immersed

Maybe making life easier for account snipers is not KGS's top priority?

I'm puzzled about how this sniping and why a few days matter. Surely if you are trying to grab the "joseki" account, you need to know when the account was registered (or last accessed)? Which you can't realistically do, presumably. How does housekeeping work? Does it only run every six months? Or more frequently, and applies 6 month rules on dormant accounts?

The last time an account was logged into is shown in its profile, so it's easy enough to count 180 days from that date. It would be even easier to count six months, of course.

There is some interest in re-registering ("sniping") certain names that have expired or are about to expire.

As far as I know, there's a housekeeping routine on the server that activates every few days to tidy up resources that are no longer needed such as older games, abandoned account names, unused rooms, and maybe other things too. It checks through all those resources and removes those that have passed their use-by dates since the last time it ran. That's 180 days for games and account names, but a shorter time for rooms. That process takes a while, so presumably that is why it isn't activated more frequently.

Sure, but that does not affect the accuracy that an account can expire before 6 months.

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be immersed

Because someone else might take the account before you. If you think that it takes 6 months for an account to expire, it's possible, as I understand, that the account expires before then (around 180 days). Snipers that are waiting on KGS 24/7 need the lowest bounds possible.

If you're really paranoid, might as well start checking 24/7 for expiration around 150 days. But I'm pretty sure 180 days is the lower bound allowed by the system.

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be immersed

Is there a thriving after-market in vanity account names? If so, how does one get involved in it?