If you can choose 1 thing (features, styling, etc.) for OGS to add in, what would it be? I would choose to have a nice background. I guess a more human-like Bot would also be my preference! 
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Weaker bots? I just started playing GO 
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An application like lizzie would be fun.
Complete elimination of the âoverallâ and combined ranks in both the backend and frontend, in favor of only having mutually exclusive rating categories, like lichess. Correctly accounting for the 1/2 stone discrepancy in handicap games would also be nice
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Video streams on game review pages, so the audience can use chat features like sharing variants and posting coordinates that can be highlighted on the board.
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Do you mean âother than black or whiteâ?
I wonder what other colour exists that would not make some of the foreground colors completely disappear 
How do you know that you need weaker bots? You havenât played one yet⌠
What about lizzie is fun?
(I donât mean âI do not think it is funâ I mean âI donât know what feature you think is funâ)
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FYI
The kibitz culture of early 2000s KGS.
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Occasionally an extra chat channel has been added for features like Rengo or the Joseki explorer.
Do you think having a dedicated chat channel for people to link or suggest games to kibitz would help?
Iâve seen some people make a discord channel for sharing games to kibitz in for example.
No, fragmentation like that is the opposite of what I believe facilitated the kibitz culture, namely that your default place to be in the application was a chat room with the list of open games offers and list of active games with the observer count. That means people do not need to actively seek out kibitz activity, they naturally see it when looking for a game or just hanging out on the server.
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I think we ultimately are in a fragmented world in some sense, since there will be people would spend more time in discords than on OGS, or spend more time on the forums than the main site and various other alternatives.
But sure, I guess then the watch page would need to be redesigned if one wanted an âeverything in one placeâ to watch games but also chat about which games to watch. Or maybe the home page, and I think that discussion is coming up again anyway.
The thing is, once a chat channel exists, say for kibitz, then maybe it can be included into something like the watch page.
The GoTV page for a while included stream specific chat channels for example intended for kibitzing.
So I think one could take a generic kibitz channel and have it alongside whatever you want, once it exists.
Donât you think the main chat room is already more and less the place you suggest to create?
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I wonder if we should somehow show the chat of the top few games in main chat:
Maybe even âthe chat of the selected game from the list to the leftâ
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I wasnât there at the peak of KGS, but I suppose that if the kibitz culture disappeared from KGS itself, then itâs not due to a missing feature, there must be other reasons like
- Lack of high dan games
- Lack of high dan commentators
- Spectators nowadays use AI, so are less interested in reading stronger playersâ comments.
Games are broadcast and announced on a regular basis on OGS, and still people donât write a lot in the chat.
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I didnât even know OGS chat now had that games top pane, thatâs progress.
Iâm not clear if you are suggesting including the actual last few messages as text. My suggestion is what KGS has which is a column âObserversâ with a number in it (and the list default sorts by that or player rank). You see a game with a big number, you know thereâs likely to be kibitz activity in there and join. Itâs important that this list doesnât only show live/correspondence games played between 2 people on OGS, but also includes demo/broadcast/reviews games of events like the recent NAGF qualifiers, or else you are missing out on an important class of kibitz-attracting games.
But the fact I didnât know about that game pane that reflects that the key part of my observation about how kibitz was encouraged ânamely that your default place to be in the application was a chat room with the list of open games offers and list of active games with the observer countâ isnât true on OGS: you have to actively decide to go to the chat room after logging in (and I donât), rather than your default landing page in the application after logging in being that place. That way you encourage the following behaviour:
- Log in to go server, thinking to play a game
- Notice a (high dan) game with lots of observers in the same screen you land in to create a game
- Decide to watch said game rather than / whilst waiting for playing a game yourself.
Yes, there are other factors than UI design, I think this (because many switched to Asian servers) and declining user base is major one in decline on KGS. There werenât typically high-dan commentators, more often low/mid dan were the strongest.
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Streaming took away some of the kibbitz too.
The tool are much less efficient as what you got in a classic game format or a demo for the spectators but video is much more attractive.
This could be where is the future of kibbitzing.
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I think it risks flooding an ordinary chat with stuff that will disrupt conversation and I imagine you wonât necessarily be able to reply in the places youâre seeing the message.
If you implemented it, I imagine very soon youâd need to implement an opt out, once enough people commented on an ongoing game, or one person commented enough.
A separate kibitz chat, could be flooded or filled with whatever you want and not necessarily be interrupting the English chat room.
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I was picturing being able to see, up where I pointed, the chat of a selected game. Along with number of participants.
If you want to participate, you go and look at that Game page and join the kibitz in context.
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Just throwing a random idea in. Would it make sense to display the e.g. top 3 viewed games in the front page? Maybe that would animate more people to watch which correlates to using the chat I assume.
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