I’ve assumed that OGS makes enough money from subscribers (and no adverts anymore) to pay anoek a decent US software engineer salary and server costs, but not much leftover after that. Is that correct? If so the ‘relegate’ would basically be anoek can’t get paid for the time his salary goes to a paid UI designer instead. Does his life circumstances allow that: would he keep the server ticking over out of the kindness of his heart / desire not to see his project of 10 years die, or go off to get a job somewhere else?
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I don’t want to minimize anoek’s efforts, but it is easily possible to hold a regular job in software while maintaining this project. It really shouldn’t take more than a few hours a week at this point, especially now that we can outsource simple coding jobs to AI.
Not really. Just spitballing here though. Btw it feels weird that we are so many people debating over what one guy should do, could do, might do or should not do with his life. Hope he doesn’t get too annoyed.
Option 1: Setting different focus plus AI support
One option would be that he simply takes the time he currently puts into other things (feature development, fixing of uncritical bugs, AI development, etc.) and instead puts it into redesigning the UI/UX himself. He could utilize courses and best practices that are freely available online, he could get the help of AI and he could of course also ask us in the forum for feedback. Might be achievable especially since AI has gotten pretty strong at this.
Option 2: Hire a European expert
If he just can’t do the redesign himself or doesn’t want to do it himself, he could also hire a European expert from France or Germany. If he actually earns a decent “US software engineer salary” of the California variety then he can take a third of what he earns and pay for one of us low wage Europeans. There are many really talented, experienced and great UI/UX designers in France/Germany that could be hired at a good rate.
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Maybe, but I think it’s good to be realistic what these debates about OGS’s direction actually come down to, rather than assuming OGS is a software company with say 10 employees which is what some of e.g shamisen’s posts came across as.
Also I did say
So happy to be corrected if my understanding is incorrect.
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But does it really? Does anyone here have numbers that say “X players leave this website for another competitor due to bad UI” in comparison to “Y players come this website from another competitor due to the good UI”.
I’ve never seen such numbers to be honest, so such claims are highly questionable and subjective, as far as I can tell.
I am not convinced at all of that, so I gave it another try yesterday and I found out that even the “resign button” is hard to locate. 
Oh, I might be an outlier, but that doesn’t make my opinion wrong. 
For example:
This trend of the gamification of everything, especially education, is starting to show more and more issues, the more prevailent it becomes and thus some studies are being made:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0950584922002518
https://this.deakin.edu.au/society/the-challenges-of-gamification-in-learning-environments/
And some action is being taken:
So, yeah people get more IMPRESSED by “bling” and “counters” and “progress bars” and whatnot, but are they really better? 
What is more impressive, is not automatically better, or even just good.
Maybe, but does every service need to cater to “wider audiences”?
I have no problem with the OGS UI and I would keep playing here regardless of what changes they made to it. I actually still play in the Dragon Go Server, which has not been updated since 2012 and doesn’t even allow for conditional moves.
If you like Go and the functionality is there, then you play Go.
The ambience is complementary.
Who wouldn’t? But the point remains that the game was made and was popular, despite its visual shortcomings. If people hadn’t obsessed over the ASCII version, the better one would have never been produced.
First comes revenue, then comes the re-investment.
It is always a good idea to not assume how difficult a job/result will be to be achieved, when that job/result is going to be made by other people.
Feel free to volunteer and find out. 
As far as I can tell, no additional curation is needed:
You can already sort the puzzle collections by difficulty, by “how many puzzles the collection contains”, rating, how many people have actually found them useful and solved them and when they were created.
What more could someone need in order to decide which puzzle collection to use?
What a coincidence! Go itself is not very good for casual players. 
Maybe you are conflating the general issue of the game itself, as an issue of the server?
You’d be surprised.
What you are proposing is an idea that Pratchett made fun off where people would “build a large temple” and hoping that this would attract a God to inhabit it.
If you have a market of something already popular, let’s say chocolates, then the presentation of your chocolate bar and the wrapper is crucial.
If you have a market of something that is utilitarian, let’s say spades, then the presentation of your spade is immaterial. Most people care if it will do the work, not if it has “bling”.
This is actually an example against your point.
In many cases a lot of home-cooked meals look worse than their “restaurant bought” counterparts, however they are in fact tastier and with better ingredients.
It is not so much that people are negative about it, but that it happens very often and with a new topic where the same things are rehashed.
A good/standard practice in a forum is to use the “search bar” to see if similar topics already exist and if the matter has been already discussed and been given a solution to. Once such a topic is located, you can revive it and respond there with whatever you have to add to the already existing feedback.
This is how fora are designed to work, but no amount of UI improvement of them will make most users follow that design.
It is always a good idea and it also quickly “weeds out” the people that just expect someone else to magically do the job.
I remember someone suggesting that I should have used a totally different program to create the diagrams in my Go Book. Yeah, opening SGF files with CGoban and hitting “print screen” is hardly a “top notch solution” and everyone knows that and I agree, but I am also no going to re-create 600+ diagrams and then replace and re-position them in all the different language versions of the book for no particular reason other than “they’d look better that way”.
So, I said “that is an excellent idea! Thank you very much for suggesting it. Would you like to help me to do this?”
I got no reply. 
That’s kind of funny, because a lot of non-profits, actually turn up enough money for a lot of people to live off from… comparatively OGS having “a single paid owner of the website” is actually pretty tame…
So, noone in those organisations got a salary?
Is that what you mean?
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Whoa, another good one worthy of being conserved:
Especially as it has the typical infamous “I don’t want to X, but X” format.
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I also wonder why you feel this way.
What if there were an “OGS Front End Foundation” non-profit, while “OGS AI Analysis, LLC” made all the profits? Would that make it better somehow even if there was no difference in what any actual people were paid?
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Oooh that background broke my brain
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So, what, you think I did want to minimize his efforts?
I fully understand when open source maintainers decide to spend a significant amount of their time on the project. But that’s a decision, not a necessity. That was my only point. It is possible to maintain this project, which is very far along in its development stage, and also hold a regular job, simply by delegating tasks to other contributors or LLMs. Whether to do that or not is entirely anoek’s decision. If he can live off the site’s revenue, it’s an easy one. BUT we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that contributors ask to be paid for their work. Some people here are acting like that’s somehow appalling, but it’s not. Not when the project’s maintainer is profiting from their work. That was the context of my post, if you care to know.
I think software developers who routinely volunteer their time to open source projects have a sort of knee jerk response to this kind of thing. “How dare you ask to be paid, it’s open source!” This may be the culture in open source software, but that doesn’t mean we should expect it from designers, who don’t live in this culture and have a very different workflow.
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Wtf is this burn my eyes out background format? 
(but thank you for addressing this)
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So, you got nothing out of your work, but others did.
This also means that there was money that was going around in that particular project, but you chose not to ask for any of it.
Or, at the very least, you saw what was presented to the public.
We call that “single owner business” in my country. A “company”, as the name implies, usually is reserved for an organisation were there are multiple owners or shareholders.
That’s a very big accusation you know… I let that slide earlier since you were also vague about it, but now that you are slinging that accusation as if it is definitively happening, then I’d like to point out that legally and ethically, the word “actively” is not easy to prove. This doesn’t look like hiding:
Saying “actively” doesn’t mean much… you have to prove your claim, as well…
I can. The difference is that the amount of money that other people took was public in that project that you did free work for, whereas in OGS is not.
It doesn’t seem like a very significant difference to me, but maybe that’s just me.
Or they are free to do neither, just like most users of OGS (me included), do.
In a poetic way it really did also highlight the importance of good UI/UX.
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What’s with this framing? It’s true that they are a company, and that the model is based on contributions. I don’t think they hide that.
Relying on contributions is a feature. What we, the community, get:
- ad-free experience for all players
- the ability to fix the frontend code (or benefit from fixes from other contributors)
- the ability to learn from the frontend and make your own - there are many people who have done just that and accept donations.
There is nothing sinister about that, in my humble opinion.
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Yeah, I’d certainly like it if the backend were OSS (both from a philosophical standpoint and for “some contributions would be easier” reasons) but I absolutely don’t think anoek is trying to hide anything about the economic situation, nor do I think he’s secretly getting obscenely rich off of running the site.
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I thought I went over this extensively in other threads.
Firstly, It’s 10x slower to do anything for OGS than in my own codebase. Even if I’m not a “10x developer”, working on this open-source plus the requirement of convincing people on the forums of my skills turns me into a 0.1x developer. I did much more complicated frontend work with direct code and modern CSS libraries than with Figma/Photoshop which I learned from scratch to design for OGS:
Secondly, I went over the systemic flaws with how Go is taught and presented to beginners on OGS from its UX flow to its puzzles. And then there’s the SGF Library, entire Learn to Play Go section, … even the Settings page I don’t agree with. I can’t fix all of them here. It would take ages. Ask GoMagic to work on OGS instead of their own website too, if you’re going to ask me.
And they’re apparently all too busy to do any heavy work for OGS – they’ll do bug fixes at most.
Now you’re just lying for fun, very classy! You were asking what my background/skillset was a few days ago, unsure if I was a former tech lead or VP of Google. The only thing you can do is wildly guess, you’re not fooling anyone. I’ve shown only maybe 10% of my skills on these forums anyway. I came to these forums to improve at things I’m weak at, from Go to UI design to open-source to communication – none of these are my strengths . Did I ever even say I was good at Go? I’m terrible at Go if you put me in any insei environment or Asian Go community, I just happen to be better than most of you. I don’t understand why you’re all so bad at this game, just as you don’t understand how people find it hard to use OGS or how dokbohm can’t seem to learn the rules of Go. We all have different strengths and weaknesses.
I’m a better at teaching, game design, storytelling, DX, UX, etc. all which would contribute to making a good Go platform.
Yeah, turns out you weren’t.
Is that so? You have told us quite a lot about yourself. I could summarize what you told us about yourself but… man it’s not a pretty picture I can tell you that.
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I do think people who have worked on a project for a long time can be “set in their ways” to an extent, but you should also entertain the notion that these people have opinions worth hearing, and that hearing them, though it slows you down, ultimately leads to higher quality work.
Regardless, any effort to replace OGS as the western hub for go is DOA. Don’t waste your time.
The only additional information which led you to develop confidence in this “conclusion” was me calling your UI ideas worthless, though you called my ideas terrible first. So this is more about you, less about me. You insulted my honest efforts and I took it with humility, while you’re still continuing to rage like a little child. I thought I was the one with ego problems:
And what type of picture are you painting about yourself? Feel free to continue attacking the 5-10% of my skillset I’ve shown. I only came here as a student of square.defender’s square style – from the very beginning I was here to learn and improve on my weaknesses. And I did learn a lot here. For example even in this thread, I identified a communication habit of mine:
Regardless, if my skills were really so bad, you wouldn’t see greenasjade asking me to continue working or people asking me to contribute more. Again, you’re not fooling anyone.
There’s like no money to be made in Go. chess.com has 100k+ ongoing games at any given time while OGS only has like 150. That’s like 3 orders of magnitude smaller and hence expect resources to be scaled back accordingly. Feels to me like OGS is pretty well designed given that it’s effectively all volunteer work.
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Waste of time in what aspect? Financially? So is studying Go or the web app I made last year then, yet I learned an incredible amount from both endeavors. I can’t say either one was a waste of time. I learned database modeling, built my own fully type-safe layered authorization system, how to build responsive UIs mobile-first, learned the difficulties of coordinating time zones from building a custom calendar, worked with data visualization libraries, built drag-and-drop interfaces, and was beginning to incorporate testing frameworks too before I burnt out of the whole workflow.
I learned an equal amount from studying and teaching Go. So who are you really speaking for, when you say it’s a waste of time? It’s definitely not me.
Just fyi he does that to everyone who has ideas about how OGS should work and claims to have skill 
very rarely is it an indicator of their actual skill level (though you never know!)
I, for one, encourage you to keep working on your personal project. I think we could all be pleasantly surprised!
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