Let me honestly reflect my experience of trying to help you show that this feature does exist: it feels kind of thankless and entitled the way you’re responding to us.
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I almost never take David’s side on anything but to be fair in this case he very clearly wants
and we do not have that currently. What we have is customizable messages that look the same no matter who is reading it. The features are similar but differ in exactly the area that David says matters to him. I think that’s pretty reasonable. It would indeed be nice if I could click on a “hello” button and my opponent could see a friendly greeting in the primary language of their system settings and currently no matter what language they speak they all see “hello” in English (or whatever language I write in).
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The only issue I see with this is that if I receive greetings in Chinese/French/whatever, I’ll assume this person speaks that language and will respond in kind, but my messages won’t be translated so they’ll be confused…
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Did you look? It’s under Community → Documentation & FAQ.
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I have looked for a user manual several times over the years I have been registered here. Thank you for the pointer.
ADDED: I still can’t find it from here. When I click the three lines at top right, I see a “Community” popup, but no obvious menu item for documentation.
On the main site, not in the forum. Anyways, here’s the link: Home · online-go/online-go.com Wiki · GitHub
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There’s no need to feel that way. ANYTIME I submit a problem report, I put myself in the shoes of a beginner or newcomer. In this case, a newcomer (and also me, not a newcomer) has not been able to find the documentation so far. I feel entitled to have documentation for any software product, especially since I spent 38 years writing documentation as part of professional software development. I see no reason why anyone should be annoyed with me: I do not make overly brief postings, I do not use uncivil language, I do not try to annoy. I try to improve any product I use. I see nothing wrong with that, or with how I post. I do see something off about having to defend myself. I never criticize people who post on fora that I maintain.
As for thanks, I’ve given the developers lots of thanks in the past. I see no reason to load down a suggestion or a bug report with tactful boilerplate like ‘thanks’. I myself don’t need such boilerplate. I know I do good work in software.
Thank you for the link. Game Chat is described on Chatting & Getting Involved in the Community · online-go/online-go.com Wiki · GitHub, and I see no mention of languages. I can only assume this means that all messages must be in English, which hardly seems fair. Oh, and by the way, thanks so much to the OGS developers for producing such good reliability and functionality in a Go server. It is the only one I ever use anymore.
Perhaps one way this could be solved would be to show the pre-set messages in a slightly different colour, for example a grey?
I think this might be rather useful for cases in which misclicks or undos are needed, too. (for the ‘Sorry - misclick’ pre-set message)
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While it’s hard to imagine why someone would assume that chat is English-only, a multilingual example would be much better than the current entirely blank chat window we show in the docs.
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It is not a valid burden of the user to “try things out”. The documentation ought to inform us about how multiple languages are supported during game play. Instead, you should have thanked me for my feedback and corrected/extended the documentation.
Since readers did not notice, my proposal was for a set of pre-translated phrases that could be chosen during game play. I even gave an example of a mobile app that does this, and stated that it is much easier to implement than is general translation. I will add that this feature would work much quicker, so it would not slow down game play, as much as the translation of entered strings.
A user who would actually need this functionality (non-English quick messages) would not have the “burden” of trying it out, since their interface will already have these available in their language.
Hi
as mentioned, the auto translated predefined messages would just be confusing. Your opponent assumes you share their language, but what they write is just gibberish for you. Any indication that the message is predefined for your language must be understandable without reading a documentation first. If chat messages have different colors it’s just confusing, but you still don’t know what happened.
In the case we get this messages, can we also make them to get sent automatically:
At the start of the game, send the greeting message,
at the end send the thanks for the game message,
If I send an undo request, send the “misclick” message.
This way we can solve the problem of the OP as well. We wouldn’t have any impolite users on the site anymore.
Btw: If I want to know what I can enter in any text input, I just enter it. It’s faster to test if my Unicode characters are supposed than to dig through a long document listing all white-/blacklisted characters.
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Your proposal would do nothing to stop the escapers, stallers, score cheats, and other violators. Like many posters in this thread, you seem to have overlooked the OP’s main point, that such violators strongly tend not to give a greeting; therefore, by cancelling games without a greeting, one can avoid most escapers, stallers, and score cheats. Here is the OP’s second paragraph:
Note that he describes a diagnostic tool for avoiding later antisocial behavior; it is not retaliation for lack of a greeting, which he even said he was
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I and others have linked you to the documentation in previous occasions. I even recommeneded you to read through it as you are someone who lacks the curiosity and adventuriousness to learn things by trying them out rather than reading documentation beforehand. So either you suffer from memory loss, or you purposefully ignore people providing documentation so that you can complain about not finding it.
This time I’m going to suggest you bookmark the documentation in your browser. I’m not going to give you documenation about how to do that, as its something you should have developed the skills to do yourself in 38 years as a professional software developer.
Your tone would be appropriate if you were a corporate client of a software product that you paid a million dollars a year for including contracts for documentation. As a free (or supporter?) user of OGS it grates.
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Uberdude, I apologize for grating. Was not my intent. I do the best I can to help and to get help in this life.
Perhaps you’re not understanding me. An example might help: I’m starting a game. I click the Universal Message button and see a list of possible messages, such as: Have a good game/Thanks! You too./Sorry, I misclicked–undo, please?/That was a good move!/Thanks for the game.
I select “Have a good game.” OGS indicates the message was sent. My opponent, who registered as speaking Portuguese, receives the message “Bom jogo!”. My opponent, who speaks Portuguese, selects the message “Obrigado! A você também.” OGS indicates the message was sent. In my game window, I see the message “Thanks! You too.”
Is it all clear to everyone now? Is it clear how this would help make OGS games more enjoyable? Is it clear how easy this would be to program, even for a dozen languages? Is it clear that only the list of messages sent need to be translated, once only, during OGS development?
I personally like to read greetings in various languages, it creates an international atmosphere.
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