Let’s make one big thread for discussing what to do with the new OGS home page and settings moving forward. We were already beginning to discuss ideas in Option to disable the new home screen "widgets" but it’s becoming rather polluted and not really related to the original topic of that thread anymore. In my opinion, some worthy goals of this discussion can include:
helping OGS be the premier all-in-one Go platform on the Internet, and
making OGS more of a social platform as how KGS used to be, but in an optional way.
from English chatroom today:
[ 9:47]TangJieHao: When will we get a filter on the front page for list of games our friends are playing ._.
[ 9:48]TangJieHao: i’d prefer just live games but I can see how others would like to see all of their friends games
On KGS there was a feature to add other players as “fans”, separate from the friends list. This meant you were a fan of that player and there was a section where you could see all the games being played by those you marked as being a fan of. OGS doesn’t necessarily need to do that – being able to see only friends’ games would be a good start.
As a side note, I’m willing to contribute to implementing a lot of ideas discussed in this thread in my spare time, but I’m going to need someone to reach out to me in DMs to explain how to set up the dev environment and give me better documentation on the codebase first. I talked more about my grievances here: Total number of active games gone from the main page? - #7 by shamisen
Good motivation
OGS is a great platform but there is a lot of room for improvement and the competition isn’t sleeping either. Last year WeiqiHub dropped which is already big, and is moving players over to Fox and Tygem. And as some of us know, this year another real big competition is going to drop.
In my experience someone has to lead such a discussion. Like the way I lead the redesign of the /play page.
Maybe this time it could be you? My tip would be to have a deep look into the biggest contemporary web apps in the sector “abstract board games”. Which are obviously chess.com and lichess.org. Furthermore you should look into the biggest Go servers there are, so Fox and Tygem. From these pages you will be able to get a lot of ideas on how a “starting page for logged in users” should look like.
Of course we can then see if this community has some ingenious novel feature ideas but there is no need to reinvent the wheel when very rich platforms already spent huge amounts of money employing very smart and experienced experts to design starting pages for abstract board game web apps.
No need to reinvent the wheel for sure, but I don’t know if we need to take a lot of ideas from chess.com and lichess either. OGS has had its own brand and style for over 10 years, it can work as long as effort is put into ensuring a good user experience.
One thing I always felt was missing from OGS was unobtrusive announcements for big tournament or qualification games like Stanislaw Frejlak 2p to represent Europe at the 4th Quzhou Lanke Cup - World Weiqi Open , especially when they’re hosted directly on OGS. I only happened to catch the game live because it was the top of the games list which is at the top of the UI on the global chat page:
The Factorio blitz tournament was also good content but I think far less people would’ve known about it if KoBa didn’t consistently paste links to the games in the global chatroom.
Were there ever announcements on OGS about these kinds of games? I believe I saw them when I clicked on the blue bell icon in the top right of the main site, but those were very annoying because I use the blue bell for personal notifications on my own games and invitations.
It does seem like a good idea to highlight such events, perhaps inclusive of demo boards mirroring major events (e.g. the Nongshim Cup), as these seem to be fun and educational, and positive for the community in a few different ways.
Speaking for myself I am more interested in knowing when something like that is happening, relative to notifications about streaming video occurring on other platforms.
About those tournaments and such, as they are organised by different go organisations and individuals, its really hard to keep track of everything that is happening on ogs :<
I do try to follow the european go scene, and i’ll do my best to help with getting some exposure for different events, but at the end of the day it’s mainly the tournament organisers who do the announcements and other advertising for those tournaments.
OGS can provide the access to the announcement center for the people running those tournaments so they can create banners, but unfortunately there’s no systematic method for tracking those events that are held here. I wish there were some event calendar for those, but that would need someone who is willing to update it constantly ://
That’s possible, but half of the main menu would not be interesting to most users, I feel:
Learn > Sign up for AI game reviews
Learn > Other Go Resources
Community > Sponsorship Request
Community > GitHub
Tools > Contribute To Translation
It would have to be greatly simplified, such as Play, Puzzles, Watch, Community > Forums, Community > Chat. But then that would be similar to what we’re proposing in this thread. Let users choose what they want to see, no?
We could have a way for everyone to chose from this full presentation what he wants only himself.
Could add some more widgets like announcements, last game played, the game of the day, statistics on my games, the players I like to watch, a pic, last posts in the forum, next AST coming, actual best of the ladders, etc… Many options.
I see the EGF website has pros and one or two writers posting announcements. If they’re willing to do that directly on OGS that would be great, but I guess they have more incentive to post on their website instead to generate traffic to their sponsors and raise awareness to their events.
I don’t think there’s a single person here who is not busy studying a PhD or raising a family or starting a business (like me), but collectively a team of moderators could theoretically contribute to keeping a calendar. It’s not about how difficult it is, it’s about providing a valuable service to the community. It might help separate OGS from its competitors too.
As long as moderators are allowed to edit posts already posted to the calendar, the chance of mistakes is low I think. And if there are missing events, I don’t think a lot of people would be upset since we’re a team of unpaid volunteers.
The main difference is they have some duty, being the EGF (including receiving cotisations), while a go website don’t have this pressure. OGS is not entitled to offer a well maintained calendary of anything, although it would surely be great.
I mean each federation manages to publish first about his own world, and at time about others. I know that even some times EGF don’t receive the results of a tournament you know so that’s even not so always obvious.
I just wanted to point out here that managing informations or a calendary would be a different matter as what happens in the federations, and a not complete or partially working one may be worse as nothing at all.
It’s up to anoek ultimately. I have no intention of leading a months-long effort to revamp the website and studying the entire codebase to implement all the changes. I can do a little bit of coding but I have my own Go website (learning/teaching platform) to make, which can partner with OGS and help the Go community in a bigger way.
This would be the main concern. But I don’t think it would be worse than nothing, for most users.
I think we’ve said enough about this idea, time to move on to discussing other suggestions. To begin with, building a custom calendar component with posting/editing capabilities is not trivial at all, I made one for my own web app last year so I know. I think the best approach is not a calendar then, but a simple announcement ticker.
Speaking of which, why doesn’t OGS provide more detailed stats on its own site when it has all the data and APIs, instead of outsourcing data visualization to websites like Got Stats?
For what it’s worth I am keeping tabs on this thread.
The problem for years is that folks have very strong opinions on what should and shouldn’t be on this page and it differs wildly.
The kibitzers folks want chat to be front and center.
The correspondence players want nothing but a huge list of games on their page.
Live game players want quick play buttons and think it should be all about match making, and within that crowd are those that want only quick match to keep it light and simple, and those that want to focus on custom games.
And so on. So, I’m open to changes, but for those that are taking this seriously I encourage you keep in mind the majority of players disagree with any one focus.
That’s why customizability should be a constant in all discussions here. either through a separate settings page (https://online-go.com/settings/home) or “Customize”/”Add Module” buttons on the home page itself.
Even Groin’s idea to simply make the home page an expanded main menu came with an additional suggestion to let users customize it a bit.
Other websites might not do this, but why do we need to copy them? IMO chess.com is popular not because of its design but because it has the perfect domain name that even grandmas can remember and type on their phones.
The best alternative to a fully customizable page is something like lichess.org. Their main page has quick matches at the top, with separate tabs for finding “lobby” and “correspondence” games, a news section, and then a live game, daily puzzle, and tournaments at the bottom.
This is not mutually exclusive with my idea. If we replace the home page with new content, all we have to do is move the huge list of active games to the Play page or a new page altogether. As a matter of fact, the Play button/link on lichess’ main menu literally redirects to the home page. Specifically, I’m not convinced that the Play page must only be dedicated to finding new games and not browsing active games.
I’m not opposed to customization, the frequent cockpit memes any time we add some more settings are proof of that - but there’s the power of the default and given it’s what new users first experience, care must be taken to balance not being overwhelming, or underwhelming for that matter (which it probably is right now), making it easy to parse and navigate to what they might want to do first (whether that be get to some lessons to learn how to play, play against bots, jump into live games, kibitz because they’re experienced, whatever). Customization is for the established folks, the initial design matters a lot and we need to keep the new user in mind first and foremost for this page especially.
Those lamenting the good old days of KGS or those who only play correspondence games might disagree
I can imagine design where menu at the top does not exist.
Board on game page is always max possible size.
Chat on chat page is always max possible size.
The main part of every page is always max possible size.
All other buttons are in different places on every page, somewhere around the main part, it’s possible to disable any of them and make the main part even bigger.
It would be good design for experienced user.
For new users it would be harder to learn than Go.
