This thread is a intended as a central place to coordinate discussion of the move from godiscussions.com.

There's already a Sensei's page about this, but I think it probably makes sense to have a thread here too. A forum is a more suitable place for discussion than a wiki page, which can get confusing and complicated with edit race conditions and such.

Since Jordus already has a forum working here, we might as well start with that rather than starting from scratch, even if the "final solution" ends up being hosted elsewhere, or under a different domain name, or in a different forum installation or whatever.

Hosting

I don't know what the hosting situation is here. Tealeaf did some research into what kind of traffic levels godiscussions.com was getting and what sort of server/hosting environment we'd need. For all I know this server will be plenty, or maybe we need more. So I guess there needs to be some discussion of this.

Domain Name

From the Sensei's page, it seemed like discussgo.com or some variant is most popular. If nobody objects, I'm going to go ahead and register that later today to keep us moving forward. I don't mind paying the initial registration costs, it's just not expensive enough to get worked up about. I'll probably just register it under my godaddy account for expediency, but obviously the domain name will ultimately belong to the community. If I go AWOL or get taken out by pirates or something, I don't want that to become a problem. I haven't done domain registration for an amorphous, non-business group of people with no individual mailing address before, so I'm not completely sure how to set that up. If anyone else has - please speak up.

Administrators

We need moderators and administrators. I think all the moderators at gd were doing a fine job, so I see no reason why they can't also be moderators here. We also need server administrators (who can, of course, also be moderators). I think everyone is agreed that we need several so that we aren't dependent on one person as we were with gd.com, and so that people can volunteer their time without feeling like they can't take a break or that everyone depends on just them.

So if you want to volunteer or nominate somebody, speak up.

Forum customizations

We need to get diagrams working. I'm going to try to make some time to play around with an installation of phpbb3 to see if I can figure that out. It's probably not a huge deal, but we need to get that working if we actually want to get talking about go.

Kirkmc was having trouble getting registered. There are some usability bugaboos with the registration form and captcha and stuff. Probably it's a bug with phpbb3, but it may be worth looking into at least.

One other minor quirk with the current setup... The only selection for language when registering is "British English". Can we turn on some other choices? For forum users for whom English is not their first language, it might be nice for them to have their choices, and of course us Yanks don't want to see extraneous vowels in our favourite colours.

There were some suggestions to reorganize the gd.com forum hierarchy, e.g. a forum for ongoing games, maybe a foreign language forum, etc. Now is the time to do that, though hopefully it will not be a huge deal to make future changes.

The embedded SGF files are not viewable by me right now. Apparently others can see them fine? It looks like Jordus used a flash viewer - flash just barely limps along on non-Windows platforms, so the problem is probably on my end. Anyhow, it might be worth getting EidoGo working, since it's non-flash and would work on everyone's smartphones and ipads and things. This would be lower priority than diagrams, of course.

It would be nice to have some of the other Sensei's-style features here. I had a suggestion of using smilies to implement inserting stone icons into the text of posts. E.g. [B21] could turn into , [WT] could turn into , etc. It's not a high priority obviously, but it should actually be pretty easy to do.

It would also be nice to have a custom, pretty, web 2.0ish go theme and logo for the forum. It's not critical, but I think we have some web designers in this crowd, so if somebody wants to volunteer their time to do that I'm sure the effort would be welcomed. I may give it a whirl myself if I find the time.

If we have more than one person who can work on it, we can probably implement a lot of nice go-related features that were not available on gd.com, which would be great for building the community.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

[hosting]: this hosting service should be plenty. So far, the highest amount of bandwidth used in one day on this site is right around 80mb ( most traffic per day so far is quite small never surpassing the 10mb area). If we say that we do use 100mb per day, that would be around 3000mb a month. The server is able to handle 1,500,000mb a month. So i think for now we are more than good.

[Domain]: Changing the domain is ok as long as its what the majority want to do.

[Administrators]: this is being addressed here : http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=64

[Forum customizations]: Diagrams are running now . We are working on getting the newest diagram version from sensei's up too. So is the malkovich section. If you would like to try your hand at some of the modifications let me know. As far as some of the modifications you mentioned such as eidogo and such perhaps we should have a community discussion? i am not sure having two separate sgf is a good idea. Then again that is why I suggested a discussion... lol.

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I'm thinking...

Newest sltxt2png is up now. Next stop: captions.

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be immersed

Sweet, it looks like diagrams are working with the new version, which means arrows and higher move numbers and other fancy features! Good work.

I wanted to use EidoGo in place of the flash viewer (as opposed to in addition) for reasons I mentioned above. If others are against it, I won't impose my will or anything. Obviously, I'm willing to do the work of implementing it.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

I think I will set up a poll and see what we get for eidogo.

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I'm thinking...

Captions have been added to the board images (when you specify a title). I noticed that smaller boards, like fwiffo's example get the text cut off, since I embedded the caption into the image itself. We can add word wrap to get the captions to show up better, but for now, I'm going to take a break.

Joaz's suggestion was also implemented by Jordus, with the advent of "indent" tags.

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be immersed

Updated word wrap a little bit for captions...

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be immersed

This would be fantastic; less flash is never a bad thing!

If this site becomes the new GD, trafic will become much more important. Can't we expect problems then ? (who said 503 errors ? )

Linking FlashGoban vs Eidogo thread.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

maybe... but we have more admins here who are also willing to be more proactive in dealing with any issues that may arise

Yes and if it is fully community supported we have proven that we can easily raise the money needed to support it.

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Michael Dobbins; Dragon: mdobbins, KGS: mgd, AGA#: 4253,
My Website

I may have missed it, but is this site hosted through a web hosting service or on a private server? If the former, what sort of plan is it? It wouldn't be an issue for awhile, but the same sort of server problems we had with GD will likely crop up at some point if L19 is on a shared plan, eventually requiring an upgrade. It's probably too early to worry about that.

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"This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought."
-Jonas Skarssen

Sorry if this has already been answered, but is there any way to get the old posts/ product reviews from GD?

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"There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level." -- Bruce Lee