Often a person plays a lot, hangs out in chat, you review games together but then they disappear and never come back. Ever wonder what happened to them? Did they lose interest or something big occurred in their lives?
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Yes. I have always assumed that they lose interest or found the time investment for gaining ranks was too steep. Go can be really hard to learn up to a point of personal comfort, where discovering joy and bliss are possible.
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Yes, I’ve often wondered about this. I would guess that the turnover in the general chat has been about 75-80% in the past 2 years. This includes several of the personalities who used to be ubiquitous in the chat.
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I do not understand. Are you saying 75-80% stick with or abandon Go?
Most of the time they kinda disappear from chat, if not the site entirely. As such it tends to transition in flavour every few months.
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Might some of them change their name or create a new one?
This definitely does happen. But there are also people who leave for varying lengths of time. I think in general, unless there’s a reason not to, people will normally announce their former identity if they do change their name or account.
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Yeah, i wonder constantly what have happened to user x 
I’ve met so many nice guys and gals here, that i can’t even remember all of those friends who just disappeared from the site at some point :<
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Fairly standard behaviour on any chat/forum in my experience. People come and go. There’s hardcore core members, those who come and go at times and then those who come, stay for a while and leave never to be seen again.
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I’m saying that I would guess that 75-80% of the regulars in chat disappeared over the course of 2 years and were replaced by new people. That doesn’t mean they left the site, nor that the new chat people are new to OGS.
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Still, I find that a very interesting observation. It is the kind of thing that only a true regular notices. Thank you very much for sharing your observation 
.
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I got way into chat for a while, then I left. Checking chat was becoming addictive. I also made the conscious choice to stop playing Go online and play on the board instead. I had too many correspondence games going. So I stopped on OGS, but I kept playing and studying OTB. (my rank dropped significantly when I quit cold turkey and resigned a bunch of games 
but it was the right thing for me to do at the time.)
Now I am back, but I am limiting myself to 2 games at a time.
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In a quarter of century I have spent a lot of time in many chat rooms, forums or discussion groups. I even founded quite a few. And left all of them, even nothing major happened. I assume that when somebody is heated in a community, and something rips him from there, when he returns to regular life he returns in community too till leave it for something else.
So mostly is losing interest. Chat is really time consuming, and no matter how fun is it, at one moment you will quit. On the other hand, when you talk too much, soon you run out of new subjects, so, unless you are defective, and repeat yourself like a broken record, you change the subject… I mean the chat room.
About taking a pause, looking at my opponents profiles I noticed some, who, like myself, have a long straight line in rank graph. It may be fun to see a chat graph for chat users, to see the time spent there, reading or writing.
And I noticed a bug. I looked to first dozen players to see how many took a pause, and found an active, unfinished game from six years ago pete vs. matt.doman
It is an active game, but unfinished. It is not a game with no timing, it has a week per move so it should have timed out. And also it is not paused. So is just a ghost game hanging there in limbo 
Two years later somebody noticed it and commented that is from a very early player. This is about disappearing :))
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I wanna put Father Tomato here, before I forget. Timing out games.
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I don’t know him, but maybe he’s just busy with “homeschooling” his little tomato and will return after the lockdown season. 
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Sometimes they come back.
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Whatever scene or community you talk about, any place or activity people are passionate about; there will always people who will disappear for a while or for ever. But there will always be a substantial percentage of the leavers who will return one day. It may be in a few months, but it also may be after 25 years. I have seen it happen many times.
There are so many reasons why people may drop out. Think about finishing a study, starting a family, building up a career, starting an enterprise, taking care of your parents, losing interest in go or finding a new passion, and a million more reasons.
If a community is warm and hospitable, people will come back. Not all of them but some will return. For an internet community it is harder to be warm and hospitable if you compare it with a real life community. OGS is doing a good job.
When (and not if) this pandemic is over I hope that we also will be playing in real life games again. Hope that we will be travelling to tournaments and meet some of the OGS players personally. Go is a passion in life and passions can be shared.
Just my 2 cents etc. Hope it is a coherent story I loaded on to you.
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So since I am probably the only one who posted in this thread who has a direct actual experience (I disappeared from another server), I will recount my personal experience. Most servers do not have browsable chat archives so that moment will be lost and after a while, forgotten.
Sometimes the reason for leaving a server is a conversation that happens while you are not there. If one leaves because of a clash with a group of other members, they will definitely not come back just to broadcast to the four corners of the server why and when they left. Something will happen (like in real life) behind your back. You, or others who hang out with you, simply will not be there to witness.
I left the other server when I realized people who I thought were my close friends were actually not my friends at all… in an eye-opening conversation. Since I was hanging out in that server because of that group, I simply had no reason to go back, so I left.
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I don’t have enough exp online but in real life, weiqi players are the best people I ever met, and I share most of my best memories with them.
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i use ti hang out a lot on here but when my triplets were born and my wife went lost her mind and went to the crazy house i ended up be a single dad to my triplets and it was hard for my to be on here so i speant less time on here so it could be life or they could have lost there internet