Just curious, how lucrative is it to have ads on the website? Do you get paid per page view/refresh? Or do you actually need clicks?
Are you using CloudFlare already? If not, give their free plan a try, we use it intensively for various online services. Might help latency even without running distributed servers.
bro, I Love OGS and would be totally fine with ads.
I live in mainland China. There indeed are issues in connection that happen regularly, resulting in error in submitting moves in live games. However, I doubt you can solve this just by deploying new servers near China (unless you are able to deploy servers inside mainland China and have ways to stabilize the connection of that server to other servers). The internet connection to abroad websites is highly unpredictable and of mystery, not just a matter of location or latency. So what I’m saying is… Don’t take mainland China into consideration, but Korea, Japan and Taiwan when you are making decisions of whether to deploy new servers in Asia.
Why don’t you add the possibility to make one-time donations? Not everyone wants to have this monthly commitment, but I’m sure many people would make one-time donations occasionally.
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On a related note, doesn’t WebRTC allow for p2p communication between browsers? May not be appropriate in all cases, but it could be a speed up for most
Yep, CloudFlare is great - but the benefit they can offer stops at being a good CDN and their peering arrangements with GCP (also great). For any dynamic content though, there’s only so much you can do when the speed of light is your bottleneck 
What we’re talking about is putting servers in other regions to serve dynamic content as well as facilitate game playing.
That is very interesting to hear, thanks for the input! I had indeed hoped that placing servers somewhere in the Japan/Korea/Taiwan area would essentially solve China’s latency issues too, although I guess it’s somewhat unsurprising with with firewalling that they do.
It does, but direct play like that opens up a huge can of worms, especially as you start to consider correspondence games, multiple tabs, cheating, etc… Also, it’s still not widely supported in browsers.
It’s a mix of per view and clicks, although most ads are done by per click I think. I’m pretty sure we signed something that says we can’t give out specific numbers or anything, but it’s enough to make a difference but not enough to change the world
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when you talk about latency, how much time are you exactly talking about?
I think a 1-2 seconds delay in live game is still acceptable. I don’t know about blitz game though.
How about fixing things up from the inside? Like clock won’t start ticking until you opponent’s move is displayed on your screen or something like that. It solves the problem and you don’t have to run another server. Even solves China’s firewall problem (at least for our part of the game).
That idea ^^^ actually might have legs.
A basic “is it displayed?” handshake before the clock switches over…
I think that the wording of the questions highly influenced the answers. Making people choose between “display an ad” and “speed outside the US is fine” is not the way to find out how people are thinking about the ad. Some of us highly dislike being forced to choose an option that is factually wrong.
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Instead of an ad that can be disabled in the settings, why not an ad that pops up every game ONCE but that you can then hide ?
I am in Australia and notice no lag. Its totally adequate. But I respect what you are trying to do here and how you are going about it.
Could you indicate how much money you need to improve speed?
I wonder if you get sponsorship from the companies of the players. A “sponsored by” image/link would be much more preferable than ugly random ads. And it would be by the players for the players.
Cheers,
Simon.
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How about only showing the ad in the areas which benefit from the new server?
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That would allow for modified clients to wait with the response, giving the player extra cheaty time. The server can never trust the client.
From a consumer perspective, as long as the ads are not big flashing banners, aren’t intrusive, and aren’t trying to track me from site to site and mine my browsing data, I don’t have a problem with them.
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One thing that may be worth considering. If you come at as openly public about exactly how much money you need for this to be practical, I think the community would really engage with “trying to reach that target” and you may find it more beneficial than simply saying “we either need ads or more subs” without being clear exactly how much more you need.
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I would rather not see an ad while i’m playing a game. It would take us out of the important concentration. if you want an ad while the game is being played, make it optional. Otherwise, i’m sure lots of people will move to things like KGS. You could put up an ad on the “Play” tab, or on the “Games” tab, but make the one on “play” not optional, and the one on :games" optional or have people vote on those as well. that’s just my opinion. - Site User for 2 Years Now. 
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