I’m pretty sure it was auto vacation.
If opponent just turned on vacation it’s within the time settings, so no problems with me 
BUT if I had a setting where I could exclude vacation for individual games, I wouldn’t be having this problem.
There is a big difference when the player turns it on and when it’s auto. Realistically, when the player turns it, there’s intention and I expect them to come back at some point. This auto probably just delays a timeout by two months.
PS I don’t agree with that! Sometimes people want to play fast then go on vacation, which is a site wide setting. I don’t want to take away an established sidewide setting from all fast games. I want the option to play games where vacation doesn’t apply.
PS 2: because I signed up last year in tournaments without vacation, I haven’t turned it on for months. I was in the hospital and still made it work. And if I had an individual fast corr game with vacation off and my opponent said they need more time, I could always pause it. Or they just time out and lose the game, which should be an acceptable outcome and not trying to erase it in every way possible.
I finally convinced my 2d friend to come to OGS to play correspondence games. He joined the 19x19 ladder and challenged three 2d players.
None of them has played in the past three days. They are now all on auto-vacation, so he cannot challenge anyone else, and he may have to wait up to six weeks before he can actually start playing a ladder game.
That does not seem like a great first experience.
Looking at these players’ histories, I can see that this has already happened before for all of them: other challengers resigned early, presumably to avoid being stuck in the same situation. But that means these inactive players remain in the ladder and can create the same experience for the next person who challenges them. I am going to tell my friend to do the same, otherwise he may just leave OGS and add another inactive entry to the ladder.
So I am not sure the “it will fix itself over time” argument is really working here. Is this the experience we want new ladder players to have?
Is that what this is about - is this “making noise to add priority to the idea of a ‘no vacation’ setting for individual games”, rather than an argument against the premise of auto vacation?
This is an argument against auto-vacation altogether - it says that “it’s not worth saving game in the rare case where someone just forgets or is unable to play, because mostly correspondence timer-outers have no intention of playing”.
I did quote my previous message.
Nope, it says that auto vacation has its merits, but I want the option to play without it.
I don’t think you did?
At least, I was responding to a post that was just saying how ridiculous the autovacation situation was for a specific game.
But:
I guess if we put the emphasis on the word “this”, then it seems you are saying “in this instance I believe that the person does not intend to keep playing, even though in other cases of auto-vacation they might be glad about it”.
Why is is that you think that this person isn’t glad of the opportunity to resume this game?
It’s early in the game and despite the embarrasing loss of two stones, this 8k has every reason to expect to beat you…
It was too easy to lose your position in Ladder before. It felt like slavery. Auto-vacation fixes this.
but:
@GreenAsJade I think that if opponents that you challenged are on vacation, they should not count towads that 3 max. It should be possible to challenge more opponents until there are 3 that are not on vacation.
Great idea!
FWIW, this person ended up on auto-vacation due to a suspension, which they successfully appealed.
They do now have the opportunity to continue this game…
You keep attacking my individual words. I don’t mind that person. I don’t know that person. Hopefully they will be back and beat me, like any 8k should. This is not about a specific person, or a specific game.
Autovacation may solve a problem, fine by me.
BUT I really, strongly, want to have the option to have my fast games without autovacation interferring. Is this too much to ask?
Not at all!
I think it’s a good idea - I can’t recall, but I think I already said I think it’s a good idea.
But since I instigated auto-vacation, I need to treat criticisms of it seriously.
Your post seemed like a very serious criticism, so I have been diligently digging into whether it is or not.
You shouldn’t take it as attacking your words. You should take it as “treating them seriously, and wanting to get to the bottom if it”.
I’m still left wondering whether the sentiment:
is true.
I was happy to find that in this specific case, the reason for auto-vacation was precisely one that we’d like to support: getting someone who is dealing with a suspension onto vacation so that their game don’t all tank in case they get re-instated.
Good to know, then I know that my opponent will happily come back and we can continue playing. That game was just an example, though, and most times I will just be left wondering.
(this would be too much work, and in case you find this a good idea, NO WAY you implement this before what I asked ( 
), but would it make sense to pause games and not vacation them, when a player is under moderator consideration?)
I want to be able to start 50 fast games and realistically expect at least some of them to go on with the indended pace. The people who accept the no-vacation rule will probably show up, or time out. The rest of the games (I will probably leave some with vacation option on), people will manually vacation, or auto vacation, but I knew that when creating the challenge.
Before, vacation required intent; now that it doesn’t, I need the option to avoid people who abandon the site for at least some of my games. Otherwise, it’s heavily weighted against my preferred game options.
Also
I think we have reached this conclusion before, that some people who are against what I’m suggesting (not you specifically) and I have a fundamendally different approach to time settings:
When I put in 24h/moves, I’m not thinking “so this game will take about 3 months, at which point I will get a result and the algorithm will get a rank update to properly match me next time”. I’m thinking “this will be a fast game, where our thinking time, including life/sleep/work will be a few hours, so we will have to think fast and the game will be fresh in my mind”. Basically, I’m treating game time as, you know, game time.
But, if my opponents vacation/ autovacation all the time, when do I get my 24h/move game? Never.
I also desire the ability to “disallow vacation” when creating a custom game.
At the moment, I basically play 19x19 exclusively via tournaments that disallow vacation. I’d love for the “disallow vacation” option to surface in more places.
Auto-vacation is in essence a time-control setting. I find it intuitive that if time-controls are finely grained down to the second, then this “backup 8 weeks” setting should also be a game-setting. My suggestion (as others have said):
For user-created games and tournaments: upgrade the auto-vacation setting to a game-time control, with the following options:
For the site-wide ladders and tournaments: keep manual vacations, disable auto-vacation. Auto-vacation seem a net negative here. From a utalitarian view:
I don’t know what the numbers for X and Y are, but if the amount of honest mistakes (X) isn’t significantly larger than escapes (Y), then the negative experience is larger than the positive gain.
The suggestion of having (manually) vacated games not count as active ladder games seems good too.
Is it still an open question about whether we should have a ‘disable vacation’ (or call it “pause on vacations”) checkbox for individual games as well as tournaments? I thought that was previously agreed as a sensible enhancement and it was now just waiting for it to reach the top of development priority queue.
I think everyone is simply continuing to argue for that (your recollection is mine as well).
In addition, JD’s assessment and elaboration on the improvements we could make is awesome,.
I too worry that the effects are net negative. However, if you don’t apply auto-vacation in tournaments or ladders, which are the most serious games and thus worthy of rescuing from life’s unexpected interruptions, what’s the point of the feature at all? I don’t feel like more settings is the solution, rather it needs to work better by default.
My understanding is that we must autovaction ladders, BUT we will not count vacationed games against the max number of challenges you can make.
Tournaments are already handled, witih the option to be either vacationed or not.
Actually why is there a need to cap the number of challenges you can make?
If you are capping the number of challenges a player can receive, I can understand. But if a player wants to make as many challenges to as many players as he wants, why should we stop him?