Blog Announcement

[JeansebL]

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.

[deja]

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.

[badukJr]

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.

[Kaya.gs]

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.

[kusto]

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

All that said, Kaya is still the most open server choice to collaborate with.

Open server choice?

Kaya still produced more features in the last year than all other servers combined, and you can use your fingers to count them.

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.

In the end, if you want something from Kaya, why dont you just ask?

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.

[Dusk Eagle]

While I'm disappointed about this announcement, I'm not really surprised by it, nor am I angry at the founders like a couple of people here are.

[Polama]

I for one am very appreciative of all the work the Kaya team has put in. It's a solid website. Leaving your jobs to work on a labor of love for any span of time shows admirable dedication to this collective obsession of ours.

Thanks for the hard work!

[anoek]

As the co-author of Nova, I just wanted to say that we fully appreciate how much effort went into building Kaya. It's an awesome project, and the developers, as well as the community that helped support them through development, should all be very proud of what has been accomplished.

It's hard to watch from this kind of tension and hard feelings from the sidelines. I know a fair number of people put a considerable amount of money towards the project, but I think it should be expected that whenever you fund a dream, it might not come out exactly as you hoped. I like to throw money at kickstarter projects and indie games all the time, but I do so with the expectation that probably only 10% will really reach 'completion' and be the awesome project they "sold" me on. That's OK by me though because there will be some that make it, and it's my hope that the people involved in the ones that failed will learn a lot and come back with a new idea that will succeed later. I have a trail of failed projects and dead start-ups in my past, and only a couple that have made it to completion or been at all a success. It's the nature of creation.

I will also say that we've been able to do what we've done at Nova because we have full-time jobs. Neither of us have to worry about money, and neither of us would feel guilty about not working on nova for awhile because it's just for fun and we don't feel like we necessarily owe the community anything. Consequently, because we don't feel like we need to work on it, I think we tend to work on it harder because it's fun instead of being a chore.

So with that in mind, it's my sincere hope that Conan and DP will love their respective new jobs, take some time to un-burn out from Kaya, then when they're ready and have the desire to write code for Kaya again in their spare time, they pick it up where they left off and continue building it up to the awesome system kayaners dreams of.

Kaya has a whole lot of potential, but in order for it to realize that potential I think the community needs to acknowledge that the funding that has been given to Kaya has indeed been used to achieve a great number of things, but what you see now is what those funds bought and neither Conan nor DP owe anything more to the community. Anything they do from here on out should be considered an awesome gift to the community, and should be thanked in kind. It's easy to give developers a hard time about bugs and issues, but the truth is if you pat them on the back and encourage them, rather than rail them about issues, those issues tend to get resolved a whole lot faster I know for a fact that when someone yells at me about something and demands I fix issue X, I will pretty much ignore them, even if it's something that really should be done... where as if someone else say "oh man, you know what would make my day? is if you did X!" I find it hard not to drop what I'm doing and do X


Anywho, I know I'm not really privy to some of the politics and history that's gone on, but my suggestion to everyone is to let bygones be bygones and help forge the future of Kaya by being positive and keeping it fun


- anoek

[hyperpape]

As far as I know, there are two people (other than Gabriel) posting in this thread who have built something substantial in the Western go world. Neither of them are angry and disappointed.

[duckweed]

I just want to play games and review games with annotations without issues ...

Maybe that is too much to ask after more than a year?

[oren]

Maybe that is too much to ask after more than a year?

There are many servers you can do this on. No one's forcing you to use kaya.

[Kirby]

As far as I know, there are two people (other than Gabriel) posting in this thread who have built something substantial in the Western go world. Neither of them are angry and disappointed.

As I've already stated in this thread, I am not angry about this situation. However, to this point, I feel that contributing money is a part of "building something substantial in the Western go world." Some people may not have technical expertise, but can contribute in other ways - like by providing money.

So I don't think it is fair to say that those that didn't pay money did not contribute toward building something. I have a "Founder Account" on Kaya, and though I did not provide technical help, I feel that I (along with several others) contributed toward building the server that exists today.

This is not to say that Gabriel et al. did not have a greater impact on the server than I did. But still, I think everything helped.

[hyperpape]

Sure, it helps. But it doesn't involve you in the actual process of seeing something through. My point is that the people who know what is involved are the most understanding.

[Bantari]

It was intended to be a partially crowdfunded, partially sponsor-supported server that would have two full-time programmers and a viable business model.

Out of curiosity - where do you get this info from? And do you have more details?
I have asked quite a few times about Kaya's business model and was blown away with something like 'now its not the time to discuss it' or the question was simply ignored. Have a missd a thread dealing with that?

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.

[Mef]

It was intended to be a partially crowdfunded, partially sponsor-supported server that would have two full-time programmers and a viable business model.

Out of curiosity - where do you get this info from? And do you have more details?
I have asked quite a few times about Kaya's business model and was blown away with something like 'now its not the time to discuss it' or the question was simply ignored. Have a missd a thread dealing with that?

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.

I'm pretty sure we both have the same information available to us (the kaya announcement that mentioned they had a fully developed business plan) -- I was simply trying to describe the sentiment at the time and what the expectations those who were contributing would have been. I haven't seen or read about the details of what kaya's business plan are/were.