Idea for the website: Pause games when server goes down

Hello!

I just had a game I was playing where we were on 30 seconds per turn and the server rebooted and my opponent lost due to time out.

I think that’s a shame and I had an idea for a solution: why not pause games automatically when that happens?

Then both players can resume.

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Agree, time functionality could be improved.

The server has not rebooted in quite a while. It is, though, possible that your connection was interrupted or that there was some point in between you and us that disconnected.

If we are in a maintenance window we’ll pause games but we won’t pause a game if you lose your connection. The idea is that the other player shouldn’t have to suffer. We’ll remediate games if we have an outage but honestly, that’s pretty rare.

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Once or twice I have lost by running out of time in blitz games because I submitted a move and got an “Error submitting move” (or something similar) message. My internet connection was fine both times. I think in one longer game I restarted my OGS window (I think it took two tries) and was able to successfully continue playing, but probably lost the time this took. I don’t think this was a scheduled maintenance window, but rather just a bug on OGS.

@youmu Perhaps something like this happened to your opponent?

I was the opponent in his game, actually and that’s pretty much what happened. Never go the error submitting move message it just wouldn’t submit. Reloaded the page a few times, but it kept spinning the black and white circle until it loaded just in time to watch my last second tick away.

I don’t believe it was a local network issue, but sometimes things happen in transit or with busy servers. It’s hard to detect and manage that, especially considering it looks similar to someone just closing their browser or shutting down their computer. It’s unfortunate, but such is a difficulty with things like this.

Both of us lost our connection to the server at the same time

I made the same report over a month ago, but was ignored: Please fix the connection issues!

This is a problem with the OGS servers, not with our connection. Even because we keep getting that “error submitting move”, but connecting to any other website works. And actually, even connecting to the OGS homepage (and some other pages also works). Sometimes you can even refresh the window of the game you are playing, but when you click to send the move you still get the error. That happens way too often actually. And it happened to me and to a friend living in another continent, at the exact same time. Just a coincidence?

It would be great if this could be fixed. I’ve been playing only Tygem now, exactly because I was getting “tired” of having this problem in the most crucial moments of my games. And my report was ignored, so I was sure it wouldn’t be fixed any time soon.

Just for the record, this (I’m referring to the “Disconnected” and “Submitting move error”) can be caused by several issues the server can’t influence, e. g. automatic switching between wi-fi networks or cell towers, ISPs fidling with their network, hiccup in your modem (or whatever it is nowadays), rebooting AP, client-side hangup…
I’m not saying that this is always the case, but it is useful to have these things about internet infrastructure in mind. (I’m not an engineer/programmer.)

In most cases (in my experience anyway) the Error submitting move goes away and the move is submitted, so maybe this is a pseudo-problem of verbosity, other services do not announce interrupted connection and recover silently. (Although one time I’ve lost on time, because I could not dismiss the Error submitting move on my smartphone and I timed out before the page reloaded on EDGE. Yes, I’m still using EDGE, stop laughing.)

These could be real issues, and they do happen sometimes. However, in this case (where everything works except for submitting a move on OGS), it’s clearly the server. It happened to me three times (probably more, but these are the ones I remember because they actually made me lose a game I’d already won).

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