maybe place all these new buttons at the bottom of the page?
(and old functionality at the top)
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I dunno, clearly a lot of people don’t like it. But I like the new update. Probably could improve the UI design a bit more but I think it’s a good direction. I will also mention though that I hate Corr games so I don’t have any active ones.
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I thought the same as you, until I started a couple correspondence games myself to see what all the commotion was about:
It’s fine without active games, but clearly this is awful.
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Yeah I think it needs a few adjustments for different screen sizes.
I guess if not a way to dismiss outright the parts correspondence players don’t want to see, maybe just a way to minimise it, and have that preference remembered.
For me it looks like this
and I believe it lines up with your automatch settings on the play page.
So if I now change to a certain time control on 19x19 on the play page (and come back) it looks like
You can imagine it being like a quick way to play the last setting you queued up for.
A lot of people will have a favourite setting (board size and time control) that they queue up for over and over again - so it speed up that process if you don’t change settings often.
From another thread (about removing download sgf from in-progress games):
Surely the ratio of live players to correspondence players isn’t 9:1. Currently there are 200 live games active, and 21000 correspondence games. I understand that this does not mean there are more correspondence players than live players, you would obviously expect more active correspondence games, but this is two orders of magnitude more.
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Quick back-of-the-envelope calculation with those numbers:
- assume a live game lasts 30 mins on average
- assume a correspondence game lasts a month on average (a bit low? mine were like 6 months, but I was slow, and there’s “fast correspondence” too)
- then 1 correspondence game exists for
2*24*30=1440~=1000 as long as a live, so you’d expect taking a sample at a point in time to find that many more correspondence if they are equally popular. - 200*1000 = 200,000, so the observed number being a tenth of that suggest 9:1 might be about right for ratio of games.
- of course a typical live player will play more live games in a unit of time than a correspondence player would.
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Point taken, but..
I have 30 correspondence games going at a time. The last entry on the first page of my game history page (50 entries) ended on march 4th, meaning I finished 50 games in the last 18 days, so about 2.8 per day. It would be 1 if my games lasted a month on average, so my games last about 1/2.8 = 0.35 months = 11 days on average. I’m a “fast” correspondence player, though certainly not the fastest, and I resign (too) early, so the average across all players would almost certainly be higher, but my numbers do cast some doubt on your assumption.
Are live games really that quick, too? Is everyone playing blitz? If I recall correctly, when I decide to take the time to play a live game, I typically reserve around 45 minutes. But maybe I’m slow.
This question could be answered fairly easily by someone with access to the database, but it doesn’t really matter ultimately. Even if the ratio is 9:1, 10% is still easily enough to warrant the extra effort of making the home screen work for them, too.
1 Like
As said
but I agree that the UI could be improved for correspondence players.
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I think it’s unfair to say on behalf of anoek that he just kthanxbai’d all the correspondence players of OGS just like that, tbh.
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Aside from the other things that have been said, it’s strange to me that the “last game” widget, unlike almost every other board image on the site, is not clickable. Only the “Review Last Game” button is clickable, and that just goes to the game (which I expected clicking the board to do) instead doing anything with reviews.
It would also be great if the devs would make all these clickable things actual links to support standard browser features such as middle-clicking, hover to preview URL, and so on.
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This new home screen is a complete and utter catastrophe, both functionally and aesthetically.
Most things were said before, but to reiterate:
- The layout is simply broken, elements are just thrown there top to bottom, without any sort of alignment or any consistency (I was actually looking if some .css didn’t load, or what… but no…)
- Due to that most of the home screen is just empty space, especially vertical space is wasted in such amounts, that the most important section (active games) gets “below the fold”
- Last game widget is just stuck there forever, even after review was done, no way to close it, no settings to manage it’s visibility
- Alignment is all over the place, some parts are left, some center aligned, font sizes are quite inconsistent
- Three huge buttons just sitting there (in a vertical layout?!) when there is a fully functional main toolbar (menu or whatever), perfectly suitable for such buttons, just above it
- Also there is already the rightmost column (the vertical sectioned container with “tournaments”, “ladders”, etc..), that would be a perfect fit for thing like this new last game widget, but it is also mostly unused and mostly just empty space
- No matter how much horizontal space is available, none of it is used, the layout does not adapt at all, nor are the widget re-arrangeable manually
So in overall about <30% area of the home screen contains anything at all, the rest is just empty space (for me, on a typical laptop screen, with a “desktop” browser), not to mention that is almost painful to look at, the layout is just so bad… 
I’ve no idea how anyone thought that such a low-quality botch-job was worth releasing, I’m extremely disappointed… 
6 Likes
Since I never play correspondence games, the empty Home screen has always felt like a waste, so I was pleased to see this change.
To go even further, it’d be nice to have a site-wide chat, or chat rooms of my choice. A Custom Game button would also be great in the sidebar.
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Hmmm, what do you want more as the chat OGS already has exactly?
Maybe they mean they want the chat on the main page?
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Given all this negative feedback, I think it’s time to light the bat signal. Calling @anoek.
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Yeah this looks better, I’ve implemented it for the most part. I haven’t done the settings gear thing, I think that’s a good thing to implement, but I figured I’d get the basic layout update in place and iterate from there.
Also for those that want to turn stuff off on the home screen, there is now Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS which you can toggle stuff on or off, so if you want just the games and nothing else, you can now do that for instance.
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I see
No active games
in Home and Profile pages now
I hope it actually gives additional proof that there are no active games and that it’s not just default text that is displayed when active game fails to load for some reason
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I’m seeing more and more pop-up issues all over the site. This one that’s now the third button on the homepage doesn’t fit on my browser (Brave, Android) and you can’t scroll down so there’s no way to proceed or cancel.
I think maybe we need “dynamic viewport units”:
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Great update. There could even be options to add chat, GoTV, and other components to the home page in the future. I’ll consider once again contributing down the road when I’m less busy with my own stuff, no idea when that will be.
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