I respectfully retract my question.
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I’m fairly new to OGS. I am playing a corres game where I was granted an undo earlier. Today I discovered that my opponent had asked for an undo, which I didn’t notice, so didn’t grant. Obviously I feel bad about not reciprocating.
I often make my moves on a smartphone (including in this case). I would like to know how I was notified of the undo so I will notice it more easily in future maybe. Was the notification off the page? I find that I don’t see the game chat when I’m on the phone unless I take some action to reveal it. Is it the same with an undo request?
I seem to recall that in a live game an undo request is notified by voice at the time. Maybe that’s been implemented because of this (old) conversation? Is that right, or did I just imagine it anyway? If it’s right, shouldn’t I hear the voice notification when I open the game page on my phone in a corres game?
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You can undo a few moves back if both agree, so you can still grant that undo. You can technically undo an entire game as long as both players request undos.
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I have never noticed a voice notification at all for an undo request but I don’t always have audio going either. I am not sure about that.
As far as the regular undo notification goes, on a regular computer/laptop there will be bold text present to the right of the board, just above the chat box and below the two indicated players. I think it says something to the extent of “an undo request has been made” and there is a button that gives the option of accepting the undo request. It is pretty self-explanatory.
But you say that you are having the problem on a smartphone and so I can see where that could be an issue. What I am hypothetically picturing is that the chat is hidden on a smartphone and you have to scroll down or to the side to see the chat box. Therefore it would seem like you would have scroll to see an undo notification as well. Since this would be tedious and you would not want to do it with every move you make just to check, you may very well have found something new that needs to be implemented into the site. But as @Kaworu_Nagisa has pointed out, you can “undo” back until the beginning of the game as long it is not finished.
Perhaps I am ignorant of something here though and hopefully someone else can confirm whether or not I am right and that something could be improved upon here.
@StevenageTony, if you are on Android, you should try the ogs app by @MrAlex. Online Go by Zen Android. You get a good notification of undo requests on it. Plus I think it’s easier to use generally than the main site on a phone.
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My problem with this is that the player plays right away probably because of the time. I would suggest a time pause ( But might be abused, maybe pause for just a few secs, and you can’t play during the pause) and a symbol or "opponent requested undo pop up OVER the board, the best place.
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Thanks for the reply. In fact my opponent is a friend and I asked him to request an undo whether or not he needed one next move, which he did early this morning. I found the undo request is in fact visible bottom left, next to the Pass button, so I must have just overlooked it when the genuine request was made.
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Thanks for the reply (but see my reply to Mr. GoBoard). I will have a look at the app anyway. Thanks for the info.
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If it became so onerous, I would change my settings to never accept undo requests.
I like @trohde’s visual change suggestion:
If there is an undo request pending, the last move should contain a ? instead of a circle.
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YES!
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I am personally in favour of the new visual indicator being on by default since it is so innocuous it is unlikely to cause offence IMO but happy to see this feature being added none the less
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As I mentioned in the PR, and previously in this thread, I think we need to be very careful not to add messaging that says “undos are the norm, you are expected to accept them”.
The only argument I can think of for making this turned on by default is that this would make sure people know it exists.
However, I think that the only people that need to know this exists are those that are currently experiencing difficulty with the pre-existing mechanisms (a big blue button and audio). These people will ask for how they can get better notification, and will find out this is here.
IMO.
EuG
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Personally, I don’t see how a question mark on the stone in any way sends the message “undos are the norm, you are expected to accept them”
However, I am in no way invested enough in this preference to debate any deeper 
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You might be right. Me either 
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It’s amazing 
but I am absolutely for default on. Only a fraction of users visits the forums or checks the settings page periodically for updates.
The idea was better noticable undos, this way, nobody will notice It’s in no way intrusive enough to send the wrong message or be THAT annoying as far as I am concerned. Without changin the default the change itself is pretty pointless imho
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Yeah of course it should be on by default. Even somebody like me, who is quite active user and somewhat informed of ogs’s features, doesn’t check the settings regularly to just see if there’s anything new.
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Obviously I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble if it were pointless
I had thought an important question is whether more people would want it on or off.
Because those who don’t like it then have the same problem of discovering a setting to turn it off - though admittedly in this case they have a prompt to do that, wheras if it defaults off then nothing starts you looking.
I had thought few people would actually want this distraction on the board, hence I chose to default off.
But defaulting on is an easy change - and has the advantage of finding out whether people complain about it
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Nobody else minds the endless proliferation of minute little switches and settings?
So I’ll add my opinion that there should be no option; it should just work. 
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