I'd like to be able to know when pros are playing on OGS (public games, that is)

Hi, with TGPL happening, and people like Michael Redmond or Yoonyoung Kim (etc.) playing games on OGS, it would be nice to be able to find the games themselves easily (sometimes we don’t remember the account names that the pros use). I can think of a few ways to make this happen:

  • a “fan” feature (one-way friendship, sort of) like on KGS (find the account name once, don’t need to remember it)
  • a separate tab or page for pro games, tracking all pro accounts

I’m sure there’s more ways we could solve this too, but that’s all I have at the moment.

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On the one hand there’s

so you could use that to find the accounts. It might need to be updated a bit since there’s new AGA pros for example.

Typically there’s announcements/banners for things like the TGPL for example if you do want to watch some of those things.

If, which is sometimes the case, the banner only links to a stream and you want to find the game, professional accounts, I’ve found anyway, tend to be one of the top games that show up on the Games page. I’ve typically seen Michael Redmond’s games or Yoonyoung show up there. Similarly one might see Yeonwoo or Young Sun Yoon show up in correspondence for example.

There is a know bug though that the filters seem to scramble the game ordering, or at the very least something goes wrong.

So if you reset the filters (typically people uncheck bot games for example) to the defaults the pro games should show up, unless they’re playing on an unmarked account.

—-

Now that’s not to say your suggestions aren’t good, I’m just pointing out ways you can keep on top of it yourself in absence of such features.

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So I take it you’re OK with continuing this thread as a feature request thread? (I’m not super up to speed on the social etiquette here and my interpretation of your comment is that you’re not treating this thread as a feature request thread, so I’m confused)

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I’m not sure I was treating the thread in a particular way :slight_smile:

If you meant I shouldn’t comment unless it was about the merits of the feature request then I suppose I could say something like

  • lichess has something similar to be able to follow people so it seems like a feature successfully implemented elsewhere also
  • players probably should be given the option to remove the ability to follow them (apparently lichess has this). I think it’s reasonable to not want to be followed

or

  • sure it would be cool to be able to track all sorts of accounts on a dedicated page. I’m imagining one tab for pros, one for bot accounts might be nice rather than waiting for them to be online or appear in a list etc.

If you meant “this is a feature request so don’t comment at all, just like it or leave”, I feel like features ought to be discussed, and then, for example someone might pick up an easy way to implement it, or at the very least it might generate a very clean presentation of what’s wanted to add to the GitHub (there’s a feature request tag for issues for example)

If you meant “I don’t want a workaround, I just wanted to make a suggestion, so don’t comment on any workarounds” - I was just hoping it would be helpful for you since it seemed to be something you mentioned you wanted. It could also be something that might not be implemented soon, and if other people were wondering how to find pro accounts, or why a pro game wasn’t showing up in the games list then it might be helpful for them.

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The problem right now is that its all done manually. The challenges, banners, schedules… I put up majority of those banners for TPGL (as for quite many recent egf/aga things), and while it didn’t require much of my time, it is not totally trivial either.

Unless you happen to check /observe-games at just the right time, you kinda just need to “stay tuned” with the events they’re having here. Can’t make the banner if i dont know that they are playing >___>

So i also think there should be some better way of knowing when they’re playing, but i dont know how that should work.

If we would add some calendar for pro (and other official) events it would require constant upkeep by team of volunteers, which doesnt fully remove the “gotta stay tuned” problem. Might be doable if we find some crew to run it, i’d be happy to help as much as i can.

I guess good automation is the way to go here, but as non-programmer i have no idea how to make something like that happen. Front-end of ogs is open source, so in case anyone wants to take a whack at it: GitHub - online-go/online-go.com: Source code for the Online-Go.com web interface

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I appreciate the banners you put up :stuck_out_tongue:

You know though, somebody will still have the same problem. They either can’t make the banner because they don’t have privileges to, or they also don’t want to be the person that finds out or keeps on top of the events :slight_smile:

The thing though, with events like the TPGL as you mentioned, they’re just board relays. We also need a system to somehow flag certain relays to show up somewhere, not just games. That is reviews/demo boards, but somehow have it distinguish between “please make this show up this is an event” and “please don’t show this, I’m just teaching my students”.

So we don’t just want to flag everything a particular player does on the site is the point.

The other post was good timing then, or inspired :smiley:

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TPGL games were actually played here, while NAGF pro qualis last week were relayed by volunteers in washington dc ^^

Maybe pro accounts could have some setting in the challenge creation windows like “Announce ”? Could be in the same place where other users have Ranked , as the pros can’t really play ranked games anyhow. Kinda makes sense in my eyes

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I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but @Trevoke posting this and dwyrin mentioning how he didn’t even know about the N. America pro qualification made me realize it’s a broader issue, not just a small-fry DDK issue.

So I thought it would have some actual value for the community.

I guess the planets aligned. :woman_shrugging:t2::slightly_smiling_face:

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Sorry you’re right, I got confused with the initialisms :stuck_out_tongue: But yeah, I guess I do mean the NAGF relays, and if there was some other pro games being relayed like a Meijin game or a Samsung cup, one might want those things to show up.

That sounds like a cool idea, until they create the settings wrong or something :stuck_out_tongue: But probably still better to have it :slight_smile:

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There is an easy “crowd-sourced” (ie no moderator action needed) way to do this that practically every other go server does: the default home page of the server contains a list of games sorted by observers. That way the people already in the game from knowledge / advertising elsewhere add to the observer count, so then casual people on OGS see it and join and you get a snowball effect. It encourages community and kibitz culture. As the icing on the cake you can then allow mods to promote certain special games to the top of the list (less intrusive than the current notification system which we talk about a lot), but even without that the observer count usually takes care of it organically.

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As you indicate the requirement isn’t just for pro accounts but also for things like the NAGF accounts which were played on arbitrarily-named accounts (NAGF1, NAGF2, etc.) and, if the AGA chooses to relay the US Go Congress on OGS, probably USGO1, USGO2, etc.

My suggestion for “fanning” an account meant I could hopefully leverage the existing feature of “filter by friends” in the game list.

Uberdude’s suggestion would probably do just enough to sidestep the problem, such that more elaborate features wouldn’t be required, though that really depends on whether it’s already possible to get a prioritized list by observer count from the backend, or whether the observer count information is being sent with the game information at the moment.

Anoek might have to do some work.

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