, there are notifications in blue text (links) of other games sometimes posted by OGS near the upper right corner of the current game board. These notifications hide the information about the two players and, during a game, hide the “pass” control. I have found no way to disable these notifications, which are of no interest to me, particularly while I am playing a game.
Experimentation shows that the only way to eliminate the notices is to click on the X of each one to dismiss it, one after another. This could be a distraction when only a few seconds are left on the clock. So, my question is: is this a bug that I should report in the bug topic, or is there a way to disable such notifications available somewhere, and is such disabling also documented somewhere?
Okay, thanks to @jlt the solution is clear, but I think that @david265 does have a point.
The notifications are placed at an inconvenient place because these
The choice is either no notifications or notifications at an inconvenient place.
But a third option - notifications at a convenient place, where they don’t hide game info, etc - doesn’t seem to be possible.
The top right corner is hardly an unconventional location for announcements.
I think the best thing for folks to do is to just use the settings as provided. The announcement system works well and drives lots of interested users to Go related media and major games.
This is frankly not true at all and the devs agree. The main issue is that overhauling the whole system is a large project and the answer of how to implement the new system is not immediately obvious.
This current system was never designed for what we’re asking of it. Nobody predicted twitch and nobody predicted professional games being played here.
We’re doing our best to make it somewhat functional, but it’s missing huge amounts of QoL optimisation and the fact notifications can obscure critical game information and functions is a pretty substantial bug.
There is supposed to be an ongoing project to overhaul the system spearheaded by a user but that has been dormant for some time.
I disagree. The announcements work. You make an announcement, it delivers, and it converts (people view and click).
Could they be better? Sure. But to say that having a notification in the top right corner or a UI is ‘too intrusive’ or ‘ineffective’ isn’t true. If users don’t like/need them they can ignore notifications by user, by type, or entirely using the base settings.
Sounds like we have a volunteer
Thanks GaJ
(it would need to differentiate playing from spectating though, as well as - I believe - differentiating live from correspondence.)
No, no it doesn’t work like that! The person who wants it says “how hard can it be”. The person who’s going to do it grumbles about how much harder it is than you think, then does it…
Well muting the announcement if user is on a game page should be simple enough but the real kicker I suspect would be still showing them once they’re free. Something like
notification: your opponent resigned
notification: this stream event is happening
Now that asynchronous programming is supported in JavaScript through Promises, it is easy to display either timed or persisting notices in a non-modal way, so that the notices can be dragged to another place on the screen or all notices can be dismissed or even temporarily dismissed by a click anywhere in the notice box or even on the game board background or by pressing Esc. Such programming these days is basically simple.
Not that I’m going to learn how OGS is programmed and built, no way. I make my own projects modular and easy to build, but that is not the way most software developers work. (I’m retired from a 40 year career in software engineering in companies large and small.)
Just imagine how much better OGS might be than it already is if you weren’t so selfish. What an outrageous waste of skill and passion. Shame on you sir.
If you have the time and capability to fix many of the things you’re complaining about, why don’t you put your code where your mouth is…
Actually, I don’t have the time. Even in retirement, I seem to be busy most of the time. But as for why I don’t fix things instead of merely offering hints, I believe I explained that. It is usually very hard to work on large bodies of existing software due to the complexities that must be understood before even a line of code can be changed. That is why I described the new asynchronous features of JavaScript as a hint as to how more flexible notifications can be done by the existing developers. I wish I had more time, but even then I’m afraid that go is rather far down in my priorities. Sorry.
This is a fairly friendly repository to dip your toes into. Many have contributed without any industry experience at all, I’m sure the wealth of knowledge you could bring from 4 decades would be invaluable, should you ever find the time and motivation to offer more than “hints”.
I don’t know that. I was making general comments about software projects. So, what’s the answer: does OGS actually use JavaScript asynchronous code to display its notifications or not?
Added: because if it does, then it should be easy to add features like I described to the code in a reasonable amount of time.
hehe
