Puzzle features

About 6 weeks ago I started some daily practice for the Cho Chikun Encyclopedia of Life & Death Elementary series. Several people have been contributing these puzzles here, but the series is still incomplete and the fragmentation between multiple sub-series is also not optimal from a user’s perspective. I have been wondering what could be done to improve this.

Looking at the API for creating puzzles, I can see that it should be doable for me to mass import initial positions from somewhere like https://github.com/mango314/scrapeGo into a new puzzle collection. Maybe this could help for creating the missing puzzles in the Elementary series, or even for the Intermediate series which is not very developed here yet but has a couple people lined up to contribute.

Before I do any import though, I want to make sure this will actually help get quality tsumego collections on the site. This means managing problem solutions, and for a large collection having a single owner may be a limiting factor.

Would it be possible / likely for OGS devs to add a few features to manage large tsumego collections ? The way I imagine it, a few things would help:

  • #1 request would be for some collections to have multiple owners. There are two points to it; it would help in populating the problem solutions and it may help deal with the issue of orphaned problem collections (for example, the owner of Elementary problems 1-189 hasn’t played here since 2016, so he can’t fix problem solutions when issues are found).
  • mark5000 also had several feature requests for puzzle collection management which I think would be useful: Feature Request: Puzzle Collection Management
  • it would be nice if it was possible for puzzle owners (or site admins) to transfer their existing puzzles into a new collection, in order to consolidate the existing fragmented Life&Death collections and maybe to deal with the issue of orphaned collections.

I’d like to get comments on the above, both from site admins & devs (to see what would be implementable) and from puzzle collection owners (to get more feedback on what would be useful).

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I also think high quality puzzle collections could set OGS really apart from other Go servers/sites. There are already other sites who also try to recreate different famous tsumego collections. OGS has the great community as an advantage to help recreate all the paths/solutions. So multiple puzzle owners or push/pull requests to collections could be a great feature!

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I think having more contributors to puzzles would be a huge value add. I think if anyone could suggest a change and the owner(s) had final say would be great because you would have tons of eyes for any issues.

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Replying to the thread with a progress report. I got my SGF to puzzle importing code done, and started working on a puzzle series at https://online-go.com/puzzle/10600. I’m still not sure how far I’ll go with this, as this is somewhat time consuming - OTOH having all the puzzles in one place is a nice boon for my daily tsumego practice.

It’d still be very nice if OGS could have better support for multiple people working on a puzzle collection, but since admins didn’t answer here I am not holding my breath :-/

Oh sorry, missed the thread somehow :slight_smile:

Well, to be perfectly honest, I would not count on these changes in a short while. I will ask anoek what he thinks, as not to speak for the dev team, but while we have a list of several potential puzzle upgrades, they are still not a priority I am afraid.

I too would appreciate to have a really good tsumego website, but actual human play is still the priority of OGS and still needs a lot of work.

That said if any of the GitHub contributors wanted to take a look that would be amazing, but I am not sure how much can be done without having the backend access as well…

At any rate I am looking forward to the collection :heart_eyes:

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