I play mostly unrated 13x13 games on OGS, and lately I have been getting hit with the recurring pattern above: an unrated player starts a game and then plays no moves, no matter how long I wait. This often happens many times consecutively, often with a variety of different screen names. Does anyone else experience this? Any ideas why it happens? At this point I’m contemplating just canceling all games with unrated players to avoid the inconvenience.
Yep, happens regularly to me. Sooner or later I cancel those games. What is striking is that often there is a player “Guest…” (… = 5 digit number) present but not the ?-player who accepted my challenge. When I search for “Guest…” I find no search results at all.
Seems to me a weird way of trolling.
You could try naming the games “No Unranked Players Please.” I have seen others do this and have tried it in rengo games, but don’t know how effective it is.
I looked at your history to see who some of your unranked opponents were, and I immediately found one that I suspect was a cancellation troll. If you see that in someone’s record (where they are cancelling or immediately timing out of games that were created by others), you can report them.
Theoretically, you have the right to cancel a game that you created for any reason. However, in a discussion of this point some months ago, it was revealed that there is not unanimity among the mods on this point. Consequently, you may get in trouble if the wrong mod sees it, if you have been cancelling what the wrong mod considers too many games.
This is not good. Sooner or later because of this players may stop reporting things at all. Or leave OGS for good.
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Anecdotally, I had a friend join OGS who did that to a few people accidentally, because they had trouble finding the interface for making a direct challenge (this is a while ago). I wonder if some of them are due to that problem?
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Could be players who are AFK, not looking with attention if their offer is chosen. That’s of course not what i expect from someone using the server but there are no constraint on doing this.
I recently ran into a player who cancels all (automatched) games where they are assigned Black 
that was a bit much IMO
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If so, OGS will need a limit of cancelation by day (like for the pause feature in a game, 5?)
Could be they want a 19x19 and didn’t notice the game settings. Putting 13x13 in the game name might help.
Happened to me several times on 19x19.
their profiles look like that:
strange [?] users that just don’t make a move
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If most of those cancellations occurred against opponents who created the game, then that person is reportable.
Interesting. I’m not sure I have the energy to look at profiles and report people, but perhaps that’s the only recourse.
In this case it’s happening with players who accept my challenge, meaning they have to be at the keyboard to click the “accept” button.
This occurred to me, but it’s weird that the player doesn’t just cancel the game right away. Why wait indefinitely for me to cancel the game?
If the person is a troll, or mad at you for some reason, then they leave the tab open to waste your time.