Well, self-explanatory. The conditional move is a very useful feature and even though I don’t play correspondence games yet, I plan to diversify my styles eventually, although I know this is not very useful with the speed of live games and faster. However, the idea of being able to mess around with the board to easily explore future possible game paths might be troublesome for some people. Even if the player has a real goban next to them, providing an option to disable this feature on the site (while keeping the conditional move) seems reasonable to me.
In what way do you feel these two options are meaningfully different? Both are analysing future positions, one is just potentially committing to play one of them 
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The difference between using your brain (conditional moves purely) and watching positions on a board (analysis)
It’s surely easy to bypass technically but the moral contract is not to neglect, in the terms of what we expect on each other.
I don’t see other reasons to disable conditional moves as to feel uncomfortable by the quickness of the answer. Why would I reject a tree of variation built by my opponent besides this?
Disabling analysis seems to be more meaningful, if you restrain yourself to not use any help and use your brain only. There is a huge difference if you put down your sequences in the deepness and exactitude of your reading. I’m not putting here any judgement if one should like it or not, but the difference is real.
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I could have not put it in better words. What I meant is exactly what @Groin wrote.
We don’t currently have a non-visual way to submit conditional moves, so I still fail to see how you can allow conditional moves without
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Folks have suggested limiting the conditional moves in the past (allowing only one variation, limiting depth, etc.)
I can sort of understand the ask… but also… ppl should just enable analysis and this is a non-issue.
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Use coordinates for example. Or don’t keep the stones you play on screen.
There are ways for sure.
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Oh right, sure. Sorry. I understand it’s possible to add such a feature. If that was your proposal I misunderstood and fully support any proposal to add new ways to submit moves, as they all inherently open accessibility pathways.
I was referring to conditional moves as they are currently implemented on OGS as being equivalent to analysis mode, and splitting them as they are does not make sense to me.
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Leave conditional moves as it is. It saves a lot of time for end game when all the moves are more or less obvious. And it is really frustrating in correspondence games when conditional moves are disabled and you play against some one who plays way slower than you (perhaps not even a move every day!) and all the end game moves left are self-evident.
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A load of design and development effort to add a much worse and less usable conditional moves feature than we have now, just so that it can be on when analysis is off (yet more options on game create). No thanks. Any competent product owner would reject immediately, and I hope OGS does too.
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Or we can make the conditional moves the way it is but make it irreversible. Once you start making the variations, you have to stick with it and it can’t be cancelled. This way you can’t use it as an analysis board.
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Yes, this is the system that came to my mind. You can have conditional moves without analysis if there is no going back on the conditional moves you place.
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we are not considering a software design for which the best design is to avoid to have to think. And I don’t think it’s so a complex implémentation as we have already conditional moves and it’s only how to communicate your variations without bypassing the “not playing them on the board.”
I’m simply looking on how to use your brain and not your eyes and indeed how to report the results in the game.
Now if this sounds weird, too uncomfortable and ok I will not change my move even if I see now that it’s not working, ok let’s keep it as it is
I considered this, but you could get around it by just playing a nonsense move first that would never happen, and then play anything you want after with no risk.
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If you are willing to take this risk and if you want to go all out just to do analysis on the board, then yeah sure… But then wouldn’t it be easier to just prepare another board by the side and do the analysis there?
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Which is why analysis off doesn’t make that much sense in correspondence, unless you know the player will agree to it and won’t use it.
Maybe you’ve played the player a few times or know the player.
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It makes sense if you don’t want to be obliged to watch your variations on the board when entering your conditional moves. Ofc, it’s easely cheated, but that’s not the point.
I think it is the point though. If it doesn’t make any practical sense then why implement it?
It’s like asking people to enter their variations blindfolded when they can just take off the blindfold.
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Stop looking on your opponent but look at yourself. Do you want to see the variations on the board when entering the conditional moves?
What will you do if you discover a failure in your reading (by brain) when you look at it?
It’s no different to playing with submit move turned on instead of click or double click
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