After much consideration @matburt and myself have finally decided to open source all that you see on online-go.com.
This comes after much deliberation and thought on the matter. The user interface, while we believe has a number of strong points, has always had a number of warts, quirks, and weaknesses. Often these are acknowledged and the desire is there to fix them, but seemingly invariably the time it takes to apply some proper polish or undertake a necessary refactoring work escapes us and the quirk, wart, or weakness gets buried in an ever growing stack of things to do.
So if you’re interested in tinkering and improving OGS, pull requests are welcome! Want to fix that thing that’s been bugging you for 3 years that should be an easy fix? Excellent! Open your favorite editor and get to cracking! Know a thing or two about color theory you want to see applied here? Great! Hack away at some style sheets! Want to build a cooler better interface? Cool! Explore the code to see what we call and how we do things.
This is a long overdue step in the evolution of OGS and we’re quite excited to see where it leads
- anoek
P.S. Yes we are considering opening the back end as well, but that’s quite a can of worms to do and there are a lot of things to consider so 1) no promises and 2) if we do decide to open it up, it’ll be awhile still.
you’re talking to a person that has no idea about coding? is this a good thing? will this mean that there will be updates more often? and will this put OGS in any danger of people who just want to watch the world burn?
At the bare minimum, no effect as matburt and I enjoy working on OGS and will continue to do so as we have been doing. But in reality, there’s been a lot of interest from the community asking for ways to contribute to the code base in various ways, so hopefully in addition to everything matburt and myself do, lots of various improvements from the community
Absolutely not, matburt and I review all the changes that are going into the site, we still have the final say about what makes it onto the site and what doesn’t.
It means anyone with programming skill can submit changes to anoek for review, for him to easily add and roll out to the site. Like the guy who made some fixes to game sorting but you had to install greasemonkey (a way to change web sites on the fly before you see them), he can just add it to the base real UI now.
Thank you for helping me to understand, i think this is a great idea. if it means that the site and community can grow and can become better then i am all for this, its a great idea.
This is really cool, I know as the devs who created OGS this site is your “baby” (and livelihood as well), so this must have been a really difficult decision. But, it shows your faith and trust in the community. Will take a look! Thanks.
Very cool! I think this step will help OGS on its way to world domination.
I’m looking forward to all the exciting things to happen. (and I guess there will be many, since almost everyone here is some kind of programmer or something similar o.O)
Thank you for your hard work!
Great news!