Thank you for continuing to provide OGS as a free and accessible platform for Go players around the world.
I would like to request an improvement regarding game records stored on the OGS servers. At present, users do not appear to have the ability to delete their saved game records freely.
I believe users should be given greater control over the records associated with their accounts. In particular, it would be helpful to allow users to delete individual game records, as well as multiple records at once when necessary.
Game records may remain connected to personal memories, past communities, or periods of activity that users no longer wish to retain publicly. Even when an account or group is no longer being used, those records may continue to remain visible. Providing a deletion function would improve privacy, user autonomy, and confidence in the platform.
I understand that a game record involves more than one player and that technical or operational considerations may be involved. Nevertheless, I hope OGS will consider introducing a reasonable system that allows users to remove, anonymize, or permanently hide game records associated with their accounts.
Nevertheless you are probably talking about deleting games people have played on OGS.
But that is exactly the core issue. Deleting own games would mean players would inevitably delete other people’s games, who might want to be able to review them later, observe their play history, check out past tournaments, etc… which does not seem okay to me?
Obviously if you or anyone else have shared some private or sensitive info in your games, let us know, and we will help clean that up, but for just normal random games, I do not think there are currently plans to let them be easily deleted. Sorry.
This is a terrible idea. It would be the greatest gift a troll could ever want. They could hide all their misdeeds by simply deleting the game evidence. Consequently, it would become much more difficult if not impossible to discover and ultimately suspend habitual abusers. It would also eliminate the only means players have of vetting an opponent.
Yeah, its not possible to delete a finished game, for the exact reason that the game “belongs” to your opponent too…
However, you can make the game private when setting up the challenge, and it will be permanently hidden on your game history. Though you need to do that before the game, can’t change that settings once the game has started.
Thank you for your reply and for providing the link. However, I believe the game-record deletion part of my request has been misunderstood.
I am not referring to SGF files that I personally chose to download or save. I understand that I can delete those files myself.
What I am requesting is the ability to remove from my OGS game history the records of games that were played as part of a specific OGS group while I was a member of that group.
I am not asking to delete all of my game records. I only want to delete the records connected with that particular group after leaving it.
Therefore, the existing ability to delete personally saved SGF files does not address my request. I would appreciate it if OGS could consider adding a feature that allows users to select and delete—or at least hide—game records associated with a specific group.
Usually, deleting game records themselves is not particularly desirable from the perspective of the server. At the very least, I believe that the knowledge of who won and who lost is necessary for the ranking system.
Additionally, as it has been mentioned, a game belongs to two players, so the other player might want to preserve such record, both for Go related reasons, as well as, for example, as proof of misbehavior if they have a complaint.
Therefore, I can’t think of a reasonable option to allow a player to unilaterally disavow their own games, short of deleting their whole account (which is currently possible).
On the flip side, I reckon people are not going around and digging on someone else’s old history for no reason. If it happened long ago, rest assured it’s a good as forgotten. If not, in time those games will be buried deep enough.
I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to your cause. Surely you have good reasons to want nothing to do with a particular game (or games). I wonder if there is a point of compromise. Would it be enough if those games are not visible for you? Do you require total anonymity even if the server implicitly preserves your relation to them for administrative purposes?
Thank you for your response. However, hiding the games from my own view is precisely the compromise I already proposed.
I understand that a game record belongs to both players and that allowing one player to delete it entirely from the server may create problems. I also understand that the server may need to retain the result for rating, moderation, or other administrative purposes.
For that reason, I have already suggested that, if complete deletion is not possible, OGS should at least allow users to hide selected games—or all games associated with a particular group—from their own game history and their own view.
I am not asking for total anonymity, nor am I asking for the records to be removed from the other players’ accounts. The server may retain them internally. I simply do not want those games to remain visible to me.
To explain why this matters, I participated in a monthly league organized through an OGS group by a Go club. Later, I was told that I had become too strong and that they had nothing more to teach me, and I was asked to leave not only the OGS group but also the club itself.
They were entitled to decide that they had nothing more to teach me. However, I believed that I still had things to learn and did not want to leave. The decision was made unilaterally.
Under those circumstances, do you really think I would want to revisit the game records from those league matches?
Telling me that the games will eventually be buried in my history does not solve the problem. If deleting them from the server is not acceptable, then allowing me to hide them from my own view is the reasonable compromise I am requesting.
Thanks for expanding on the rationale of your use case, but I don’t find it persuasive of a great enough need to warrant changes to OGS. You don’t need to open the games, and I don’t see the games existing in your list of past games, even with a name referencing the group, as a problem you can’t deal with by simply ignoring them, and once you play more games they will disappear into later pages you need to click a lot to access.
the number behind /game/ is the game number you want to hide.
I tried it out with 2 different games and they vanished from my profile page, so it works.
I do not think you understand what this situation has meant to me.
Why should I be the one who has to endure seeing these records or abandon my existing account and create a new one? I was so deeply hurt by what happened that I have not even been able to continue playing Go. Telling someone in that situation to simply ignore the records, play more games until they are buried, or create a new account is astonishingly dismissive and insensitive.
I am not asking for the records to be erased from the server or removed from the other players’ accounts. I have already offered a reasonable compromise: allow me to hide selected games from my own view.
It is not for you to decide that these records are something I should be able to ignore, or that my distress is not significant enough to justify even considering such a feature. You may not personally see them as a problem, but that does not mean they are not a serious problem for the person affected.
I am asking for a modest privacy and display option, not demanding that OGS rewrite its entire system. I find your suggestion that I should simply tolerate the situation or start over with a new account both unreasonable and lacking in empathy.
Manapy has had a good idea of how you can do this right now, without any effort needed from the OGS developers, who have limited time to implement features and also need to consider how they integrate into the software and user interface in a cohesive way without burdening other users uninterested in the feature, and the risk of changes breaking things.
Sounds like you had a very bad experience with that group… In my opinion, asking you to leave was pretty rude :<
I had a look at your profile, and it seems that those games were all unranked. So you can filter the game history to only show ranked games for now, which effectively hides them from view.
And once you play more games, those old records will be pushed down and out from the first page of your game history, making them virtually invisible (as leira pointed out, basically nobody ever bothers browsing thru old games past the first page)
