Home page ideas megathread

[sjrothsc]

This is a super interesting thread! A lot of why I put together GitHub - Seth-Rothschild/libaduk: A re-implementation of Lichess for the board game Go. · GitHub is because I like the feel of it. I would be happy to use it as a prototyping and experimentation ground for things that might/might not work for OGS and then help port stuff over if there’s consensus.

@shamisen

This is more valuable in my opinion than even a community calendar. I’m 99% convinced (by myself) that it would be better if not for change aversion. I acknowledge it would require a moderate re-design of the current Play page’s UI. But it could be worth it. For example, another user’s opinion:

@sjrothsc

It’s a reasonable question! For me, the OGS UI isn’t satisfying to use in the same way that Lichess is. Something about the layout of the page and the feel of playing stones just doesn’t do it for me even as compared to Sabaki (which are the components used here).

We can conduct a poll to verify whether enough people want a re-design, but it would be hard to ask people to compare the status quo to a hypothetical UI, and I trust my designer’s instinct.

I’m not totally certain on this, but I have a hypothesis that some number of user complaints could be mitigated by a bit of CSS. This unfortunately isn’t my area of expertise but as I poke around some of the stuff that brings me the most joy on my site are the way the mobile hamburger menu transitions onclick and how the stones have a css transition and have the fuzzy placement from Sabaki. These are much easier to implement than wholesale new features and might mitigate some of the complaints (though I’m sure to @anoek’s point it will create new complaints too).