I was studying lichess and I think there automatching is actually just creating a custom game with predetermined settings and then checking other custom games for those exact settings and challenging them to start the game. Why are we not doing this? Or are we and I just don’t know how the auto matching works? xD
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I have kept almost entirely silent on this thread because I hate the whole idea of changing the landing page to something entirely new, but I suppose I should register my disagreement. The proposition seems to do little more than bring to the front the components of the Play menu. Is it really too much work to click Play if that is what you want? What I want on the landing page is my active games. I understand that the largely empty page is a problem for non-correspondence players, therefore I suggest that the Profile page should become the landing page. I have always thought it odd that the Home page and the Profile page are separate.
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Why do we need a copy of the profile page when we already have the main profile page that you can easily go to?
I would love to see the home page get shaken up a bit and have more things there relevant to newcomers or that will get returning players more engaged.
I didn’t mean a copy. The profile page and the home page would be one. No duplication. You sign in and you are on your profile page.
I see this as mainly helpful for people who don’t know the site so well. For me, it’s no problem to click the Play link (although I wouldn’t mind saving a click). For a new joiner, they may simply leave before finding that page.
For reference here’s what a the front page looks like to a newcomer right now:
It’s cool that there are a bunch of games now instead of a blank page! But all the stuff at the top is a mess. Especially the announcements - IMHO we shouldn’t be showing those at all to anyone who isn’t logged in since it encourages them to just leave the site right away. And the two copies in different orders is just weird. What does “refresh” do?
@Clossius1’s big buttons look great if they help beginners get games! How about some links to what the site and go are about?
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And here is the welcome screen beginners get if they somehow find the Play button:
Strangely it keeps trying to find you a game as you go to log in:
I tried Lichess and was instantly delivered right into a real game.
@GreenAsJade can we use your anonymous login tech from game invitation links to allow anonymous players in automatch games too?
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I personally don’t really like the proposal for actually changing the home page. As a correspondence player, >99% of the times that I open the main site, I want to just check on my ongoing games, and am not interested in starting a new game.
Maybe the situation is the exact opposite for people that only play live games. Perhaps what is displayed on the homepage could be a personalizable option.
I don’t think the profile page is a good substitute for the home page, that is, I’m firmly against the idea of ditching the current main page and showing the profile page instead. The profile page is cluttered with stuff like ranking graphs, a larger user avatar and all sorts of stuff that I don’t need to look at that often. It means scrolling down a bunch just to get to what matters to me, my ongoing games.
I agree with @Feijoa that we also need to carefully consider the experience and presentation of the main site and other pages for completely new users that don’t even have an account. Perhaps views and layouts for logged out users could be somewhat different due to the lack of an account.
How and whether we enable the possibility of immediately jumping into a game without an account is not interesting thing to consider. It might be a bit tricky. I think those anonymous games work okay on lichess, but I think chess is a little bit less susceptible to trolling than Go. The checkmate/stalemate mechanics makes the endgames a bit easier to deal with in terms of dealing with stalling, and the concept of clocking an opponent is large part of fast chess.
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But all a troll has to do right now is make up a username and password, and they are in. The bar is really low, since they know how to use the site.
I guess you and the other moderators know better, but is that really slowing them down significantly? If you slow the trolls down a little and the real players down a lot, it seems like you might actually be increasing the proportion of trolls in beginner games.
Of course it depends on the tech being readily available, and a simple redirect to a login form would be 100x better than the current error message.
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What about allowing playing bots until you log in? Then no one gets trolled.
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Is there a way we can run some user experience test? I’m very opinionated but I also believe in data over opinions.
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We definitely could… the components of the solution are there, and could be wacked into that flow.
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Rather than debate about what hypothetical page is better, I think you should push to get something up on a separate URL like /newhome then gradually make it more prominent, starting with a link from the home page. There are probably lots of ways to make everyone happy, like with settings or additional pages or just by making the new page really great.
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^^^ This is the answer to the earlier question: “Can we run some user experience test?”
The answer to that question is “Yes, make the page, and we can try it out”.
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What about allowing users to choose from different templates to customize their home page the way they want to?
In basic form, this means that they could set the profile as home page, or the current one (though as Conrad pointed out the current home page is basically just the profile page minus a few elements), or the play page.
Then we’d just have to think of a way to 1) choose the best home page for newcomers, and 2) communicate the possibility of customizing the home page through the GUI.
If we adopted Conrad’s proposal, even in this optional form, I think it might be good to move the currently played games at the top of the page, or generally to slightly change the layout to make it more similar to the current Home.
I guess we’d have to cross fingers that the “you can’t see profile pages” bug never happens again 
By the way, if the concern is that new users have too hard a time finding the play button, there’s a much simpler solution.
I believe something like this is our current Home Page the first time you log in:
We could, you know, just do this instead:
Or, uh, any kind of tutorial for new users
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It’s better than nothing – but it doesn’t help the user become independent when the button eventually disappears.
I think it’s better to have a system that handholds the user into doing the same things they will have to do eventually 
The button disappeares when you have active games and is there when you have not.
So if my understanding is correct, currently those who play live have to click a button on the home page to get to the play screen. Those who play correspondence have their games load on the home screen.
What is the general opinion of this solution?
We target live players as I think that is the future of OGS. So the home page is the play screen, whatever solution we come up with.
You can click one button to be taken to your active correspondence games.
On the active games page, there can be a button to set that as your home page. So on the next loop, when you visit the home page/on initial home page load, you are directed to the active games page.
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I really like the idea of choosing which my home page is (and am sorry to see only one like so far). Then it would be reasonable to aim the default home page at the curious, to try to lure them in and get them interested.
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