Am i the only one disappointed in hearing this?

All of the hype and false promises?

I expected more, a lot more in fact.

You guys asked for donations from the public to help fund YOUR BUSINESS.

409 Contributors bringing in a total of US$ 17,478 thus far. That is a communities worth of generosity, love and support that i feel has been under appreciated.

Your rate of progression was embarrassing as time went on and as most programmers would likely agree, the change log was heavily padded out with a few simple things from week to week. That was up until a couple of months ago when traces of development disappeared.

You promised full time development and yet didn't apply yourselves completely.

People donated money, code, translation services and more. All sold on a dream.

If you were to say that it was too much work for such a small team of two, i would feel this was inaccurate. I can't help but think the money would have been better off given to wms to update KGS.

I for one hope that the source code will be made public for others to use and contribute to the community as suggested in the comments below the post.

I am sure some people will disagree with my above view, but i felt i should share it none the less.

Leaving aside the other portions of this comment, I think it's surprisingly arrogant to think that $17.5k is enough to fund two people to work on a project full time for two years in the US, let alone a few months. Not everyone is a college student with loans or parents to live off of and time to spare, and when the question becomes 'do I make the mortgage and put food on the table for my family, or do I work on this project that I can't live off of?' the answer is a no-brainer.

Something that seems to be missed with kickstarter and the like is that most small businesses fail within their first few years. You are not buying something in return for your money. You are giving a gift, and hoping that it will lead to something you see as valuable. You can look at it as an investment too, but investments carry risk. That this project came as far as it has, and that many of these sorts of community funded projects end in success is a testament to the effort of the people being funded.

I guess you are right, skydyr. This is what happens when you 'invest' in people with no business plan and no track record of running a business.

True, but it was not supposed to take 2 years and it has not even been two years. Why you bring up that number is beyond me. Also they do not live in the USA which is still beside the point.


With time to spare? That is what the donations were for, to help offset that burden.



Not true, we were paying in advance for a go server that promised to go above and beyond. That was the pitch. Instead what was delivered was below sub par without even a set of basic review tools.

When businesses need funds most of them get a loan to start their venture and you can be sure the bank would collect if it failed. I think the least i can want is to express my disappointment.

I guess my take on this is that I am a little disappointed that the project is changing gears, but I also agree with skydyr that, sometimes projects fail.

Personally, I like kaya, and I think that they did a pretty good job with what's there so far. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is just that there aren't enough users.

If everyone on KGS or IGS, for example, played regularly on Kaya, I would be there all of the time.

It's too bad things didn't turn out this way, because I think the web interface is great.

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be immersed

I don’t feel that bad about it, I rather congratulate Gabriel to his new job.

The blog post says they are devising a plan, and hey, Kaya is not that bad, is it? Anyway, I don’t see that post to announce an abandonement of kaya.gs, just that it will progress somewhat slower. I think it’s great what they have built so far (and yes, I also paid, $30, IIRC).

Greetings, Tom

p.s.: be sure to go to that blog post and read the comments.

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Fair go mate!

They did their best and as far as I can see Gabriel hasn't said anything about giving up on the project. He's just said that he needs a job on the side to pay the bills, which is entirely reasonable. What else do you expect him to do?

Anyway, the server they've made seems pretty good to me. It's just hard to get enough people to play there.

The reality is that it's incredibly hard to run a Go related business without also doing some sort of other work to support you and your family. Until there are many more Go players in the West, that's not going to change, no matter how much you rail against it.

Nearly everyone I know in this business either has a second job or is retired. And they all do it primarily for the love of the game.

Nobody's getting rich here...

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

.

Kaya has a bundle of features everywhere and its made to remain flexible to outside changes. However we noted that most users arent familiar or know a lot of the features already presented actually exist, like variation sharing, malkovich, broadcasts (had some really nice broadcasts by JeanSebl). When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability.
What kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game, which is the fundamental service of a Go Server.

I do have a plan for that, but i dont have the personal finances to wear that out until it "may happen". On the other hand, because of this i will have way more resources and can patron the server in another way.

As many already know, OpenKaya is always open for contributions, and some developers have gained access to the private repositories of Kaya. There are many things to contribute to from a developer perspective, and I will make sure to check, verify, guide , write tests and more for such contributions, as I have already done on many side projects.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

From this thread:

So it is safe to assume that all of that fell through?

From the same post, a year and a half ago:

Is this the plan now?

I am glad you are so proud of broadcasts. I am not so thrilled with them. It is just a bandwidth hog that offers nothing more than a view of a couple players shifting uncomfortably in their chairs while they play a game. Without review tools a server is useless and that has been ignored in favour of broadcasts. The UI is full of bugs and clutter. Games still have bugs with unplayable points. There is no support for browser accessibility features. And there is a host of other "small nuisances" which turned many people away.

The verdict... nice try but it's a fail. See you all on Nova.gs. Those two guys with full-time jobs have accomplished more in 3 months than Kaya did in over a year with our donations.

Would it be too much of me to think that you are biased by our previous disagreement in the Baduk TV thread?

You say they did their best, i say they didn't. Otherwise a lot more work would have been done within that time. Remembering that most of their structure work for the server was completed before opening to others. Then adding that most additions to the server from that point were others providing various sections.

He might not has said directly that they were giving up, but you watch. It's the same old letting people down softly routine. Which is what has been playing out for a long time now. Until the user base drops so badly that they say "Oh there is no point now". It's going to happen.

Saying there isn't enough user base for it is utterly ridiculous if it was meeting peoples NEEDS then there wouldn't be a problem. Most go players have an account that they use on multiple servers skipping between them at will. It's when a community starts to shrink from inactivity and see a lack of progression, compounded by incomplete projects losing traction that they lose faith and habitually stop accessing it.

I understand that it is hard to run a go based business. But for a project that was funding their venture allowing them to get off the ground without having to worry about holding a job for that time means that side of the equation shouldn't have been a concern. At a time that they should have been pumping out updates daily. Not 4-5 weak updates weekly. Conveniently not dating them to see just how poor an effort it really was.

They were complaining about how hard it was to work on the server while maintaining a job before they took it upon themselves to "work full time" on kaya. Being the main factor for why the donations were being requested in the first place.

As you would expect there to be some transition period, a sacrifice if you will to facilitate the process until the business becomes self sufficient. This was where the money was to be taken into account. So i don't share the same sympathy you seem to be mustering up. I am like i said earlier, disappointed. I can't help it.



A new air-conditioning unit doesn't excuse the fact that the car doesn't have any windows. You can say "oh we have x,y,z features that are really cool" but lack fundamentals. Without the basic features that are expected from a product no-one is going to find it terribly useful and its not like its recent that they were promised as being high priority either.

Broadcasts, consisting of an embedded stream slapped to the side of a pre-developed board is hardly a time consuming feature. Considering it is far from a recent addition. Variation sharing, another feature from almost the start, barely changing along the way. Malkovich, another simple feature to implement.
And when you say "When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability." Why does it have to be one or the other, and from what we have seen it has not really helped that much along the way.

Kaya's fan-base was increasing, and rightly so when it was something to look forward to something new claiming to be better than the rest. Mocking on occasion the many other servers openly. So when you say that what Kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game. I disagree as do a lot of people i have spoken with. Kaya lacks basic ingredients but tries to pass it off as a complete alternative. Like the old saying goes, build it and they will come. But you know that is where the problem of this equation lies.

Open Kaya is your answer to a public request of becoming open source? The reason people barely are contributing code anymore is because they don't want to work on things that you will profit from it later, and rightly so.

If the project was completely open source i have no doubt contributions would increase drastically. But keep it to yourself, let it become old and outdated while Kaya continues to wither.

You know my thoughts and that's all i can say. If you are honestly proud of how you used your time and the small amount of fruits it bore than that is all we could honestly ask.

_________________
PLAY GO EVERY DAY

As i wrote on the blog, open sourcing the server is a possibility. Let me remind you that over 50% of the server's code has been made accessible to collaborators(client code and such). Open sourcing is not a silverbullet.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

Isnt there only like less than 20 collaborators, most of who dont code lol?

Ill start by saying i used to recommend kaya to everyone, but i havent been able to lately because people are never happy with its level of completion. And if i stop and think i can now see the passion was disapearing a while back with you guys. I dont blame you or anything because you are only human and we all get distracted/run out of time/fail to meet expectations.I do think though in hind sight it would have been nice for you to communicate with us throughout the past few months when updates stopped happening so at least we knew officially the direction the site was headed and i also vote +1 for open source, hopefully others will learn something from it and possibly are able to keep contributing new stuff to the existing site which just needs a lot of time and love. I think releasing it open source would be a great gift back to the community and can only improve it.

I think as kutso and palpiku have touched on, much of the disappointment stems from how this server was announced and presented, and perhaps some of the underlying assumptions made by the supporting community. It was intended to be a partially crowdfunded, partially sponsor-supported server that would have two full-time programmers and a viable business model. The assumptions were that with full time programmers there would be quick progress and rapid development, and with the sponsors and business model the server would become self-sustaining.

The lack of progress is disheartening because after over a year with two full time programmers one might expect quite a bit more (as dfunkt mentioned, there is a relatively polished, hybrid turn-based/real time server in nova.gs that was made as a hobby by two people working part-time on it over a shorter period). This blog announcement was also disheartening because it suggests that the business end of the server has also fallen short.

Given that two of their fundamental assumptions were apparently not borne out, I can understand why some of the initial supporters might feel disenfranchised.

The Quebec Go Association uses Kaya for all its events. Why? For fun perhaps? No, simply because no other go server enables us to do what we want. With Kaya we can broadcast live games with video, comment these games efficiently with vars, share games with simple urls and add events to the countdown.

We actually tried in the past to use kgs and other go servers to broadcast events, but the simple fact you need to download something (either java or the client itself) makes it impossible to access these services from most public computers (like in schools, where most tournaments are organized).

Does that mean Kaya is a perfect go server created in 2 years by 2 programmers? Of course not. It means you should think twice before saying they failed. They actually more than succeeded. Also, just in case somebody didn't get this yet: They're not stopping, they're slowing down so they can eat.

It seems to me there are lessons to be learned on both sides.

Developers:
1. Be moderate in your expectations.
2. Resist making promises that depend upon unknown resources.
3. Be overly transparent in communicating your progress or lack thereof.
4. Ask for help when you need it.

Donors:
1. Don't be naïve and expect a guaranteed return, regardless of promises.
2. Don't give more than your weekly booze budget.
3. If it doesn't work out, dip into the wife's weekly booze budget.
4. At least KGS isn't asking for donations.

_________________
"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

Its kind of sad really.

First was gross time mismanagement. There were quite a lot of vacations and breaks. A lot more than I get at my job. And to do it on the community's money is kind of a punch in the gut. I know a few people who donated $35 from countries where $35 is quite a lot of money.

Second was the absolute lack of feedback on reporting bugs. Say something in chat, get told to write it in the Support Channel. Ok, put it in the Support Channel, get told to tweaki it. Put it in the Tweaki, oops, too many people are using the Tweaki and conanbatt threatens to close it off to supporters only. Wow, people are taking their free time to bug test your software? Software that you had mentioned many times to make money off of? That's a really terrible response, honestly. I had a lot of games ruined by bugs, which is to be expected... but when they don't get fixed and there is just no feedback at all, there is no point for me to visit the server anymore.

Without counting february, I took 4 days since September 2011. Plus worked over 20 weekends.

The number of bugs/tweaks solved thanks to user reports is uncountable. Your complain only points that bug reports should have been made secret. If you reported something in the tweaki, you can see if it was fixed or rejected simply by its permanence in the list.
After beta, tweaki reports become grossly duplicated, including suggestions to implement features already done. And the tweaki is just as open as it always was.

I would love to continue working on Kaya 24/7 as I have been, but i am unable too. If I could sustain myself doing it, i would have had the choice to continue. But I dont. By the last 2 months, i've been working with an extremely deficient computer.

All that said, Kaya is still the most open server choice to collaborate with. It has implemented a great number of things the community asked for, and it remains having an extremely API oriented service, which made ASR inclusion a piece of cake, and so it would for other services.
Kaya still produced more features in the last year than all other servers combined, and you can use your fingers to count them.

If as a go community participant, you feel Kaya is your representative and want it to succeed, you can collaborate in many ways, and coders and developers are more welcome than ever. Our Lobby was designed by a collaborator. Many services and libraries open to the public are available at OpenKaya, including the GTP client, scoring and estimation algorithms, and there are more side-projects regarding Kaya that have a lot of work put on them.
Kaya as a server has many features implemented that never got to the client. Including review tools, variation predictions, player style profiling, problem solving, game-video recording and more.
I simply dont have the resources to implement all of them myself, while also communicating with the users, answering emails, dealing with 3rd parties for potential partnerships, filtering through feedback, etc.

Particularly if you are a developer with the wish to contribute with Code , contacting me is as easy as sending me an email, or to Kaya or contacting me in the server either by pm or in chat.

In the end, if you want something from Kaya, why dont you just ask? Its as easy as login-in and talking with me.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

This is not true and you know it. Sitting at your computer does not equate to working.


If it was such a problem you should have asked one of the many willing volunteers to help inform those users that had submitted the duplicate, that it was already being taken care of. Instead of releasing a relentless wave of hostility upon most who were merely doing what they thought was right, that is to say helping your products development. You didn't have any problems with outsourcing most of the site.



24/7 Also you haven't been working on it for the last couple of months, period. So even if you had a rock it wouldn't have changed the outcome. You don't need a high end machine to code web applications.


Open server choice?


Yes, and then last year was over and now perceived competitors have produced more in three months as mentioned above than you did in over a year. But you expect us to turn a blind eye to that. But they are using magic or something, so that clearly doesn't count. Magicians with full time jobs.


Becoming open source was asked. But its not likely to happen because then people would actually see just how little you guys actually did.

People have asked and i am not even talking about the open source request. However you failure to deliver anything short of a no or an "if you want it buy" approach which became the norm. This was of course when users weren't being told off for not taking into consideration your ultra heavy work loads.

Making up stupid rules like users must not mention bugs or development on "release" day.

The killer feature that you hyped for many weeks by the way, was not killer. People would have preferred the tournaments that were promised much much earlier and were supposed to be out the within a week at one early stage.

In the end, i hope you enjoy your sinking ship captain because we all know it has a lot of holes and in reality is not going anywhere.