I agree. I think Malk has it’s use. I wouldn’t want to see it removed. An additional “Private Notes” feature would be great and add much needed functionality to the site.
3 Likes
Why? If the problems caused by its existence are greater than the benefits it provides. Given the numerous support requests and people misunderstanding its function I thought that might be the case. Given my poll I now think that’s less likely. It’s also about avoiding feature bloat. If you give everyone what they want you can end up with a harder to use system with too many options, not to mention the increased complexity and cost to implement it technically and not introduce bugs with other changes.
To give an exaggerated example. Let’s say next to the resign button there’s a seppuku button which resigns and deletes your OGS account in shame of your humiliating defeat. This is explained in the documentation which few read. People sometimes click it out of curiosity or because seppuku sounds cool and kinda like resign. They then complain in the forum their account was deleted. This is an example of a feature that is better to not exist and saying its just an option you could choose not to use leads to bad user experience. It will cause more problems than it solves, and telling people after they complained its their own dumb fault for not reading the documentation is not a good response. It’s a principle of human computer interaction and UX design that functionality should be serve a useful purpose and be intuitive, predictable and discoverable.
I’m not saying Malkovich is this far down the spectrum, but it is a spectrum and saying yes to every feature request without removing redundant or similar ones can degrade the overall user experience. I say this coming from a day job working on a commercial software product with an even greater cockpit of configuration than OGS, and satisfying customer demands for new features whilst managing the increased complexity in both code and configuration is one of the key challenges we face.
1 Like
I think the issue is that that main problem “caused by it’s existence” is actually that there is not a private note function. I.e. the problem is not the existence of Malkovich but the lack of private notes.
If there were the thee options of chat/Malkovich/private then it would be perfectly clear that Malkovich is not private.
(Although not that I’ve written that I wonder if “private” should be “personal” as private might imply not public, as in chat shared with opponent only like a private game… Terminology is difficult!)
4 Likes
I like “personal notes” for notes shared only with oneself.
1 Like
Don’t be silly. They can’t complain in the forums if their accout is deleted 
2 Likes
Off-topic, but I’ll add my voice pro Malkovich Log.
Not only has the name a long tradition on the L19 forum, it also is a wonderful way to allow people watching a game, and the opponent after the game, to “look into our head”, plus it is practical way to jot down variations one doesn’t want to forget during the game.
As for opponents logging out and reading it …
-
If one does it deliberately, it will just be their own loss, as they won’t be able to really enjoy their cheat-victory. (And I personally refuse to believe that any one of my opponents would cheat in a game.)
-
If it happens accidentally, I personally can (and do) “make up for that” by accidentally posting a variation or comment publicly, every once in a while, that was meant to go to the M Log
I think almost everyone who as ever played me has experienced this 
Also, I have nothing against the West also adding to Go traditions, after all we’re also in the game now.
7 Likes
[quote=“Uberdude, post:44, topic:40341”]
To give an exaggerated example. Let’s say next to the resign button there’s a seppuku button which resigns and deletes your OGS account in shame of your humiliating defeat. This is explained in the documentation which few read. People sometimes click it out of curiosity or because seppuku sounds cool and kinda like resign. They then complain in the forum their account was deleted. [/quote]
Just to make things clear.
This is completely unrelated to this thread as the feature under discussion is not implemented as it is documented.
I get that people here seem to love the idea of having “full private notes” but if it is implemented the same way the malkosomethings are today (as chat messages that frontends are not supposed to display on some conditions) we’ll have the same problem in the future: a badly coded front end could display your totally private notes to everyone.
The sad thing is that people would probably complain in the forums and the discussion would be deflected on why not replacing malkonotes and personnal notes by a completely new feature that will probably fix the initial problem or be broken in the same way.
I understand your concern but i think that in some way we are all here trying to resolve the initial question on the malko privacy at the same time.
Keeping privacy on private note should be much easier as anyone else has to be you which is much easier to check. I don’t really see an easy way to check better with malko logs besides detecting that you are the opponent and not anyone of the public kibbitz and even so it can always be jumped over. So malko will have to integrate a part of gentleman agreement and private note be much more secure if you want to.
1 Like
I am very sympathetic to your argument about feature bloat. I have often seen feature requests in the Forums and thought, Oh, come on, that is too trivial to bother with. However, Malkovich already exists, and the fix to mobile doesn’t sound like a major undertaking (of course, that’s for anoek to decide). Moreover, Malkovich still serves a useful purpose, although reduced from what it was several years ago. As for people misunderstanding it, I regard that as a separate issue (as stated in my previous post) deserving a separate solution rather than the draconian removal of the feature.
3 Likes
Not the request, but I actually really like the idea of autoplay Go. Although I think it would take the form of Arena Tournaments or something similar
2 Likes
Yeah, I thought that one was so ridiculous, I couldn’t stand to comment on it.
I’d really love for OGS to have Lichess style arena tournaments 
1 Like