I have never played on OGS, so perhaps my opinions are entirely irrelevant. But I did use the OGS website a lot, because there were interesting games there, especially Uberdude's. OGS was a beautifully designed website, at least for the purpose of observing other's games; easy to look at, easy to navigate, well-suited to the game of Go and the way we tend to comment up our games afterwards.

As it stands, I would have loved to see the archived games from some other live server receive the visual presentation that OGS gives its games. Instead we get OGS giving all of its games to the second-ugliest Go server (after DGS). I don't want to go wild criticizing Nova.gs because it's a new server and I'm sure they had many other things to take care of: copying the visual "feel" of the server from Yahoo or FlyOrDie is not a move that I would have expected from Go players, but it's pretty logical, especially as a starting point for later development. But I can't imagine what ever could have possessed OGS to sacrifice its own appearance in this way. The sensible thing would have been to fold NGS's real-time capabilities into OGS's visual lay-out. I can understand if there were programming challenges that made that impossible, but if you can only effect a merger by defaulting both servers to the lowest common denominator...

Well mine is green.


Seriously, though. I found DGS much more elegant in terms of visual appearence than OGS. OGS seemed a bit cluttered, and I'm not really a big fan of javascript.

And I happen to think that nova looks better than OGS did. Have you tried the "dark theme" on nova?

I agree that the interface leaves a lot to be desired.
But I see it as an intermediary step. First you get the functionality done, work out all the kinks, iron the wrinkles, and then slap a killer interface on it.

Otherwise - you kaya it all up.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Ah, I should have known I could trust you to provide a solution. Not a serious solution, but perhaps that would be asking for too much.

@Bantari - I agree with you completely. I don't think I ever mentioned the look of Nova because functionality should come first. But do you agree that it's backwards to take a server with established functionality and an intelligent interface, and dump all its users onto a server that hasn't had time to work on the interface yet because functionality is still shaky?

Well, I took a look at OGS and found it to be very unintuitive. I could not find a list of active game offers, which to me is the most important. And the list of active games did not appear to be scrollable. I also could not find any instructions as to how to use the site.

What am I missing?

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Yup.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I can't help but feel that the surprise announcement as a fait accompli reflects a sentiment on the part of the development team that many of the users would not like the changes and did not want to give the opportunity for input.

I actually signed up to OGS thinking it was NOVA

but i ended up just sticking with it cause I signed up anyways.

so now i actually get what i wanted

Maybe you would be interested in hearing the OGS side of things:
http://online-go.com/forum/thread/2909/

Also I heard that OGS was autotranslated to PHP from some other language, which made maintaining the code (or even adding features) a royal pain in the ass.
Though this is pure hearsay (and I might be remembering it wrong), so you'd need to ask topazg for more info on that.


You were logged in, right? If you were logged in, I have a hard time believing you missed the big blue button that says "browse open challenges". Did I mention it was big, and blue?

It opens a seek graph (a small version of which is also available in the chat-window) and a list-form of the challenges. For questions I would generally advise to go into one of the chat-rooms (on top of the page there is a navigation bar).

The direct links would be:
http://online-go.com/game/showOpen (open challenges)
http://online-go.com/chat (chat)

Although admittedly, I wouldn't know how to get to the open challenges without being logged in (and without using the above direct link). My guess would be that guests aren't allowed to play, so they don't need to see the open challenges anyway.

Of course I saw it. And when I clicked on it all I got was a big empty box with labels "blitz", "live" and "long" below it. Nothing else.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Well, that's the seek graph. If everything was working normally that would mean there were simply no open challenges when you checked.

But I suspect there might be something wrong on your end, maybe a javascript/browser issue or something?

As I mentioned earlier, the best place to ask questions would be the live-chat.
I'm sure they will be able to help you out. Of course if the chat is also not working, that piece of advice might be moot..

From the chat:

DrStraw did you ask in the OGS/Nova chat? It sounds like maybe you hit a bug or something because usually the box you talked about has grey and green boxes in it for game offers, and also a table style list of them below that.

Perfect, 75% of the time I send moves were in my iPad 1. Great way to ruin my correspondence experience, which was acceptable in OGS before. I hope the "at the moment" is that they are trying to solve it.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

It sucks to lose the games you're playing now, but you could switch to DGS for new ones.

I can still make my moves in my computer, is just that I use to play correspondence when I'm no longer in "work mode," i.e. tablet instead of computer. I moved from DGS to OGS because I liked conditional moves (which also didn't work before on a tablet...) and the tournament structure (which I still like.)

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I feel your pain -I'm 99% mobile and I can't force new ogs to work on any of my mobile devices. But I'm not playing there at the moment so I can wait for a fix. btw there are Android and iOS clients on the way (as I heard on #twitter).

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Tsumego/Tesuji apps for iPad, iPhone & Android devices:http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7511

They're welcome, but I'd bet actual money in that they won't think about maintaining iOS 5 compatibility and thus won't work either on iPad 1s. I won't be getting a new iPad in at least 6 months, just spent a sh*tload in a new Macbook and a second-hand sewing machine... Next year's expenses may include a new iPad. May not :S

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Websockets are cool and shiny but depending on them in a project that has hundreds of users...? Sounds like yet another case where the developers would rather do fun and interesting stuff than build something that's usable and works well. Not saying there's anything wrong with that, though.

Ah, all those little gray rectangles are supposed to be games! I thought that was just an error in the representation of something. Strange way to represent them and somewhat wasteful of space on the screen because they don't provide any extra information which is not available in the list below.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I guess you never had an OGS account since after the server merge the duplicate accounts were merged. I see zero games in your profile. If you would like to offer some CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, perhaps you should play some games to get a real feel for the server instead of bashing it with uninformed opinions. If you don't like the seek graph, present your view in the feedback section of OGS and suggest an alternative method of displaying game offers.

For my part, I think seek graphs are terrific. When there are many games open it graphically represent all the offers on the least amount of screen real estate. When you hover over a dot on the graph you get information on the offer. It's much easier than scrolling down a long list of games. Although, if you prefer that the list is also available.

Some people just gripe for the sake of being difficult.