Life In 19x19

I added aussiemate and DrStraw.

L19 users can express thoughts about dsaun in this thread viewtopic.php?f=10&t=17376

With great sadness, I learned that one of the most liked KGS users, dsaun, has passed away. I thought we could use this forum to share memories of dsaun and other prominent KGS users, either in this thread, or a separate thread for each.
aussiemate Dr. Geoffrey Gray 1924 - 2023 https://tributes ...

I suppose we should be glad there aren't more serious problems in the world to complain about than username squatters on KGS /s

If you want to see a mysterious username censor, try to register vvms: you can't and it says in use, but if you try to view that user it doesn't exist. My guess is wms ...

I see that someone has registered "Yahweh" "Elohim" and "Allah" (and probably others) as user names to prevent other people from doing so.

I can appreciate that some people might be offended and that is the motive.

Other people might be offended by a user name such as "Satan" or "Hitler". Yet ...

As a former admin at KGS, I can confirm that some users do make several registered accounts so they can be jerks. We had a number of "serial sandbaggers" who would make another account each time they were caught. Some of them were abusive toward their opponents, in addition.

There is a discussion in "General Go Chat" about online aliases and anonymity, which may be of interest to KGS users.

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12227

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UnclMartin, regarding KGS bans always including IP, has that changed? I thought I got banned from KGS many years ago and managed to reconnect with a different username, but maybe my memory is faulty or my connection's dynamic IP had changed. Glad to hear KGS has a policy of not revealing ...

... Or how about admins using the threat to reveal aliases against the human's wishes, is this an acceptable way to enforce the behaviour they want, or an abuse of power similar to blackmail? I regard it as an abuse of power.

At KGS, it is against policy for admins to reveal alternate accounts ...

On KGS they can just ban the account, or they can be more severe and ban the IP too if they want to prevent that human from reconnecting with other accounts (unless they are clever enough to use a VPN), though as you say it can ban many other innocent humans too. No. When KGS admins ban a user, the ...

It is 180 days, which, in some cases, might be a couple of days short of 6 months.
However, if the account has or used to have a KGS Plus subscription, it is 2 years.

The arguments that Uberdude's weak account should not have been deranked make sense to me.

But, as Nyanjilla said, admins cannot read minds. In my experience, when admins encounter deliberate poor play in ranked games, it has always been connected with sandbagging. The association with sandbagging ...

You are welcome to explore different styles of play with the weak bots, but making them Free games would save you and us a lot of hassle. It's not possible for us to read your mind to tell the difference between losing on purpose and playing badly on purpose, especially when the end result of both ...

Shortly before I retired as an admin, I was engaged in a chat with other gold star admins about deranking policy. One of them mentioned an incident in which he/she deranked a "fake-dan" account. Normally, a fake-dan account is created by cheating the rank system: Someone creates more than one ...

Issues of cheating, joseki books, whatever -- we'll cross those bridges when we get there. Personally, i think worrying about bad actors before we have something for good actors is premature.

That caught my attention. When I was an admin at KGS, I took a position which with my fellow admins ...