When challenging some bots, sometimes my game offer will get rejected by them without anything telling me the conditions that the options need to be in, in order for the bot to accept the challenge.
It would be great if the bots (ALL of them) would tell us what options need to take on what values in setting the game up so that the offer doesn’t get blindly rejected with no way of knowing how to set the game up so that the bot doesn’t reject the game, but instead plays the offer.
Hello, aheavyburden
yeah, the bot interface is not perfect, but it should usually tell you the reason for rejecting… At least last I tried. Would you mind specifying what bot you were trying to challenge and with what settings?
if bot has any unusal limitations they should be listed in the bot’s profile. If they are not, let me know and I will negotiate an improvement. (most bots are not run by OGS, but by volunteer players who offer their computers to let others play.)
Hi there and thanks for the speedy reply.
Can you tell me how to access the profiles of the bots?
In the meantime, I’ll go see what bots aren’t telling us the correct settings.
Usually the current most convenient way is to search for them via the upper left OGS logo > searchbar
For convinience I have listed at least k bots bellow. (there is too many dan leves 
)
Amybot 11k
Kugutsu 10
NightlyGNU 9
KirkBot 7
GnuGo 7
BadukEllington 5
Budgie 16
okay cool, thanks.
Im going to check all the bots with various settings to see which ones just give a blind “Game Offer Rejected”.
Should just be a few more minutes.
Okay so I checked all the available bots. Any bot that is omitted from this list is a bot that tells you the settings you need to set in order to play against that bot. All the bots in the following list reply with a blind “Game offer rejected”, which doesn’t tell us how to configure the game in order to actually play the bot.
KirkBot replies with “game offer rejected”
DarkGo replies with “game offer rejected”
RoyalMinigo replies with “game offer rejected”
RoyalLZ-ELF replies with “game offer rejected”
minusGo replies with “game offer rejected”
RoyalZero replies with “game offer rejected”
cortexGo replies with “game offer rejected”
If we could get whomever is responsible for these bots to act like the other bots (tell us why the game offer was rejected), I think many of the bot players would appreciate it. Cause as of now, with these bots, it’s a terrible game of changing a single option then challenging the bot only to be met with “game offer rejected” instead of what needs to be done to actually be able to play the bot.
The responsible bot administrators are listed on the bot’s profiles.
KirkBot: @kmartine
DarkGo: pjreddie https://online-go.com/player/434217/
RoyalMinigo: @roy7
RoyalLZ-ELF: @roy7
minusGo: @Alderi
RoyalZero: @roy7
cortexGo: @Alderi
Awesome, thank you both for all the work, much appreciated
I will pass the info on see if we can do anything more 
Yeah sorry about that. We did a lot of work (mostly @metaphysician_splurg) in gtp2ogs to add detailed rejection messages for every possible situation. But I hadn’t upgraded my own bots yet since they’ve been stable for so long and I didn’t want to rock the boat. I need to get my Royal* bots upgraded to the newer gtp2ogs, maybe I’ll take a crack at that this weekend.
indeed, bot admins need to upgrade to latest devel (which currently does not have any major crash issue) : try against @dorus bots for example, i think he is using latest devel :
it’s not always online though so check it during day
if there are things that we can add as far as bots are concerned i’m open to suggestions 
I’m not running latest devel, but pretty close to it. My bots do support more detailed reject messages.
I recall reading in at least one of the bot profiles that a generic “Game offer rejected” message usually meant the bot’s server couldn’t accept any more games, i.e. the server reached max capacity. And I have experienced bots rejecting a game and then accepting the same parameters some time later. So that makes sense as one source of those generic rejections. Of course, it would still be good if the message could expand to “Game offer rejected; server too busy.”
@scotto Earlier versions of gtp2ogs gave that message for too many games, but also for any other reject reason. So yeah, it could be too many games, but it could also be other wrong game settings (too much handicap, wrong komi, wrong board size etc). Bots only accept challenges that are within the parameters of what the bot admin set.