This community is usually very welcoming, very understanding and very constructive.
You just happened to pick an unbelievably bad time to post this. Something else that had nothing to do with you spilled over into this thread.
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It was mostly my fault actually. Scrolling up, I see that the first instance of negativity was me:
I’m just gonna apologize for causing drama in general. The need to constantly tell everyone “I can do this better”, even if true, was not the right method of communication. And it’s wasting my time to keep choosing to defend my ego against people thinking I’m wrong or unskilled. I’m closing these forums for the day.
Honestly, OGS doesn’t need to change anything and everyone’s lives will still move on. It can serve a niche market of correspondence players and have a loyalty customer base for many years to come. It might not last forever, but that’s too far in the future to worry about right now. In the face of running a stable business, maintaining good health, happiness, etc. none of this matters.
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These conversations (forum conversations in general really, but especially about OGS) blow my mind.
It is just truly amazing the range of different views that people can passionately hold on this sort of topic.
Someone really thinks that OGS’s mode of operation is shady, in fact unlawful.
Some people are deeply concerned that a service provided to them for free might be benefiting someone other than them.
Some people think that an excursion into redoing the UI design would be worth pausing features and maintenance for. Some people think that there’s barely effort needed to run the place anyhow, so what would we lose with an excursion like that. Some people can’t image that this kind of stuff is surely going on behind the scenes anyhow.
One thing it does do is shine a light on why anoek’s mode of operating works so well. From what I see, he knows what he wants to achieve with his project, has a good idea of what the priorities are to make it grow in the direction he sees, and he runs it in that direction, watching all the inputs but not getting tangled up or stressed in all these different views.
Man there are some weird views though!
If it wasn’t for the occasional notable exception, like this one, I’d think it was a complete waste of time trying to change anyone’s point of view 
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I have taken the time to read the vast majority of this thread and indeed other interlocking threads of relevance. So what I’m about to say comes with the consideration that I’ve just spent the better part of 2 hours reading and thinking about this.
There is a lot of bad faith in this subject. Bad faith in how OGS is making/ using money, bad faith in how OGS is being developed and worked on, Bad faith in, and between people who have made meaningful contributions to OGS, the list goes on.
This seems to have turned into a place where grievances were not only being made, but were being dug up, for the benefit of ‘one-upping’ a verbal interlocutor. Indeed, much of the above can be characterised by two words, ‘Mischaracterised’ and ‘Discouraging’.
The really annoying thing here is that, broadly speaking, I genuinely think that everyone in here had something worth saying, worth talking about, and indeed worth contributing. However, as is often the case in situations where opinion becomes the bread and butter of conversation, feelings were clearly left bruised, if not hurt.
This whole conversation was only a few steps away from being very productive, and I’m genuinely sad to see that it decayed as it did.
I’m not a smart person, nor do I hold the qualifications that I would argue that most people in this forum have in terms of educational standard, as opposed to subject matter. However, I do have some experience in group communication, having been a board member at a charity organisation and more than a decade of volunteering on committees of various kinds. I no longer do these things because of my mental health, but the experience of those things isn’t something that goes away, as I’m sure that anyone with any experience proved, tested, and forged over a decade can attest.
The single best piece of advice I can give to anyone who wishes to communicate in a setting by which they hope to achieve change, contribute, or make something happen is to check your ego at the proverbial door.
This piece of advice cuts both ways, to the people who are having their work criticised, and to those offering the criticism too. Sometimes, people communicate in a way that can feel very direct and indeed impersonal, in a way that can offend, even if such a thing is not intended. This effect is largely exacerbated by the fact that the communication is done in a text-based format. As such, the mood, and indeed one’s own relationship to words, their intent, meaning, and subjective use, are all skewing the intended meaning of what is being said, and indeed, in this way, harsh comments can and will be taken to mean something far harsher than intended. However, this is only part of the problem as I see it when it comes to these forms of communication. This is just the receiving end of text-based communication.
It is, when conveying ideas, talking, communicating anything in text, incumbent on the person who is communicating in this way to do their best to articulate themselves as best as possible. This is harder for some than for others, varying levels of education, and access to quality materials for self-study is one hurdle; another is exposure to this kind of communication, and indeed, another hurdle is experience.
It may seem odd here that I am spending so much time talking about how to communicate as a means of talking about this thread, but really, I think it’s important to understand all of these things when openly communicating about something that has a lot of people and a lot of opinions flowing in and out.
It is also true that sometimes, people lose themselves to how they feel in the moment, and act on bruised feelings and ego, and react in ways that are unbecoming of themselves, and end up undermining what they are trying to achieve. This part may seem that its being directed at one person alone, but I intend for this to be directed at everyone here.
@GreenAsJade It is clear to me, at this point, that there seems to be no small amount of animosity here, and perhaps even behind the scenes, when it comes to talking and bringing new ideas to the table. You have said yourself that it may well be worth looking into creating alternative or improved means by which people can contribute to OGS.
I bring that up to raise my own suggestion. There needs to be some kind of mediation between people in the process of “fixing” OGS. I’m referring to behind-the-scenes work here, as it was brought up often enough in the above that there were difficulties in the fact that people were essentially combating against one another.
To make my suggestion clear, I’m not saying that there needs to be a behaviour moderator for the forums; I’m saying that when the back-end staff, be they paid or volunteers, come together to work on something, there needs to be a better way for these people to communicate effectively. That may look like more structured meetings, and indeed, moving away from text-based communications for the specific purpose of working on OGS. I say this because if people are turning away from OGS because of hurt feelings, then there is something in the process that simply isn’t working to maximise the power that people can contribute. It may be that having a meeting with a chairperson who can control the flow of input, to keep it strictly productive… may be something worth thinking about in the future. I do, however, understand that this is coming from a person who has never contributed to OGS, and indeed, I don’t know what that process fully looks like.
Moving away from that, because I have little more to add to a suggestion that may be impossible to implement… I will finish by saying this…
It is a fair assessment from where I am sitting that most people in here, if not all, want OGS to be the best it can be. If everyone went into this conversation thinking “I may not agree with him, but at least we are working toward the same thing, a better OGS”, then perhaps more ground could have been made, and less would have been lost to senseless insults, and back and forths that were, essentially, at their core, because of the nature of these communications, entierly redundant to the point of being utterly a waste of time, which is a shame.
All this effort of going back and forth could have been better spent coming to a mutual understanding and, indeed, working toward finding a solution that would allow you all to work together, rather than senselessly degrading others’ comments and ideas.
I will not be responding to this thread…I have shared my opinions and thoughts. I stand to gain no more. And any response to this can be directed to my messages if indeed such a thing is needed.
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Although @Lord_o_o_Spoon says they won’t be back to see this response, I just want to note for anyone agreeing with the above suggestion and thinking “yeah!” … there already is a good way for the “behind the scenes staff - volunteers and paid” to communicate together. I’ve even mentioned it a number of times in this and the related threads - I wondered out loud why one potential contributor didn’t join us there and ask for help instead of complaining about our work in public here in the forums.
The normal way that developers find this developer chat is by following the Getting Started instructions and reading the invite that pops up as part of the process.
There’s a gap in this for UI Designers … they possibly never follow the “Developer Getting Started” … this is a problem.
I hope that this problem will be mitigated by my earlier resolution:
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Yeah, humans are very interesting beings. If you get 10 people in one room you often end up with 11 different opinions 
It is indeed interesting that the opinions on redesigning the UI/UX of OGS in this thread alone range from “No need, it’s good as is.” to “We shouldn’t focus on anything but for a while.”.
Seeing how often the UI/UX gets brought up by various users and seeing how there seems to be a focus on new features and maintenance in the core team, leaves the reader with one pretty obvious question that I think needs to be asked and looked at:
Is the development focus of the core team aligned with the desires of the user base?
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There’s a separate thread on this topic , although it did get a bit off track (no way! 
)
I think that this is orthogonal to both “how do we encourage contribution” and “how do we get UI design improved” (the main threads of this topic)
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Very good point! Yes, that is actually part of what I wanted to achieve with that idea. Thanks so much for making that connection.
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Woh, this was a splurge with some unexpected side bars that i want to avoid…
On the op topic as a professional software developer myself i would agree , the ui is not ideal but i also agree that though i can easily create a great ui it needs a designer to tell me what the ui should look like. My natural design skills are poor..
If the site ever finds a professional ui designer willing to contribute then fabulous otherwise design wise ogs is not terrible. I have seen much worse..so as far as i am concerned hats off to the volunteeers..
Ignoring some of the animosity the only other subject worth addressing is on the attempts to balklanise the hobby. Its a bigger topic than this though i think it encompasses the paywall locked leagues and proliferation of mini servers , perhaps needs a thread of its own though.
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I’ve mentioned before that I have never thought that participating in fora is a waste of time/effort and time and again its two main benefits ( a) Learning new things or re-thinking the things you know of and b) introducing your mind to different points of view that you would have never thought of yourself ) surface even in topics/replies you wouldn’t expect. In just a couple of your posts (and that single line putting the cherry on top), both of those benefits have occured.
a) One of the contributors to my own project asked my a couple of days about the possibility of turning it into “open source”. Thank you for reminding me for all the reasons why I will never opt for that.
b) You seem to think that in case of malicious intent, then if a group of people call themselves a “non profit” while raking in the money and they “take advantage” of the volunteers and they inform them about it it, then that is fine. However, if it is one person doing that and does not inform the volunteers of the exact amount of money that is being gained, then that’s suddenly when things become ethically dubious. Now that’s definitely something new.
This topic might seem messy, but it has a lot of interesting things in it…
Finally I’d like to say this:
That’s probably what people said about OGS when KGS was in its hayday…
…therefore I do not see the point of this negativity about someone else’s time.
Maybe he makes it, maybe he doesn’t.
And if he does make it, maybe it will flop or maybe it won’t.
None of us knows for certain and it is none of our business anyway.
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Ah, the committee… of course, how could I forget about those amazing entities.
So, yeah I think I got that correctly. Thanks for making it even clearer.
I didn’t “call you out” on that. I just said how we call such businesses in my country.
You said it is a company, but if it is just one owner, that doesn’t make sense even linguistically.
Now a “Foreign Profit Corporation” makes more sense and it is a legal/tax term for a business that brings in money from abroad or does work abroad or is stationed abroad.
But, just to be totally on the safe side, another clarification: if it was a “Foreign non-profit Corporation” but still only one person got all the money (via salary) and the volunteers got nothing, would that be fine with you?
What I really “called you out for” was about your “actively hiding” it claim, but you seem to be “actively pretending” that this never happened. 
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Let’s stop suggesting there’s any malice behind what any of the dev “team” (of 2? people) are doing. I didn’t feel taken advantage of except for the one time when my work was potentially suggested to be equal in compensation to a $29/month subscription to the website. I’m definitely a bad UI designer, but my UX intuition is worth close to a pro’s if not slightly more in the specific case of a Go-related website (and I’m not going to debate that – it’s my point of view, take it or leave it). But it’s not a big deal because I can stop whenever I want to – the only thing I don’t like is being disrespected by strangers even after I did my best for ~15 hours; I didn’t waste my time.
Anyways, I gained a lot from my experience because it was my first serious attempt at both UI design and contributing open-source, and as mentioned by others, the important part is that I’m able to stop working on it whenever I feel like my time is better spent elsewhere. I knew I would be working for free when I started, and I started working anyway for my own motives:
- I wanted to help OGS continue to be the best Go server to drive out any competitors that could interfere with my own Go platform, and
- I wanted some bragging rights.
And I could’ve gotten even more out of the experience if I had joined the dev chat and asked for help.
OGS provides this very unique kind of opportunity that other companies don’t. There’s definitely pros and cons, but even if you argue there might be a few more cons than pros, I don’t think it needs to change how it operates in a significant way.
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This is so out of touch with how a thing like OGS comes into existence… it’s just silly.
Here’s how OGS might have formed, if I were doing it
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I think to myself “KGS sucks, we need browser based Go”.
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I prototype a web stack that can play a game
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I deploy it somewhere free, on a hobby plan, and mention it in a news group somewhere, maybe at the Go club.
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People start using it and finding bugs, requesting features. I’m having fun
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I start a dedicated forum for people to tell me what features they need and report bugs
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I need a paid server to keep up with demand. I pay some hobby money for this.
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It doesn’t keep up. I try putting some ads in some pages to get revenue to pay for the server.
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Howls of agony anguish and outrage. How dare I put ads in this free service.
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I backpedal and ask if people would be willing to support.
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They are!
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I can’t keep up with the maintenance and features, it’s impacting my life
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The supporter revenue is enough that I can use it to supplement my income! I can do my day job less and code features more!
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Volunteers start offering to code features I don’t have time for. I open the front end for this, but not the back-end, because I don’t want the heart of my new baby stolen!
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I upgrade the servers to keep up with the burgeoning demand, and find I can even go half time, to maintain the servers and start adding more complex features.
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Carumba, my accountant says I need to make a company to receive this money and declare it properly! OK I do that.
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Uhoh, the tech stack got deprecated. Phew luckily now I barely need my full time job at all, I can take extended leave and do the re-write
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Actually, I don’t need to resume full time work. The rewrite lost some users, but more came, I’m full time now!
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Wow, I can actually offer these volunteers some recompense from time to time, from the supporter funds! Maybe I could engage a UI Designer!
At what point did this become shady? There are no committees. There’s no “for profit organisation”. There’s just supporters funding the ongoing development and maintenance of a server that they get for free, and a person doing the work.
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That is an interesting analogy - it demonstrates your lack of appreciation for what is going on.
Go (in the West) is not an industry. There are not investors putting money in hoping for investment rewards (forgive me for glossing over the teeeeny pro scene). There are not profits, in the corporate sense.
And … you don’t purchase a subscription to OGS as you do for Netflix.
Go is a sport/hobby.
OGS does do a lot of work behind the scenes (and visibly) supporting Go in the west.
OGS exists to provide a place outside the Asian servers for the international community to play go.
So when anoeks ask the users of his free service “it’d be great if you can support us”, that’s what you are being asked to support. More features, more players to play with.
I can’t know for sure, but I would say OGS is somewhere between 17 and 18 right now.
At what point did this become shady?
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i didn’t want to bother him, but now that we’ve started pinging @mart900 i have a few things to say to his earlier comments too:
It’s not easy at all. Especially with what I suspect to be a lack of DX and productivity tools in anoek’s workflow. I’ve seen him actively respond to users on Github, OGS Groups, OGS Chat, OGS Forums, and I assume Slack/dev chat, …all in a single day of work while fixing bugs. To me it looks like a mess. And I know how hard fixing bugs for a full-stack web app can be from trying it myself last year – I’ve gotten stuck on many of them for weeks.
This is why I suggested better task prioritization in the other thread – but the way I delivered my suggestion led it to being interpreted as rude and insincere. I shouldn’t have phrased it like an insult, I should’ve been more respectful and clear that I’m suggesting looking into better DX tools.
This is the only thing mart said that I agree with . I think it’s worth pointing out that everyone here has said something valuable and productive at one point or another.
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Hey yay back on track!
Totally agree. It is a knee-jerk reaction. ( Perhaps not quite “how dare you ask to be paid” but rather “don’t you understand how this works?” nitpick )
And it definitely is the case that we can’t automatically expect it from designers. Both culturally and workflow. So many correct points.
The only question remaining is “hmmm … so what do we do when a designer comes along and submits a post of ideas (such as the OP)” ??
Regrettably the answer seems to be “Nothing. Not until the organisation is mature enough to hire a UI designer and implement the workflows”.
But if we tell the OP this, we get criticized for begin negative
And why is it that someone “from a culture that doesn’t support volunteer work, and needs paid workflows” even shows up in a forum offering ideas which obviously are going nowhere, because that stuff only gets implemented if its paid. They should know that right?
Personally, I keep hoping that a UI designer will come along who is motivated to get a vision in place, and figure out how to work with the rest of the team to achieve that.
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I actually think internal DX is as big of a weakness as the website’s UX. Both my laments about issue triaging and open-source workflow/documentation were related to that. but I mostly talked about the second one (open-source) and not enough about the first. While it might be important to clean up open-source documentation if you’re going to rely on open-source for frontend contributions, it’s actually going to be issue triaging on the back-end that limits the potential of the website.
anoek is more than skilled enough to make a good UX if he ever found the time to work on the frontend himself as well as play and study more Go. but he will literally never find the time at this rate. That is the true reason I feel the far future of OGS is limited, if not doomed to be usurped by bigger companies. Not the UI/UX.
edit: To add on this, I’ll admit that half the reason I was able to suggest improvements to the UX is because I’ve played 3000+ live games on the website. If anoek used his own website even half as much as I did, a lot of the UX issues would become obvious to him too. And this might be the #1 reason why I can make a better Go platform: I’m going to use my own website. It’s not rocket science.
Now I am genuingly very curious about that. Where did they think OGS (or any other online service for that matter) comes from then? 
Web apps or websites or anything on the internet for that matter doesn’t spontaneously generate. Someone put in work and effort to create it (yes, yes, before someone quibbles about AI. Even if something now is made with AI, someone made the AI or the tool. Some work is still involved.) and even if it is provided for free, there is some cost involved somewhere, that someone is paying. (I certainly remember writing a similar thing in previous topics before, so this modern lack of understanding of how “free” is really a “free service”, is not new, but it is always bizarre. Like meeting someone that thinks that babies come from a stork delivery service ).
That someone probably wants to recoup those expenses (unless it is just their own hobby they’d like to share) and, if things go well, recoup some of their invested time and effort, in the means of money (which is the standard compensation of labour everywhere on the planet, currently).
So, all these “quite a few people” you’ve met and talked with: What did they think that OGS was and how did they think it operated? Did they think it was some hobby venture or something?
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Don’t get angry but now that you wrote it like this, I do wonder if this would have an effect on a developer’s mindset. If you consider your backend “the heart of your baby” so basically the USP of your project that only you reign upon, and at the same time have your frontend open to the public for anyone to touch and put their hands on → then wouldn’t you become, at least subconsciously, more eager to work on your backend?
I know there is disagreement among the community on the priority of a UI/UX redesign, but maybe this is one factor that has lead to me writing this the other day:
I’m just responding to say that I did say I don’t know what happens behind the scenes. If indeed my suggestion is redundant, as there is already a means by which people can contribute in a way that does not leave them feeling animosity toward anyone, then I sincerely hope that more people do indeed join in and work to make OGS a better place.
Had I the relevant skills, I would volunteer myself. At best, all I am able to do is make suggestions based on my own opinions. I have some small experience as an artist, but I’d not consider myself to have the same level of expertise as a professional designer.
All that said, thanks for taking the time to respond.
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