That’s on a positive side, when it happens like that. But still there is a loss to not talk with the player you just play together because obviously he’s the one who spent time and energy to think something together.
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I play against KataGo on OGS when I want to play Black with high handicap.
Once you get to SDK, it’s not easy to get that sort of game, at least not on this server.
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I started to become motivated to see if we could generate some culture of doing reviews after a game - getting like minded people together etc.
But I realised another reason, which would need to be fixed first: OGS game-chat simply isn’t a good place to do shared reviews. It is very slanted towards a one-person affair - it’s fine for “going through the game in the analysis window and commenting the moves”. It is barely workable for a discussion where someone wants to respond to comments at each move… this may indeed be a factor of why we simply don’t do it.
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I disagree. KGS is even worse but people still used it perfectly fine for reviews, long time ago.
On OGS it’s much better because of sharing variations. You can have actual conversation showing vars, like you would in real life.
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Interesting - I don’t have that KGS experience to make OGS feel better.
I just have my own frustrations at trying to have a conversation about variations…
I’m trying to think what OGS reviews are missing in comparison to KGS reviews. OGS has
- the option to give control in a review
- the option to jump to stone with a click
- the option to jump to the move that a person commented on with a click (I think you pointed that one out me @Eugene, that the move numbers in chat were clickable)
- players can share variations even if they don’t have control.
- OGS has a draw tool
- I kind of like OGS’s ability to attach comments to each move in a variation cleanly. I don’t remember that in KGS so much.
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OGS lacks eraser tool. That one is frustrating.
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Right - you are both making the point that OGS reviews are way better than KGS, and yet on KGS there was a review culture.
So you’ve shot down my explanation of why we don’t have the review culture here. 
Nonetheless, I find a mutual review of a game quite frustrating at OGS, and I’d love to see that improved before trying to encourage people to start up a review culture. Not that I’m holding my breath for this - there are other far more important improvements in the pipeline than this.
I didn’t mean to shoot it down per se, I was just curious and wanted to make a comparison 
I’m actually not sure how to make OGS reviews better, audio wouldn’t necessarily help, if some players didn’t have a working microphone. On a pc/laptop I think one can probably view the chat and comments box at once although probably not on mobile (at least without losing vision of the board).
I was just about to suggest some kind of Zen mode (like a minimal mode) for reviewing but we actually already have that!! The only thing is that I think it hides the chat.
If that could get a frontend PR maybe it’d improve things a bit?
From a super newbie perspective (I’ve only played a few games against humans) I would like to offer 2 recommendations.
-
After the game, and the stone removal phase, by default there should be a review phase.
If both players want to skip it, that’s fine, but it should be assumed that there is a review of the game. -
I think there should be 2 kind of reviews (or maybe two types of default “settings”).
The first type is the current system, which is perfect for an external player to review a particular game.
The second type should start right after the game and it should have both players are “enabled” so both can start commenting on moves immediately.
Just the other day I wanted to review a seki situation so I told my opponent in the chat, and the reply was “how do we do that?”.
A second later she/he started a review in which I could not write comments nor share variations. I think she/he would have to “give me control” over the review for me to share my thoughts… that was not intuitive for two newbies
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Re: Review culture. On KGS it seamlessly moves to review when one player starts it. On OGS you get sent to another page, and there is no guarantee that the opponent or any spectators will join. It’s good for sharing reviews externally and having them be permanent things, but not great for review culture.
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Strangely, it’s not necessary to “create a review on a different page” to review a game, is it?
Why don’t we just start chatting about the game on the game page? (much like my opponent and I did here, quite naturally Play Go at online-go.com! | OGS )
It’s true that “commenting on nodes in the analysis tree” isn’t available, but that’s the part of it that’s totally one sided anyhow. Not really needed for a post-game discussion?
(And maybe could be enabled on the game page?)
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On OGS reviews are so seamless, you can review even when the game hasn’t ended yet. But how to indicate it to players appropriately?
A blue link appears in chat saying Review. What could be more appropriate?
You can’t treat the users like dumb apes and yell at them REVIEW STARTED! 
CLICK HERE!
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For it to fit in with modern times it’s gotta be clickbait:
You’ll never believe what sequence you missed… Review NOW to find out!
Also it needs to have a very large database of clickbait phrases, or just generate them on the fly.
If you’re a superhuman bot this feature is not for you… but if you’re not, you’ll wanna try this out!
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Or you got sponsors for the one who wrote the most variations in a month…
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Bots HATE this one weird trick! Try it now!
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You released an automatic AI review tool. Of course human reviews are going to be less common.
I rarely do reviews on OGS, because I can’t delete them. Unless I know I have time to really get into something worthwhile, I’m not going to bother clicking the review link and clutter up my review list with trash.
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I’m pretty sure you can delete a review. Just did one today.
You deleted a review today? Where is the button for this?
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