This topics purpose is for everything that has to do with the beta site, https://beta.online-go.com/overview Having just logged on to it and playing my first game I noticed a few things.
When placing your stone you can hear the audio play twice, only for your stone though not the opponents. Hikari had the same issue.
There is a lot of blank space on the board page. I like how the board is centered on the page but i feel there is to much blank space on the page.
This will hold a few things since they are minor, (1). In the comment section it no longer shows what move the comment was made on which I thought was a great feature. (2). I’d like to see the number of spectators without having to click the button how it is currently on the main site. (3). When clicking the spectator button sometimes it will come up as zero even though there are people there. (4). The location of the friends list seems weird to me I think it would be better to put it in the top right corner with all the other stuff inside the drop down box as well as having it in the home page.
I have a couple things. In the older site and in the beta, the “home” page seems to be pretty useless. It is mostly blank when you first start and mostly only fills up with games if you play correspondence games. As a player that only plays live, I average about 1/2 a second on that page before I go to a more useful page. I feel like that tab should be re-imagined or a different tab like chat should be the landing page. Just make a different page for correspondence games or “in progress” games.
Another thing is a really big quality of life update you could do while you transition to the new site. Editing in the game tree currently takes up a move for each stone you edit in. For teachers, it’s essential to create board positions to illustrate ideas. With the way OGS currently handles edits in the game tree, it quickly becomes impossible to navigate between branches of the tree. The way it should would is edits and moves should be handled differently. Every edit should act as one move until an actual move is played. One side effect of the way the server handles editing in sgf actually does cause a bugs though. It’s possible to have stones left over from previous variants as artifacts. I notice it mostly in uploaded sgfs but I’m not sure if it is only for uploaded sgfs.
Edit: Other bugs include swapping the stone colors in some edited variants
Finally, I think the OGS side bar can be cleaned up. I don’t think you need the same options in the side bar as the top bar. The top bar should be the most often used choices like chat, play, watch, etc, and the side bar should be the less common options like demo board, the libraries, and about, settings, profile, etc. Having the same option in both locations feels more cluttered and makes the side bar unnecessarily long. If it looks too empty after this change, maybe you can add more shortcuts to more useful information in the side bar. Maybe even add the game graph from the non beta site chat window to the side bar.
The search bar on the left sidebar sometimes brings up strange results for the “site” section of the search results. Examples of strange results: “t” brings up Learn to play Go and Refund Policy; “o” brings up Settings; “p” brings up Donations; “a” brings up Developers & API Access, “h” brings up Learn to play Go and F.A.Q.; 'l" brings up Chat & Lobby; “c” brings up Settings; “v” doesn’t bring up anything, it just stays on the side bar page without using the “no results” page that others use; and “m” brings up Donations
Acknowledged. This is a never ending struggle for me to use space without making things feel cluttered, and to make it so a page is usable on desktop, tablet, and mobile. The game page is particularly challenging.
Done (wasn’t removed on purpose, just hadn’t gotten to it yet)
Done
Fixed
Yeah I’ve been trying to find a good place for it, folks were complaining that it’s location on the upper nav bar was a bit cluttering, but maybe that’s the best place for it still. Under the right drop down might work as well, though that’s already pretty cluttered with the addition of the “quick theme” settings… though maybe the friends list would be more useful there anyways… but then I’ve also heard good feedback about the quick theme settings… finding places for things is hard.
For predominantly real-time players I agree and am aware, however for correspondence players it’s pretty well liked afaik, so the question is how to please everyone. That’s an open question still left to answer.
Yeah that’s on the todo list, though we’ll probably get the release out the door before we implement that, we’ll likely get to that as we do a “Things for teachers” features pass (which is definitely on the near agenda)
If you could send me an SGF that this happens to you on I’d love to fix that.
The main problem with not having them both places is accommodating screens that aren’t wide enough for all of the options on the top nav bar, which goes beyond just making some different defaults - if you take a desktop browser and resize it to only use half of your screen for the site, then you can’t see all of the options - what do you do with them? The only thing to do would be to dynamically add the options to the left nav as they fall off of the top nav, but then you’re moving options around the left nav, so as folks resize their windows how they move around the site changes, which I feel would be rather confusing.
When one tries to “delete” highlighted text with delete button you get an popup saying “The current position is not an explored branch, so there is nothing to delete”
This seems to happen only in demoboard chat and in gameinformation
How easy would it be to make all the info (names, ranks, rules, place, tourmament info, etc) in demo boards editable AFTER the demo board has been created. This would make relaying tournament games somewhat easier as now there is no room for errors and sometimes you are in a time trouble at the beginning of a round.
Also the tool icons in review/analyze are not ordered according to the keyboard shortcuts. F4-F9. I think it would be somewhat more intuitive if the order would be the same on the keyboard and on the screen.
Sharing a variation in demoboard (as spectator) does not render move numbers in the shared variation.
Also I noticed that creating a demo board from the side menu when inside another game will not flush the chat rendering empty. I can see all the old messages from the earlier game I was on when creating the demo. After a refresh the old messages go away.
The Blitz preset is totally too fast. 30 seconds + 5x5seconds. I think most players have gotten use to 10 second blitz games. That is with Byo-Yomi. I think You could use Fischer in there also as it’s more elegant (no need to manually maximise the usable time with time sujis). I find this particulary important as the Custom section is still quite menu intensive and not so inviting.
Sometimes after cancelling live game offer the page get’s redirected to the gamepage that I just cancelled.
This does not happen everytime though.
The visual countdown in the ghost stone (under mouse cursor) is really nice. Could we get the same (or even better the last 3 seconds) also visually on the board (not everyone hovers their mouse over the board when thinking). Like in the last stone played (or even all of the stones) would have the same visual countdown for the last 3 seconds
In the top right drop down box the user apipoulai has issue me a challenge, when I click to decline it I get “A error has occurred”, then when I refresh the challenge reminds there.
When clicking “review this game” you get a popup box saying “TODO: reviewAdded not implemented” but at the same time it makes a review still and you can review the game.
Spectator list seems to be broken in demo board. I created a demo board and It correctly displayed 1 , then I joined in with my other account and it did not change to 2 (the joining account correctly displayed 2) then I refreshed the page and it displays 0. Also the second account refreshed and it also displayed 0.
Cannot open the spectator list either.
Refreshing the page while in the game window will remove notification from that game. I had two different notifications in my list and I toggled between them trying to reproduce blank rendering board (no success :() The notifications stayed on the list untill I refreshed the page while I was in the gamewindow. It only deleted the notification about that particular game and the other notification was still on my notification list. Then I clicked on the notification and refreshed that game window also and poof the notification was gone.
This is planned, basically after 5.0 is done I’ll be shifting back to features and enhancements, this is going to be done as I work through teaching / review improvements
This is a little more than a small tweak so I’m going to do this with the review tool improvment pass, but yes good idea, those should be numbered.
Fixed
I changed to 20s + 10s, 30s max fischer - seem reasonable?
Yeah I’ve seen this, I think I know what’s going on, I’m going to address it with an alteration of how that system works a bit - which I’m starting into as soon as I’m done with this forum post
Indeed, I’ve put a note for this in the card I’m using to track time control settings stuff I plan on doing post-5.0, relates to the configuration improvements that will be coming re: Timer countdown warning sound - #26 by jbrausen
Should be better handled now
Fix in progress, not done yet but should be up within a couple of hours
Hm, I fixed something that sounded exactly like this yesterday but I thought it was before you made this post… I wasn’t able to reproduce it today, are you still seeing it or did I happen to fix it up after you made the observation?
I see what you mean - the intended behavior is for notifications for a game to automatically be cleared when you go to that game, but currently that only happens if you start off on the game page and not as you navigate to a game, so I’ll be fixing that up. Thanks for the catch
Doing it dirty(heh) could work quite nicely and not so difficult. Just force the numbering tool to run at the same pace as “move” tool. So when one goes in to analyze mode inside a demo board and starts to put stones on the board, it would automatically also use the numbering tool on those stones. I have been doing it manually a few times. First playing out a variation and then using the numbering tool to put the numbers in. If this process would happen automatically when in demo board it would be good enough. Not a clean or perfect solution but still a solution
This is quite difficult subject. I would personally love 10second fischer capped at 30 seconds, but some who have gotten used to 10 second byo-yomi blitz might think that 30 seconds it too long. Maybe there should be a poll/survey?-)
Yeah this is working correctly now.
While testing this I noticed that if the game window is scaled narrower so that the player names, move tree and move comments are moved on top/bottom of the board. I lose chat area that was originally under the board. It is completely lost somewhere.
