After a game (9x9), I clicked the “full AI review” button a couple of times, but nothing happened. Then I clicked the beginning of the game button to analyze it. Some moves (move 2) had suggestions for better moves, but others (move 7, move 9) did not show any suggestions. Clearly, I don’t know what I am doing. Is there an article posted somewhere or a Help topic that would help me? If relevant, this was an unranked 9x9 game.
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Thank you. So I see that “Full AI review” is just basically the features that include a graph showing who is winning that, for me, always appears after a game is done. It is not like a human review, where someone teaches you what you should have done and why. My expectations for the term “full AI review” were incorrect.
Anyway, the page says “For site supporters every move is fully explored,” but this was not my experience in this game, as I reported in my question. Many moves show no AI exploration. If relevant, my browser is Firefox.
I am also curious why the instruction page is in GitHub instead of available from a builtin OGS Help system.
Hello David,
at the moment I see the game fully analyzed, so I am not completely sure what happened, but to give some general explanations that come to mind:
(to avoid confusion - full review are only avilable for site supporters, normal accounts get the limited review with only a few moves explored)
- The review is not instantanious. It is usually very fast (manner of seconds), but if the servers are busy, it can sometimes take a minute. As long as the review is being processed, there should be red dots moving accross the graph.
- Once the review is finished every visited move should indeed display variations. Is that still not the case for you?
- Ranked/unranked does not matter, but only 9x9 13x13 and 19x19 are currently supported for review.
We can never rule out some random fluke error, but generally speaking I have not recently seen any complaints about the review not working, so it should be pretty reliable.
If you are still having troubles, my recommended approach to troubleshooting would be to log out and back in (which is the most general advice I know, but just to be safe), and if the issue still persists after another game do let us know to have a deeper look. Turning off any browser extensions is also always a good thing to try.
Well basically so far nobody with enough experience to do it got to implementing a more built-in OGS help. It is somewhere on the todo list I believe, but probably is not the highest priority for our developer.
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Thank you so much for your in-depth advice! I just looked at the game again, and it looks very different. The red dots for important moves are now appearing in the graph, and every move has detailed analysis. I think your first point must have been the reason: the servers were busy.
And thanks for the explanation about the lack of builtin help. I had thought it was some sort of design decision. If all this software was produced by one person, I am absolutely amazed. I’ve written a lot of software for various companies, but this far exceeds the functionality of most of my projects.
Well, yes and no, there were two people at the very beginning, and then some years ago we went partially open-source so a lot of improvements to the interface came from volunteer coders too. But yeah, still the vast majority of the code is Anoek’s doing 
In fact, it made it to the top of the list - I’m working on it now 
That said, there is more to it than this. github is a perfectly satisfactory place for full-text documentation - long explanations with headings and sub-sections and images. It’s a wiki, which means that anyone can edit it, which is important for an open-source project.
We are looking at other wiki-style options that are a bit more “user-friendly” in the background, but there’s nothing “wrong” with github for this per-se.
The built-in help will be more focussed on short context-specific help popups. Things like “hey, Honoured Guest, you just accepted a challenge invite, have you thought of changing your password”.
That is wonderful news, as using OGS can sometimes be puzzling. But if the bulk of the help will be in a GitHub wiki, then I certainly hope that you’ll put a link or button to it in a very prominent place in the OGS user interface.
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