13x just doesn’t appeal to me, never has.
Even though 9x9 is smaller, 13x feels more cramped. I could never get into that.
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Here is Ilya Shikshin 4p playing on OGS today. Дружеский матч I found it randomly mindlessly scrolling through ganes.
Why doesn’t OGS promote it literally everywhere? Promote it to drive people to the website, and you will get more players AND dans. Brand yourself as the “go-to website” for professionals this way. Set up a twitter bot that automatically fires up a message when pros are playing. Push pro games to the top of the website, and so on.
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To promote you need to know.
Anyway when you find something interesting you can ask for an announcement banner in chat
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They are able to make sitewide announcements if they wish… as for an auto-bot, I don’t think they would want such a thing, would they?
This raises the question of whether the pro would like or frown upon this kind of automatic promotion. Maybe they would prefer to avoid a volley of pop-up and twitter posts whenever they launch a random quick game.
That being said, this ties up to the whole discussion about re-designing OGS (which really needs it) and showing the top game(s) being played on the homepage, like it is done on Lichess.
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I would be much more in favour of internally promoting top games and streamers as Lichess does, than auto-tweeting every pro game. This would be a lovely feature, wish I was a good enough coder to tackle the re-design myself…
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I don’t know if pros would like not being able to enjoy a relaxed game without everyone popping in. Maybe they’d go have some nice and quiet elsewhere…
Not sure pros often “enjoy a relaxed game”. For a pro, go is work and not a hobby.
On the other hand, if they don’t want to be watched, they can set their games to private, or open an anonymous account.
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Or the search could filter the pro games properly…
Or a list of high level games could be part of the default screen (as in fox).
Even in the lower dans, its hard to find games. I keep playing the same people over and over again it seems like.
Interestingly, Fox doesn’t care about feelings of Pros. You can clearly see Pro matches in the list, along with a list of the number of people watching the match (“Online”):
They broadcast it, and I think, it means they comment on the matches.
Lichess.org doesn’t care about feelings of Pros neither. They have:
- LichessTV Top Rated TV: IM Didici12 vs GM Dr-CRO • lichess.org that broadcasts games of masters
- Games Top Rated • Current games • lichess.org that are nicely sorted by the pro level, with a very clear indicator of GM (grand master)/IM next to the names of people. Check the slick and clear interface for the list of games they have on that page. Additionally, note that the default page is the “TOP RATED” page that shows ONLY the games of Pros.
- Lichess streamers • lichess.org Great list of streams, easily accessible from the top-down menu, and with quite large but very readable UI
So I would really love to focus on how to communicate Pro games to OGS users and think about the minimal feature that could be done to achieve that. I like the following aspects:
- number of people in the chat that monitor the game. It really brings the sense of community, and can motivate people to post variations in chat (speaking of better review tools on OGS…)
- clear UI for the list of games. Lichess is doing it by: left menu with nice logos + “TOP RATED” section that opens immediately after visiting the games page + images of chess boards, that is very nice and visually-pleasing motivation to check the game (don’t undervalue the aesthetic aspect of Go). Current UI solves a simple problem “get me a list of games”. Not sure why people would need it at all. The list of games should motivate new people to start playing go (with “wow-factor”) and already registered users to watch games and engage with the community
Speaking of UI, some statistics from Google Analytics or relevant analytics tools (not sure what you use) would be very helpful to understand the behaviour of users. If you don’t have a product manager on the team (obviously), the community can at least try to be such a product manager. But we really need the user statistics. If you don’t have any analytics, then I’m not sure how to even proceed here, because you can’t really understand the habits of users. On the forums we have a vocal minority of people, and some of the are extremely vocal, but it’s a minority.
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Nobody ever opposed internally promoting pro games on the site, and indeed they will always be on top of the observe games page… we’re just saying that’s very different to sending out automatic tweets any time they start a game.
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I don’t have a strong opinion on tweets, sure, I’m just brainstorming. Probably there are simply two different tasks: motivation of internal users and occasional strangers to check and inspire by pro games and motivation of external potential users to check OGS and Go in general
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I think we all agree that OGS deserves a UI overhaul, which would include a complete redesign of the homepage and better promotion of top players’ games.
The main issue (as I understand from @BHydden’s lament) is to find an OGS user who is into UI/UX and willing to invest time in that.
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It’s a very large project indeed. We’re occasionally making small improvements but a specialist with a few spare hours here or there would be amazing.
If a pro player uses social media and permits the use of share links and other sharing options, I don’t see why not using them. However, if their style is less people-centered, their feeds/videos should not be shared without prior permission. The best option would be to create some sort of list of pros who don’t mind going public and sharing their games in announcement and a pinned thread, maybe. I’m not sure about creating an event based on a pro game, though. I mean, if we go directly to their “space” it’s fine but if we use their game for our own twitches or whatnots, it’s not fine.
As long as it’s not an ugly “mobile-first” with happy purple-green people or weird-shaped fonts…
(I find the clean white look functional, but I understand there are some things that must be implemented and it needs to change. I’m not against changes.)
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The main point is to add the automatch button + games of top rated players to the homepage. Whatever the result, it can’t be more ugly than Fox or Tygem.
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As long as it’s not an ugly “mobile-first” with happy purple-green people or weird-shaped fonts…
Yeah I don’t think the point is to change the whole aesthetic…
I find the clean white look functional
…although we may not agree on everything!
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Check my profile as one example of this. Despite my best efforts, I have some blitz categories that had zero games until recently, and even now like ONE GAME. Somehow I managed to get a ridiculously fast game that met the standard and go A GAME. Sigh.