That’s a weird way of interpreting what was said. It was more that you might navigate away from the game page, not that you’d “escape to do other things”. If this popup appeared every time you might reasonably navigate away, and you couldn’t just change a setting to turn that off, it might be more annoying than actually helpful.
I don’t really have experience with simul games, but I think it’s not an unnatural thought to think you might use the move indicator button to swap between games if you can’t fit all the boards/windows on your screen at once. But maybe that runs into problems with the disconnection timer.
No, it’s not. Lots of early comments in this thread act as if people have to close the tab in order to do other things. Many ignorant escapers seem to believe this, very commonly closing the tab in order to play a second simul game—back and forth. I have observed this many times, and discussions with escapers when I was moderating confirm this.
Also, your term “navigate away” is vague. “Closing the tab” is more explicit if that is what you mean.
Navigate away isn’t that vague I don’t think (maybe unfamiliar wording?). If I’m on a game page and I click a button like home or puzzles or profile or settings, then I will “navigate away” from the game page. That’s precisely what I mean, you will no longer be on the game page, you will be on another page. You don’t need to close a tab or open another to achieve this.
That wasn’t my experience, and I have the additional experience of watching many DDK games, something I doubt many people do. It is very clear, I think, that the majority of escapes are acts of revenge. In many instance the game chat even supports that.
The original request here seems like such an obviously good idea to me. We can argue about exactly how beneficial it would be, but as long as we want people to stay on the page, we should tell them, and a great time to do that is when they are trying to leave.
During live games. I sometimes click on my opponent’s name to view their profile. Is this not an encouraged behaviour, are we saying people should not use the current tab for that but open a new one? Or if they are slow go into OGS chat (and then the move counter in header tells me when they’ve moved so I can return to the game). Is the proposal that this prompts the 'Resign or cancel" dialog? Or is it actually “navigate away from OGS” rather than “navigating away from an ongoing game”?
I can think of a couple ways to accommodate players who momentarily go away without opening another tab. (No one wants players to be harassed by something intended to be helpful.) The pop-up could be designed not to activate until a certain amount of time has passed—perhaps a minute or two. Even better, I think, would be for the pop-up to be designed as a one-time occurrence. Once a player has received a pop-up, they would never receive another in any future game. That way the purpose of educating well-intentioned players would be fulfilled without an undue burden on others.
Yes, it does matter. A big difference exists between players who escape as a form of revenge, and players who escape because they don’t know any better. The goal is not to solve the problem, which I don’t doubt is impossible (as my previous posts have indicated), but to ameliorate it as much as possible.
When an opponent has timed out (maybe after thinking long in an already lost position or otherwise), I will send this message. I don’t suppose it will help much, but giving a signal that timing out is not okay, gives me at least a positive feeling.
You are free to send such messages, if you think it might help. In addition, you can report users that appear to intentionally time out or abandon games.
If there is a clear pattern of abandoning games, we can issue official warnings and in persistent cases, we do sometimes issue suspensions.
Of course, sometimes people do have an occasional connection issues that cause them to drop. The more severe sanctions are only applied to extreme cases, such as when players are clearly trolling their opponents by intentionally timing out (like even playing another game, while leaving the original one to timeout).
