A few user interface questions

I’m teaching Go to a college class and using Online-Go.com for games between students. First of all, let me say that it is a great resource and I very much appreciate it. Good job!

I’ll be explaining the site to the class and I have just a couple of questions I hope someone can help me with. (I’ve been posting a lot of questions lately in the Forum; thanks for your patience!)

First of all, the black and blue squares in the upper right of the main screen. Obviously, the blue square shows how many games are underway and by clicking on it you can navigate to those games. But what about the black square? Does this tell you how many games are awaiting your move?

Second, a question about the stone removal phase at the end of a game.

The easiest thing to do is click “Accept removed stones.” But a couple of questions:

A. What if you disagree with the computer’s classification of live/dead stones? Is there a way manually to change the marks and propose those changes to your opponent?

B. What is “strict scoring” and “auto-score”?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

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The blue square contains general events - friend requests, challenges etc.
The black square contains indeed moves you have to play.

The system is pretty good in finding dead stones, however, the users have the last word. You can change the status of stones by clicking on them (same goes for open spaces to mark them as dame) - your opponent will see any change you do this way. Note that this also cancels the agreement, i.e. the green tick. So if your opponent relabels groups you are asked to accept that once again.

(I never checked out strict and auto scoring, so I keep back on those.)

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Strict Scoring is available for Japanese rules, which turns on the rule that territory in seki doesn’t count as territory. This is defaulted to off because if you aren’t familiar with this rule (which most players are not, since most servers don’t support it), it tends to cause a lot of confusion since if you don’t properly mark contested area as dame, the system will count the groups it’s adjacent to as in seki, and thus cause any area attached to those groups ignored.

Auto-score simply re-runs the automatic dead stone removal, so if you click around a bunch and mess up the board and want to just see what the computer thinks, just hit that button to reset it to what the computer thinks it should be. After that you can still make additional changes to tune it to be correct if something is messed up.

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Thanks anoek and flowing – very helpful!