anoek at nova.gs wrote:The new OGSWelcome to the new online-go.com!Online-Go.com has joined forces with Nova.gs to bring to the Go community a state of the art web based go server! Here you'll be able to play both correspondence and live games, perform reviews in real time, voice chat with other players or spectators, and a whole lot more!
In addition to being an excellent place to play Go, OGS now has several features for Groups of players. So whether you have a local go club, an online study group, or just a group of friends, you can use OGS groups to create yourself a private forum, chat room, organize your members, and best of all run group tournaments and group ladders!
The already great tournament system of OGS had has been improved and extended, bringing in several options for tournament structures, controls, an advanced pairing algorithm, as well as adding the capability for users to create their own tournaments through the group interface. Additionally, we will be adding much better support for real time tournaments, automated tournaments, and some additional tournament structures in the near future.
While our core go server services (playing, reviewing, and running tournaments) will be ever evolving, we will also be focusing a lot on services, tools, and content for the Go community at large, so whether you choose to play here or at one of the many other excellent go servers out there, we hope to provide you with some interesting useful things in the near future, so stay tuned!
This merger marks a major accomplishment for all of us here and it wouldn't have been possible without the guidance and support of countless people throughout the community. Our sincere thanks goes out to all that have given us feedback, thoughts, ideas, bug reports, translations, media, moral support, and so much more. We aim to repay this help ten fold by giving back to the community an ever increasingly amazing site for Go players and by growing and enriching the Go community overall.
Thanks from all of us here!
To our existing usersNow to apologize! We know that this merge comes as quite a surprise for most of you. Hopefully after the shock wears off you'll see it as being a pleasant surprise! Normally we wouldn't keep such a large change as a surprise, but for various technical reasons, this was clearly the thing to do. So sorry for being secretive, it's not really our nature, hopefully you'll be understanding and forgive us
To our nova.gs usersWith this update we're bringing you the most requested feature, players! In addition to a large influx of new players we're also turning on site wide ladders, forums, and title tournaments! So please help us welcome the players coming from OGS, help show them around, and enjoy all of the new games to be had!
To our online-go.com usersThere is a lot of new stuff for you to check out. This marks the third generation of server software used by OGS, which is an impressive feat for any online site! OGS has withstood the test of time and your new developers (matburt and anoek) are proud to be carrying the torch for the next leg of this journey.
We've worked hard to preserve all of your game history, active games, forums, tournament data, and just about everything else, so rest assured your history on OGS has been preserved. If you have questions, concerns, praises, bugs, or anything else please stop by the Chat, the developers and many people from the nova.gs server will be around a lot to answer questions and field issues. For bug reports, you may also want to use the bug reporting system found under the Help menu.
Unfortunately there's some bad newsDuring the migration process the old OGS server failed to produce the expected database backup for the 2013-10-18 and we had to use the backup from 2013-10-17 instead. This means an entire 24 hours of moves, game outcomes, and forum posts were lost. This is certainly not the way we wanted to start things off, but that's how they are, so we hope that you'll be understanding and in time forgive us. We worked long and hard to make sure all of your data was moved over to the new system appropriately, but unfortunately if we don't have the data we can't move it
Never the less, we're hoping you'll find it in your hearts to overlook this somewhat major hiccup and enjoy the new site and all of the new features and functionality
Some other notes about this merge:
Challenges have not been imported. If you've challenged anyone recently, you'll need to re-challenge them.
Active games that have move times of 1 day have been changed to have 2 days to ensure no one times out because of the merge.
All game clocks on active games have been increased to their maximum time for both players to help ensure no one times out as a result of the merge.
All games which are in the stone removal phase must use the new system to select and agree upon the removed stones, so you may want to check up on any games that are in the stone removal phase.
- anoek, 2013-10-19