Why do people join the correspondence Rengo games? I joined one, thinking we’d discuss moves as a team and teach each other. But it’s just a long wait for people to time out.
And I’m curious … does the private chat mode in a Rengo game belong collectively to all of the players on the same side?
Rengo etiquette forbids discussing the ongoing game. You can of course ignore that if all involved agree, but you should discuss that beforehand. So the silence is not really surpring. 
People joining and not playing is annoying of course. And with multiple players the likelihood for that is pretty big. For this reason I stopped playing rengo with random strangers.
Discussing moves is not rengo. The attraction of rengo is to cope with the spread of skill levels. The kind of game you want is team go, which has been done, using an ongoing PM thread for players on a team, and with the team captain making the moves in the game.
The real mystery is why total beginners join rengo games and then time out without playing a single move, or only one or two moves. It is a tremendous problem for open rengo challenges that seek to create balanced teams. I have been experimenting recently with some game-creation strategies to deal with the problem.
Interested
I think that classic historical rengo was just two on two, like a game of bridge.
Next time I try rengo on OGS I think I’d like to go that way, with four players total, two on a side, who’ve all four agreed to the rengo in advance.
Some people seem to think joining/hosting the biggest rengo is a game in itself.
Well, there is one that autostarts when 1234567890 participants have joined the tournament. At the moment 74 participants registered. I don’t think there are 1234567890 go-players in the world we live on. I am sure OGS doesn’t have that many players.
FYI moderators have the power to, and do from time to time “clean up” the rengo challenges.
I mentioned that this would take place, back in the early days of Rengo introduction.
So those ridiculous open challenges are not in fact going to sit there “forever” clogging up the challenge list.
Challenges that have no prospect of starting will be started after about a month of collecting participants.
Challenges that are an exact duplicate of another, from the same creator, are likely to be deleted, unless there’s clearly a reason for them being there.
There aren’t any policies about this, and to my knowledge no-one has ever noticed or at least no-one has complained, and the open challenge list remains a sensible selection, so it seems to be working.
That is great news. Thanks for sharing this info.
Two things come to mind.
Wouldn’t it be simpler to limit the possible number of participants when you are setting up a rengo tournament?
This would spoil the fun for all those one celled go players who set these ridiculous open challenges and save the mod team work.
Another thing; if mods have the power to clean up ridiculous things, would it be possible that they tackle the puzzles section?
There are a lot of nonsensical ‘puzzles’ in there.
Finally …
Let’s hope you didn’t wake them.
Sometimes it’s easier to just clean things up from time to time than to implement things that stop them getting messy
and …
… yeah, why spoil their fun? 
Mmm - I was conscious of that 
I like the Rengo idea, but in my experience it doesn’t work on OGS because of people timing out. That was in correspondence games.
I think it probably works best if you have a small group (4 or 6 players) who agree to play a live Rengo game.
It also works for correspondence games if a small group of people who know each other agree to play.
I’m curious too. Although i suspect to not work like this.
I don’t think so, but I’m not 100 % certain.
I’ve never tried it, but I assume and believe that private chat notes are personal
If there were private chat among a team, that’d basically be cheating anyhow.
I think the question was asked precisely because of that reason. One wants to avoid inadvertent cheating, if it turned out that personal chat was shared unbeknownst to the writer.
Won’t hurt to have a choice like a switch on/off “team private chat” (off by default). For that kind of collaborating games.
Guess bit hard to implement.
yeah i get that now. i had a wrong idea about rengo. I still wanna play sometime, maybe 2 vs 2
