I was surprised about this discussion.
Couldn’t we just have included the converation in the original thread itself? And if it did need its own thread, how far down the rabbit hole of discussion of discussions do we need to go?
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Maybe I should make another wrap of it too? 
Looks like the August of 2025 is the month of outbreaks of epidemics.
We have already CSS and AI issues. Now it is “Do we really need”.
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I think it is much more polite to have a meta discussion about a thread in a different thread.
Who wants their thread derailed by “do we have to have this convesation”?
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Just wait until you see the AI generated “do we really need” threads!
True, I guessI did the same thing here. Although half the reason for it was I just felt like being a bit silly 
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Very soon we will have another “Do we really need…” for this discussion as well
Don’t fear the silence when you are on holidays
I agree in one sense and we do have some previous examples of meta discussions of threads being moved to another thread, though typically they might’ve started in the thread.
Example:
vs (for individual meme discussion)
or (for meta commentary/decisions)
I think the main issue to watch out for is that when you make a meta commentary like “do we need a discussion on X” you would likely wander back into the scope of the original discussion within X.
I think “why chess com?” might’ve been within the scope of the original thread, and part of the responses about Go magic’s pitch deck were certainly within the original scope.
But I think that discussion did bring its own useful element into play, different from the original discussion
So I think one could honestly retitle that thread to be in line with this and it’s fine as a stand-alone thread with its own scope. It just happens to be motivated by another thread (as many are).
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I’m quite surprised that the topic of a road map for OGS has never come up before.
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Seems more of a thing with “live service” video games? That is to say, video games that the developers keep releasing material for the players to enjoy within the same game as oppose to standalone releases. I am not surprised at all because go doesn’t need “dlc” nor “season pass” type of announcements.
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It has actually, although I haven’t been able to dig up the threads - search-fu failing me.
I found some notes from about 2022. Salient points:
- 60% of OGS users have other-than-English as their primary language
- IGF reckons 1% of Go players worldwide speak English
=> OGS needs to cater better to it’s international users- Note: we just haven’t really worked out how!
- OGS worldwide has moderately poor page-load performance
=> Work to be done there - Aesthetics - have degraded as we’ve organically added features
- Note that this observation drove the recent rework of the “Find Games” page, so roadmap->change happened!
- Missing features - there’s a list of them:
- Achievements, Matchmaking acitivities, “betting” (with a different name), Challenge invites, post-game Joseki analysis, Simuls, AI cheat detection, Game variants…
- Note: since the list was written, we got “Challenge invites” and are steadily improving AI cheat detection. So roadmap->change also happens
I’m not sure how roadmapping could be usefully conducted “in public”, and resourcing roadmap developments is of course legendarily hard .. just tackling moderation, AI cheat detection and ongoing maintenance (keeping up with payment provider changes and infra growth) keeps us busy.
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Maybe
A project is an adaptable spreadsheet, task-board, and road map that integrates with your issues and pull requests on GitHub to help you plan and track your work effectively.
I wasn’t really thinking of “what tool would we use” but more “how does community-involved roadmapping work?”
Of course, that’s not necessarily what was being sought here … I imagine that even “a high level roadmap published somewhere” is the kind of thing Uber was speculating about.
I guess to a certain extent the synopsis of notes I gave above is the OGS roadmap
GaJ view of OGS Roadmap:
- Solve short-medium term moderation scaling
- underway
- Improve AI cheat prevention
- underway, continuous effort needed
- Aesthetic improvement
- Improve new-user experience
- Improve “overall” experience
- underway (“Play” page updated, new user joining flow experience updated)
- Improve Internationalisation and more broadly “International appeal”
- Trying to work out what effort makes sense
- Performance improvement
- Infra upgrades underway, ongoing/continuous
- Software (packaging etc) improvements later
- New features
- Largely on hold, behind the rest
- Incremental additions opportunistically
Disclaimer: I do not speak for anoek or OGS, I’m just sharing what my impression is.
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Well to what extent do you want them to be involved?
I linked a tool where you can make the development timeline be visible, which I think is a good first step toward making anything community involved → let the community know what the plan is.
One could imagine instead periodic announcements in a locked thread here on the forums either, reserved only for roadmap updates.
Now if you want community involvement more directly, you could go the route of certain long term game developers, I’m thinking for example like Minecraft. They let the community suggest or vote on which upcoming features should be the next long term focus or part of a next big update. I’m not saying Minecraft does it well, but just the idea of voting on something would be one way to do it, and it wouldn’t replace any of the other things you’d be doing anyway.
One could imagine having the community vote on
- revamping the tournament system
- gameifying the joseki explorer
- making a rating system for a central bank of puzzles (like you might have on 101weiqi, goproblems etc)
- etc.
Then the result of that might be the “we’ll work on this for the next while, when there’s time” sort of project.
Anyway, there’s probably a lot of things one could imagine doing.
One could try to run regular code jams for instance, for bug fixes or simple enough mostly frontend features.
It depends on how much it needs to be community involved, community driven, or just annoucing and making visible to the community various development timelines.
Probably at the moment it’s more like a surpise annoucement that a new feature was added, more than an announcement that a new feature is incoming
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Yeah - these do sound like good initiatives.
Here’s an interesting question: “who is 'you’ in your post?”
Is it “we”? We, the OGS community, could put that in place and see if we can action it.
Or we could ask anoek to do that “from the top”.
One of the perceived challenges facing this sort of system is the extremely long timelines over which it has to operate.
A voting system gets dusty and feels ineffective if the timelines over which the resulting actions happen is long.
My guess is that this is a reason why anoek would not initiate such a thing.
But this doesn’t stop us, the community, from putting such a thing in place and using it to organise our own feedback to anoek and the other developers who each currently just “do what they think is right, and that they are motivated to do”.
Much of “the roadmap implementation” is driven by “contributors deciding to do something”.
Such a community-driven tool would help them decide, and may even motivate.
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Continued roadmap discussion can be done in Does OGS have or need long term goals?. If there’s ideas to reopen this thread with more direct scope then I’m happy to do it.