A thought: go chat channel

OGS Development
1

I saw some people discussing it and I thought maybe it would be useful indeed to have go chat channel.

Currently we don’t have any chat channels where we could discuss anything about go.

English chat never talks about go.
Help is about OGS features.
Off topic is often politics.

Maybe a channel where people could drop links to videos and such would be useful. Or maybe people could advertise their correspondence tournaments. Maybe daily tsumego. It would be slower than English chat, probably, so things there would stay for longer and it won’t be flushed out quickly like in English.

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Isn’t that what group channels are for?

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I think there’s something to be said for a public channel that you don’t have to join a group, for this purpose.

TBH, what I think is that this amounts to a request to police the on-topic nature of English, and move the off topic stuff to Off Topic…

… not sure how we’d go with that though! :open_mouth:

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I think the problem is that English is already like a home for many people to just talk, they probably don’t see it as the channel to discuss Go, but more as the channel to talk English. The other language channels are seemingly also about meeting people with the same language, rather than being about Go itself.

I think a specific Go channel would be a good idea. Nothing really needs to change for the English and off-topic channels, and moderating the Go channel to stay on-topic will be unambiguous.

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Only partly true. Yes, the English chat is talking off-topic nonsense most of the time, but if you raise a go related question the chatter will stop and the discussion switches over to go.

At least that’s my experience.

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@anoek a new public channel specifically for Go discussion should be pretty simple to spin up, right?

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I don’t see this as useful. It’s easy to talk about go in the general channel, and I see people using it and putting links to games, variation… Some chats go forth and back between a game and things not related to go. I like this flexibility I don’t like to put each thing in a little box.

Besides it will give more work for admins (more place to watch) and their plenty of more important things to make better working (in my opinion)

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Go discussion will still be permitted within English, obviously, but often links and such are quickly pushed off the top, so a slightly more permanent place to discuss such things would be beneficial I believe.

Two of us have already offered our support to the idea :stuck_out_tongue:

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However, most of the more important things are not as easy to change as adding another chat channel.

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permanency is more a trap as real in a chat. Better use the forum if it’s the goal.
I’m still skeptical on how the rooms will be used. Or you’ll have a lot of moderation to do in the go room or the go room will remain dead.
When I go to a go club, I’m not expecting to hear only things about the great avalanche or the winner of the honinbo. I can stand bragging about that player on his last game or the nice cooking planned for tonight . Even I can enjoy a stupid joke or some kibbitz around. I’ll be sad if I have to push doors with boards telling me: "here it’s serious things, here you can joke, here…

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You do realise you would be under 0 obligation to ever open the Go channel, right? :stuck_out_tongue: just because others would find it useful doesn’t mean anything is being taken away from you…

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It’s not that simple. Today the english room is good working with a mix between go and others. Tomorrow you disturb that working balance by asking to make a choice in some way. It’s not so innocent. Even if you can talk on go in the english room, you will have people who would feel better to talk others in the go room (because it’s where people are) or as said that go room will just stay empty.

The other thing is permanency. If you start to discuss go in the channel, chance it could become interesting but sure it’s going to be lost soon. That’s what I call a trap. Why not just use the forum ?

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You can still discuss go in the English room, just like you can discuss off-topic subjects in the English room right now. It’s just that there would be a separate channel focused on Go, so that people who are not interested in off-topic chat can hang out over there.

And it’s only one click to change from one channel to the other, it’s not like people have to choose whether they stay in English or move to the Go room; you can be in both.

Also, there is no problem with the Go room being relatively empty. If nobody uses it, we can just delete it again, if it is used, then we made something useful… It’s not a problem either way.

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I cannot be in both on my phone. I can’t watch both at the same time.

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Current “working” mix in English channel is 1% go and 99% some nonsense. An absolute overwhelming majority of the time English chat talks about nonsense, and it’s often not easy to change the topic simply like that.

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Not true, I just had a check before telling that, it was pretty go related. I’m not a crazy user of the chat but each time I go there I find some games links, some break for go related things. I think the 1% is far from reality.

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You can switch between them in one click, is what I meant.

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Yes I did understand you very well, but you didn’t tell me how I stay in both?
And still what about permanency? Is that really the thing here?
When I read about this 1% I feel to be the lawyer of the evil. It looks more like a moderation problem as a permanency or ability to talk about go.
I like the integrated system where the 12yrs old DDK telling some low level can feel to be part of a go server and it’s each of us to bring him to some higher level of chat instead of running away in a separate chat.

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You are right. 99% offtopic is hyperbole.

Yet it is still way more offtopic than Go related. It is true that if a beginner does ask a question, they get attention… but I think that for each question asked, there are several that are unasked because they don’t want to butt into the current politics conversation(okay, there are also wholesome and interesting non-politics conversations but those are also something to butt into).

I think it’s partly a moderation problem but our mods are volunteers and probably don’t want to come close to the level of KGS chat moderation.

I like the idea of adding a Beginners Room(KGS got this right) or perhaps advertising a few links to study groups when new users open chat.

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I understand that current English channel works for some people but not for me.

I was an active chatter for quite a while but it’s not interesting for me anymore. In the current state you either participate in English chat and get tons of casual chat and a tiny but of go chat or you don’t participate in English chat and don’t get both. Because English channel is so quick you need to actively monitor it to catch someone starting a go topic, so you have to sit through chit-chat to get to the go stuff. And even when you get to go the conversation is often in casual spirit, with many people in parallel discussing something else.

It’s a big waste of time.

I want a topic which I can hop on any time and see some go stuff. Ideally it would be like Help channel. It’s not very fast, people come in, drop some questions, get some answers.

I would use it.

If you want an example, Through the Years tournament chat has around 300 people in it but it’s still rather slow. You can check it and see all the content written for the last day or two. Very good pace.

And the cost of setting it up and tearing it down (if we don’t like it in the end) should be very low. It’s not a new feature in any way, so it should have almost no development costs.

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