It would be cool if games involving players who were on the user’s friend list showed up first on the https://online-go.com/observe-games page.
Personally, I am more interested in these games than I am in bot games It also seems to me like it would be relatively easy to implement; though I’m reliably informed that it would require some back-end changes.
Nope, the observe games page takes the number of games you ask for (say, 10) does the filtering on the server side and then only sends you those 10 games. So, while you can sort those 10 games on the front end however you want, what you won’t get is “the top 10 games of all games based on your filter” which is obviously what you would want. Essentially all you can change is the displayed order and not which games you receive.
I was looking at the overview page, which displays the active games for a user. Would it be possible to use this interface and loop through all users in the friends list?
It’d have to be a separate category/section, but that could possibly be a workaround…
Have something like if (friends.live_games > 0) {display friends.live_games}
at the top…
…and then the normal observe general games list underneath it…
It would be dependent on the existence on some kind of for user in friends.list
I’m not sure if that’s something that can be called but worth looking into
Edit: this would probably tie in with another request I’ve seen floating around (but am currently too lazy to find and link right now) for the ability to ‘follow’ a player or game such that you could see all the games of your ‘followed players’ and ‘followed games’ in one handy location, with the distinct feature of following obviously not needing to be accepted the way a friend request does.
IIRC a while ago somebody also asked whether the games on the Games page could be sorted by number of kibitzers … overall such kinds of sorting would really be nice:
rank
kibitzers
friends
And if these things are going to be implemented, it might also be a nice idea to exclude certain kinds of games, or perhaps just some filter with checkmarks, like
A quick search for “filter games” on the forum shows that filtering live games and profile games by various criteria has been on user’s minds for many years. Filtering is definitely a popular feature request.
(question from someone who knows nothing bout coding:) If its some backend code on server side, that is filtering users up to 28 games at a time, couldnt that filter be personalised somehow based on individual preferences? I mean if there is already a filter build in, how hard can it be to tweak it a bit, right? XD
The problem is not difficulty, but rather access. If it were front-end only then anyone could make the changes and submit to anoek for review. When a change requires back end work, anoek himself must make the change, which means the community needs to make enough noise that it can make its way to the top of his rather large pile. (He always has many projects ongoing and is always trying to improve the site).