There is a law that all developers are around 10k in strength. Nothing you can do about that. Also a 10k Go player will have enough understanding of Go to develop a Go app.
To take your own example, you don’t need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to start a gym chain.
To be fair I haven’t seen a better Go web app than OGS yet. Have you?
Refactoring the codebase instead of completely rewriting it can also be a viable solution.
If you would integrate Go-Variants into OGS then that would have a series of consequences:
Larger project with a larger codebase to maintain
More people having to work together (or more people you have to pay to not touch the code as you would say )
Also way more bugs, since maintaining several variants of the game will surely be bug prone, and since it’s on OGS now these bugs would be associated with OGS which could be a damage in reputation
… and so on and so on.
I’ve heard you’re 29 now. If you eat healthy and work out once in a while I’m sure we can count you in for the next 50 years, which is quite the time span.
Hey, stop stealing my jokes!
True, but again if we want to say something positive about OGS we can say that there aren’t really any other competitors out there that do it better currently:
Fox Weiqi
Windows Desktop App (I mean are you joking?)
UI/UX from the 90s
Translations to other languages are incomplete and erroneous
Tygem Baduk
Windows Desktop App plus a mobile app now I think (but still no web app, at least non with TLS certificate)
UI/UX from the 90s
Translations better than Fox but still not very good
BadukPop
Only on mobile…
UI interesting idea and OK for puzzles but not something I’d want to use as a main interface
And all the other options don’t even feel worth mentioning. So while the OGS UI/UX could benefit from improvements, OGS is currently still king in that realm.
Although one Go Interface worth mentioning here is WeiqiHub, whoever created this is a total genius. He managed to create a way to play games on the three most important platforms (Fox, Tygem, OGS), he then build a super beautiful UI on top of that with a straightforward UX, and he added a great repository of puzzles with very cool puzzle modes. Definitely my favorite way to play Go after OGS of course. That app is also available for Windows, Mac and Linux; and for Linux you can simply run it as an AppImage. He also added my favorite Go Theme “BadukTV”. It’s like the guy literally implemented all the most important features and he did so in a good way. Total Boss
The reason I still go to OGS is mostly the community aspect.
Why do you think that? I totally have the confidence. If I had the time then I’m sure I could create an amazing FE for OGS in a matter of months. But I just have other stuff to do. And as YellowAsTopaz stated the same goes for most people here.
OGS has barely scratched the surface in terms of Go-related features it could offer. Pandanet/IGS offers integration with https://ai-sensei.com for example. Unless OGS plans to:
let GoMagic handle learning resources forever,
let AI Sensei handle training,
send people to Go Variants to play Go variants, (Don’t Lichess and chess.com both provide in-house support for variants? It almost feels like expected functionality for a board game platform.)
send people to 101weiqi.com or goproblems.com or WeiqiHub for puzzle-based content and features (the Puzzles page on OGS doesn’t count – the 2nd puzzle in the top-rated collection mark5000’s “Exercises for beginners” is a 15 kyu problem that would alienate half of beginners)
expect people to go to the EGF website for tournament information and announcements, etc…
The reason I haven’t released a Go website yet is precisely because I’m preparing for a humongous codebase (and due to integrating my game design into it meticulously, but that’s another story).
Yes, I wouldn’t be here if OGS wasn’t the best service overall. But this can change as new talent, new technologies (i.e. vibe coding tools, lower barrier to entry in the web dev field), and new interest in the market arise. KGS used to be the best service.
by the way, isn’t Arnold Scwarzenegger more like Lee Sedol in Go strength, not 1 dan? I think I was 10 kyu after a month (or less) of learning about Go… I’ve never had a teacher or read any books in any detail either. I got about 2 stones stronger in the past 6 months from watching Go Games Series/JianqiuChen on youtube and enjoying tsumego for the first time thanks to goproblems.com.
I have like 90% win rate between 2 and 3 dan now, if I ever drop to 2 dan again i’ll basically be a sandbagger:
I also improved a lot at UI design between my v0.1 and v0.3 UI design threads, no? I learned Figma at least. And I never contributed to open source code before, yet I did within a couple hours of being challenged to.
If y’all learn nothing else from me, it’s that you can improve if you have confidence and set your mind to it.
OK, so we have established that the OGS UI/UX leaves a lot of room for improvement and you have made clear that you’re basically our Sheldon.
Now as an OGS enthusiast I would hope that you follow WhiteAsPearl’s advice and put your brainpower to good use by refactoring the code base. Maybe migrate to React Router v7! Put some elements on the homepage. And maybe look into Removing resigned tournaments from list - #9 by Regenwasser
It could have been a part of OGS indeed. OGS back-end is closed source, so the front-end would have to talk to an additional back-end, with probably a totally different API. But of course it was (and still is) possible to integrate it into OGS.
But it would have been a bad idea – change my mind.
Just copy-pasting the code over would be a bad idea, but the concept of having variants, random or cycling variant tournaments (with unique trophy icons), and variant ladders… can’t all be bad ideas. If done right, it would drive user engagement similar to the recently proposed Kibitz features.
I don’t know who Sheldon is, but whatever he does, I probably don’t enjoy doing as you can guess from my complaints about the open-source workflow and DX.
Before considering anything else, I was planning to finish fixing the Play page UI. It would help form a base for Go variants to be servicable on the website too. I was working on it instead of my usual procrastination of watching NBA basketball highlights and I took a break from studying Go too (watching Go videos, doing/categorizing tsumego, playing Go).
After the recent feedback, lack of interest on my v0.3 thread, and subtle jabs I’ve gotten all around, I’m losing interest in that too. Good luck to you all with OGS.
That was me with that misinterpretation of these word
”I learned from mingling with OGS chat that DDKs and 25 kyu players are a lot smarter and more interesting people than I thought”.
Which I misunderstood as you saying you wouldn’t expect DDKs to be smart.. I guess because that’s what it’s says.
Now, I can’t code.. and I’m only 19k after 9 Months of casual play so by some criteria I’m under qualified to have an opinion, but..
You seem to want some immediate respect for your ninja level coding, dev and design skills and unfortunately in a multi decade project like OGS respect is earned incrementally and almost entirely on one’s ability to collaborate. Now I’m going to sound prescriptive here and I apologise in advance but your repeated references to how you could do it better and how your GO app will be better and how you got to 10kyu in a month frankly sound a bit performative and slightly presumptuous. I’m not saying it isn’t true, but it does echo what appears to be some insecurity. You need people to know how good you are.. I think you’re good, and a lot of people here do too. If you’d channel that talent into collaboration I’m positive you’d do great things here.
This site it free. Supported by a small team of people mostly working for free. I feel very appreciative to these people for providing a great service, the best I could find. So yeah some patience is needed if things aren’t perfect.
The main reason for this is because time is ticking for me to launch a business since I decided to quit my office job and stay unemployed for years, and there’s a conflict of interests between adding all these features to OGS versus simply making my own Go platform. In a way, they’re insecurities about time management and ability to focus.
I’m probably the equivalent of 1 dan at coding at best (tho I can improve if I try), 5 kyu at UI design, and 4 dan at UX design since it’s the most similar to game design (which I am Lee Sedol at) out of the above. It would help if people agreed with my ideas a bit more so changes I want to see get implemented faster – better yet, I would be happiest if OGS had more pleasant and useful “Play”, “Home”, “Puzzles”, “SGF Library”, “Learn”, etc. pages to begin with. At least so beginners/new users aren’t as often confused and turned away from my favorite website in the past 6 months. and so that I don’t have to ever think about developing a Go server myself to accompany my Go learning platform in the works – I would just direct learners to OGS like GoMagic does (kind of).
FYI OGS Joseki Explorer started in exactly this way:
A separate app using Goban
Front end integrated into OGS with a separate backend (joseki DB store)
Backend integrated into OGS backend
During that process I established the working relationship needed to become the first person other than anoek with backend access.
Teamwork, tolerance, trust … all those expensive boring things
Hilarious: you haven’t interacted with anoek at all yet, otherwise you would know that anoek is the author of OGS. He decides which refactors are needed and when - his living depends on it. He gates every PR. He undertakes the big jobs that you describe as the “role of author”.
What you don’t realise, in all your criticism, is that each criticism you have of the codebase is obvious. ( * )
You’re sharing your observations as if you know something others don’t. Pfff hilarious, and worthless as I said before.
It hasn’t dawned on your that there are reasons why each improvement, each “opportunity yet to be taken”, is not done yet. If you had any respect for the author of a platform that has been operating 20 years, growing all that time and managing technology stack leaps along the way, you’d take the trouble to find out how that’s done, before slanging off in public… because it takes consistent good decisions over a long time to achieve this result.
At 29 perhaps you are aspiring to have similar success with one of your projects. You might look to find out why this one is so successful despite the decisions you don’t agree with - maybe you’d learn something - shiny codebase is a minor contributor to longterm success.
( * ) Let me add here that your observations about UI design don’t fall into this category. They could be an awesome step forward - we know that we are missing good UI design insight. That’s why I wish you would focus on helping by making those successful as part of the team instead of failing to achieve that by getting distracted by irrelevant speed bumps and your need to tell everyone how much better you would do!
Yeah, I wasted about 3 months doing nothing except trying to get full type information on hover in my TypeScript files across packages. In anoek’s codebase, there’s none of that – all types default to “any” yet everything still works and a lot of other devs were able to contribute. His ability to focus on what’s important, time management, and executive control are better than mine, and things like that are better predictors of success than pure talent, intelligence, or Go rank.
You all are also better communicators and empaths than me. I’m not denying I have as many weaknesses as strengths – such as refusing to ask for help and a tendency to burn bridges in just about every community I participate in. There’s good reasons I still haven’t achieved anything I set out to achieve at the age of 29 and I’m not delusional about it.
If you showed up in the right place and asked the right question, I and others would be delighted to help you get it working too, and maybe improve our onboarding in the process: we might learn something new from what you expect to see!
All it takes is for you to let go of this idea that everything you see that you don’t like is broken, and be willing to get involved in dev conversations…
So you used OGS front-end code to build the separate app? It’s just a guess, but I think that would have been hard for the variants we were going for. Things are not just black and white there
Integrating govariants into OGS some day might actually be a good idea.
I wish to thank you all for this conversation.
It was very instructive and inspiring.
The rephrasing from “why are they doing it so dumb?” to “that’s unbelievable, they must have a reason why, I must be missing something” is enlightening. I confess that I had the first approach quite a few times in my life (not specifically about OGS).
I found the same advice twice in the same day from two completely different situations: the other one was someone talking about how to get better at using AI. “If you don’t like the results, don’t just think it’s dumb: ask yourself what could you do to get better responses”.
It’s somehow funny, and thought provoking too, that the same advice could apply both to humans (colleagues, teammates) and bots.
But probably the reason is because that applies to ourselves in the first place, whatever the situation is.
I’ll try to treasure it in the following of my life.
To @shamisen: I don’t know you, but I feel sympathy for you. Your nickname is an instrument that I love. You seem to be quite talented but also quite harsh towards yourself in the first place and to the others as a result. I get how frustration can bring us there. I wish you the best for your projects and your life.
This thread does offer a lot of insights about human behavior and thought patterns, it should be studied by scholars.
What I think is amazing is the incredibly strong halo effect that seems to be present here. Maybe that’s normal for one topic forums but pretty weird to see so many people fall for it.
Something that could work well, without being so much effort: govariants could implement OGSs OAuth flow, so people could login with their OGS credentials. That could make it more worthwhile for OGS to link govariants more prominently.
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