Can there be an option to know when a player’s around that isn’t a friend request? Basically, if I want to follow someone’s live games, I want to know when they’re around, and maybe when they start a game! I don’t want to trade friend requests with everyone whose games I want to follow. Eventually, popular players will be annoyed with constant friend requests from people they don’t know and don’t want on THEIR friends lists.
I’m not sure why friend requests even exist instead of “buddy lists”, but there certainly needs to be a simple way to sort players I’m interested in from those I’m not without forcing them to put me on their lists.
I agree. I like the KGS “Fan” feature and I use it. But I believe there is an even better way. Years ago I used to frequent a chess server which had a “follow” feature. You could mark any player as one you wanted to “follow” and then when they started a game, you would automatically join their game as an observer. This had the advantage that you could join a game at move 1 and see the opening instead of having to trawl through lists and spot that they were playing when you would inevitably miss the opening moves. So here’s an opportunity for OGS to get a feature which is even better than KGS.