I'm trying out the social go commentary site gokibitz.com. I found an old game a bit by chance between Yilun Yang, Chinese 7p and James Kerwin, Japanese 1p (the second Westerner to become pro I think!). I ran across the game commented in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkFWGql5zVk

I'm not sure how I found the video, but I thought the game quite interesting. I don't think the whole game is discussed though, and some things I was wondering about are not addressed in the video. My own comments and questions are in the gokibitz link below to stimulate some discussion:

https://gokibitz.com/kifu/E15ZupD1b
I hope to see some additional contributions - thank you in advance!

Do you need to sign in just to read comments? That's a bit rubbish.

It does not seem so. I just logged out and was able to look at the game and see the comments...

As far as I can tell you only need an account to *make* comments...

I also checked using another browser to make sure it was not a cookie issue and I was able to see everything without logging in there also...

I wonder if that path parameter in my original link is to blame. I updated the link I originally posted to the one I can see without logging in just to be on the safe side:

https://gokibitz.com/kifu/E15ZupD1b

Logged out, I'm able to view the comments as well.

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Go Books

So the reason I couldn't see comments is because I followed the link, and then held down my right arrow key to whiz through the game and no comments appeared as the stones appeared on the board. That's because the comments are loaded asynchronously by ajax and take a long time to appear, by which time you've moved on to the next move (so you get loads of js errors). I suggest the developer stores a list of the moves with comments on first load (edit: it already has this as on move 0 it lists the moves with comments) so that when you whiz through it knows to display a "Loading comment" message on relevant moves (and not to issue the ajax request for comments immediately on moves the cache suggests have no comments (but have a small chance to have been commented since initial page load)), but wait a short time to reduce the request spam which is presumably why it is a lot slower to load comments after whizzing through moves that if you directly navigate to one with a fresh page request.

Yeah, with a slower internet connection, one can often discover bugs that developers can neglect when developing locally.

I actually quite like the site. If I have time I really want to integrate this with my pro collection. I like the simplicity - no messy tree structures and all comments have a proper context. In case you haven't noticed, it has a special way to display variations. Try this URL https://gokibitz.com/kifu/VkYTViMyb and go to move number 8 to see an example.

Yeah, it seems like a nice idea and stylishly presented, but that little glitch gave me a bad first impression. I've reported it on the dev's github (Nate Eagle, I seem to recall that name from KGS...).

I put the 3rd Judan game up for discussion: https://gokibitz.com/kifu/Ek-iSJtJ-

Perhaps you remember this?

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11291

I don't think the issue is internet speed. From the way it behaves, it looks like the comments might be loaded on a keyup event, so if you hold down the arrow to run through the game it doesn't show comments. I'll look through the code later and see if I can find where this is happening; perhaps I can pinpoint the issue for the developer and/or fix the bug and submit a pull request. It seems like a really nice way to comment on games, so I'd like to to be a useful tool!

Interesting. I can see how that would be annoying I plan to set up my development environment so that I can try to make some (probably small) contributions to the project. As the site states, it's in "alpha" mode although I think it is already very cool and useful despite some glitches like this one here and there.

The variation diagrams are very nice. Would be nice to have the option of sorting kifu by player rank. Have a nice day.