Hello!
Is there a direct way to download all the sgfs of the games that have been played out in OGS? I looking to do some that exploration and would be great to be able to use such a database. I know with the api you can download games, but the rate is limited. Thanks for your comments.
Sergio
The API is the only way to go about this on your own, and it’ll take…a while, mainly due to the rate limiting. Now, if you’re doing something that would be beneficial to OGS or the Go community as a whole, you might explain a bit more here and the devs might have something they can do to help out. No promises, though. I’m not affiliated with OGS whatsoever. =]
You are right pb. So with the hype of AlphaGo and me being an amateur data scientist, I started exploring the use of neural networks in the realm of Go. I wanted to focus in the use of AI as a teaching tool, which I think is lacking in Go. The first thing I thought was how to go about extracting the knowledge a neural network had learn about playing Go. A Go engine tells you which move is good but not why. The idea that has been my top candidate is to create two networks, one to predict the ranking of a player based on move played in a certain position and another to play at a certain strength. I hope this can help players better understand their mistakes and what a higher up (2-3 stones) player would do. I think this small steps would be easier to digest for a player.
So why do I need a OGS game db? To create the two networks I need examples of gameplay from all sorts of players 25k to 9d, and that is what OGS has 
Sorry I explained so lighty the ideas. I did it for brevity sake. Im happy to answer questions if anyone has. Im also way open to different ideas on how to use AI to help in learning.
Sergio
I also think the community as a whole could benefit from an open db such as the one im asking. Im sure many more could carry out brilliant ideas .
If OGS don’t want to host the files because of bandwidth I’m sure someone here would help hosting for free.
The data is from recent public games (217,000 games). The API endpoint I used was https://online-go.com/api/v1/games/{}. I have dumped the mongo collection. The link bellow is a a compressed json of said dump. Making it public so other people find uses to it.
As a side note, the moves for each game are in the DB. If you want to get a sgf you can use the sgfmill python library
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByupT4ggjM0DYjQwOXZYZWREaEU