I know, this has come up for years. It’s still annoying. Please make it stop.
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What is your alternative suggestion for indicating that the time is not counting down?
Is the word “weekend” sufficient?
(Note that blinking time is the standard for when the game is paused for any reason)
The funny thing is literally 10 minutes ago I clicked on one of my games and “wait, what, why is that blinking up there!? Oh, wow, I didn’t know we had pause on weekends!”. So it did me a favour…
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A few options off the top of my head:
- The word “Weekend” in not-flashing text. This is already there. It’s sufficient.
- A chat entry announcing that a weekend pause is in effect.
- Grey out the timer to indicate a pause.
- Do nothing. In a correspondence game there’s no downside at all to not realizing that the game is on a weekend pause. The flashing is giving us very little in the way of useful information. If I forget that the tournament I’m in pauses for two days, then what’s the harm? It’s not like I’m going to accidentally time out because of this.
The flashing is sending the wrong message. It should be for things that are super important, right now. I have a game with a flashing “5 days” timer. It’s flashing why? So that I remember that it’s really 7 days? This isn’t useful. It’s distracting. If I never know that this timer stopped for two days it doesn’t matter. It’s going to start itself back up. As it is, I’m being trained to ignore the flashing timer, so if it ever is important I won’t notice.
I get that there could be many reasons why it’s tricky to change this. The game is paused. The code for the clock knows that it’s supposed to blink when paused. I’m not claiming that it’s easy or anything like that. I’m just asking for a dev to look at it and see if this change is possible.
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All of this previous comment is a well rounded argument, and in general, I’m inclined to agree.
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I still feel like it should NOT blink, since blinking things are visual signals on urgency of some sort, and clock being paused for weekend clearly is not an urgent matter.
Maybe just keep the clocks grey during weekends, instead blinking between normal and greyed?
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I personally don’t see a problem with the blinking, and it has never distracted me. That being said, just because it does not bother me, does not mean it bothered other people.
I will add that generally something blinking isn’t an indication that it’s urgent. Digital clocks, phones, and other such devices have blinking/ flashing features that we do not associate with something urgent… Like notifications on a phone may cause a blinking light, but the chances are that it’s nothing urgent.
But… If we were to change this then I have two suggestions.
- Stop the blinking and have a static paused game text.
- Create an automatic notification whenever a game is paused for whatever reason… Weekend pauses and other such pauses included. That way everyone is sure which games are paused, and, it stops the blinking.
Hope my input helps.
Noooooooooo… I have a thousand games running, and 999 of them are set to pause on weekends 
(OK, that was exaggerated, of course, I think it’s only 28 or 29 games, but you get what I mean.)
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Thats a good point… i have a good twenty something games going on myself, odd, that i didnt think about that.
Alright, I had to head over to the uBlockOrigin reddit for support on this one. Turns out that you can use this extension to set permanent filters that change CSS values on a website. And the pausing activity is part of a CSS style. This very well likely works with other ad blockers, but I haven’t tried anything but uBlockOrigin. Enter this code into the “My Filters” section of Settings and the blinking will stop
online-go.com##.Clock:style(animation-name: none !important;)
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well yes, but (^^), since urgency is something you can only determine by checking first, thats not the point is it? in the context of electronic devices blinking means “look at me” (just like, in general, any event other than a non-event will draw peoples attention, unless they dont have the capacity atm). we can get used to ignoring visual cues like blinking clocks, because we have learned that there is really nothing going on, but if nothing’s going on… then why is the clock doing something?
in the context of clocks and especially countdowns there is the added strong meaning of time shortage.
in that spirit, it makes sense for a clock to be blinking when a player is in byo-yomi and needs constant reminding of the time. in the opposite case of a game-pause, where time is least important, it is unexpected for the same clock to be blinking as well.
we already have the text saying “game is paused” and the coloured button to resume the game. they tell me that indeed the game is paused 
. the blinking is like a little child jumping up and down saying: “im still paused, im still paused, im still paused…”
imo this cue is not only superfluous (people ignore it at best) but potentially distracting, because it is used for another situation, where constant attention to it is actually important. it should be removed.
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There is no coloured button or separate text saying “paused” for a weekend pause.
There is a small text saying “weekend”, but that is in the place of the time-clock, and you probably have to actually look at it to notice, unless some blinking draws your attention to it.
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Done
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It’s still blinking.
That’s odd: mine isn’t!
Have you tried shift-reload of your browser, to make sure you have the new styles loaded?
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Yes. Are you looking at a game that pauses on the weekends?
I checked with Firefox on Windows, Firefox on Linux, and Safari on iOS. All three are blinking.
) .
Tournament vs not-tournament maybe?
Devs, here’s some debug info for you.
This is a tournament game. The span element surrounding the clock has the CSS classes “Clock black paused in-game-clock”. It’s blinking.
This is a non-tournament game that pauses on the weekends. Its span surrounding the clock is using the CSS classes: “Clock black paused-correspondence in-game-clock”. It’s not blinking.
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Upon a little investigation, it doesn’t seem to be related to whether or not a game is a tournament game. I’ve found weekend paused non-tournament games that blink and others that don’t.