“Western” in quotes because of course it’s not strictly for Westerners, but to add to @BHydden’s observations, OGS is also English-forward (see Forums, Help Chat, default language).
Even for non-English languages, translations skew toward European languages. Korean (which is probably top 2 or 3 for Go popularity) is only 80% complete (#18) according to translate.online-go.com.
To be clear, OGS aims to build a global playerbase, and I hope it continues to grow in Asian countries. But I still think it’s reasonable to call it a (de facto) Western server.
I don’t know but I’ve always regarded OGS as an international Go server.
OGS is open source, everyone can create PRs (Asians too)
OGS has extensive language options including Korean, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese as well as two flavors of Chinese
OGS is not region locked (afaik) and accessible from anywhere (from Asia too)
While Americans and Europeans do make up a large part of the OGS player base, according to this statistic out of the 15 most used flags on OGS six are Asian: Thailand, China, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea
Regarding Languages
I think it’s very important to point out that while the Korean translation on OGS is only 80% complete, the Korean translation on Fox is way less than 80% complete. Furthermore, Fox does not offer any South Asian languages (Thai, Vietnamese, etc.).
Regarding General Accessibility
I’d also like to point out that Fox is only accessible via Windows. The many Chinese users that might use a Chinese OS, like Ubuntu Kylin, cannot even access Fox. But they could always access OGS.
Agreed, I try to avoid that term these days. Although I have to acknowledge that people use it a lot.
I don’t, if I avoided all fuzzy terms, I’d be avoiding approximately all the words of language, because natlangs all have a lot of semantic fuzziness built into them
