umm.. yes

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"This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought."
-Jonas Skarssen

You do realize that He doesn't have an obligation to you, right? And that admins are cranky about it because people whine a lot?

Well it's up to him, ultimately, where Deja plays is of little importance to the future of KGS.

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North Lecale

This is becoming an Abbott and Costello who's on first routine....

_________________
"This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought."
-Jonas Skarssen

I would like to add that I understand deja and I've decided to do the same.
I've never had any issue with wms or any KGS admin in particular, but I decided I don't want to support them given the way they interact with the community and the way they treat their users.
It alls boils down to the fact that I don't want to use a server in which the creator puts his own interests above those of the community and rules as the sole dictator.

Is this of importance to the future of KGS? I definitely think so, wms and the admins participating in this topic seem to think otherwise.

Hello,



One of the benefits of Life in 19x19 is that we get to hear perspectives of those who we wouldn't ordinarily meet in real life. Even if Deja and I disagree, I'm very interested to understand his point of view.

I'm also interested in the references to wms putting his interests above those of the community (which I understand to mean the people who play on KGS).

When I check the KGS server stats, there are usually about 60-80,000 active accounts. If we allow for some multiple accounts, let's assume that there are 30,000 active players on KGS. Who should wms speak with to represent the wishes and priorities of these 30,000 people? Which person or persons can accurately represent the overall KGS player community?

This is not intended to be a rhetorial, point-scoring question. I'm genuinely interested to know how wms can interact with the community in order to better understand what they want. The KGS section of Life in 19x19 is a forum, but the active participants appear to be roughly 50-200. How does wms understand the perspective of the 30,000 KGS player community?

I'm not saying that kgs is not a good server to play on or that wms did a bad job, the numbers clearly show otherwise. It is a great server to play on.
However, it is clear that he is not willing to go the next mile and allow others to make kgs something even better. Some people have even gone to the trouble of creating alternative versions of the KGS client that fixed or improved some small details that wms hasn't addressed for years. In all seriousness, the sound problem is just plain ridiculous and shows how dead the kgs client really is: Give me the source code and I will fix it myself in one week, and I don't even know anything about the specific issue.

I would rather play on a server with less players but with vibrant developers that listen to the players and do active development, even if currently subpar by kgs standards, than on kgs right now. We all make our choices, right?

Hello,



Yes, this is a fair point.

A site with multiple developers has some advantages, with faster fixes of small, stand-alone bugs being one of them.

Equally, multiple developer environments create problems as well. In this specific case, wms has ruled out multiple developers because he enjoys building stuff, not managing people.

As a project manager, I can understand both perspectives. Both have advantages and disadvantages. This isn't a right or wrong decision. It's a matter of priorities and personal preferences.

If you're going to leave KGS because you don't like wms' decision to retain the sole development role, that's cool. I understand it. We're sorry to lose you as a participant, but wish you all the best in finding a go server which better meets your expectations. As you said, it's a free world and you get to choose what's best for you.

I can't play on KGS because stone sounds are broken (yes, I have tried all the suggested methods of fixing this). They are broken despite the fact that someone has already written a patch to the KGS client long time ago. Just like deja, where I play is "of little importance to the future of KGS", but it seems pretty obvious that when essential maintenance is not being done people are eventually going to have to leave.

To reiterate my point, people are not going to leave in droves because they are not happy with wms's management style. But they will leave if the server is falling apart.

Well, to be fair, many people have several accounts, so the actual number of distinct counts is likely much lower.



Gratitude *must* be optional, lest it loses its meaning. When you are forced to be grateful without free will, it is not your genuine feeling. Gratitude should be optional for it to be sincere. It makes it more meaningful when it actually exists. A social requirement for gratitude makes it worthless.

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be immersed

As deja says, gratitude is reserved for those who do things for me. Of course, wms took the initiative to create KGS and spent a lot of time and effort on it. That deserves huge amounts of respect. But gratitude is a little different. He's not doing anything for us. The most striking example of his hands-off approach, in my opinion, is how he is happily watching kaya spend years and huge amounts of effort building itself up from scratch, gratuitously repeating all of his hard work, because he can't be bothered either to maintain or to release his code. If that's not a vulgar example of disregard for the go community, I don't know what is.


Right, but there's a flip side to that. In go, as in real life, when there is an important task that needs doing that many people are capable of doing, and you raise your hand and say "ooh, ooh, pick me!", and everyone allows you to take responsibility for this important task because you seem like you'll do a good job, it is not acceptable to spend a long time half-doing the job, get bored, turn out something half-baked, and relinquish all responsibility for the bad bits and omissions and still expect praise for the good bits. If you volunteered to be charged with a task, it's your duty to see it through.

Stones not clicking is a complete non-issue, but every Java update threatens to be the death of KGS, and a lag of 10 seconds (as I had today) is just not workable. For all we know, these might be the death throes of KGS. If so, and even if not, in practice we've ended up in the kaya situation I mentioned above. At best, one of kaya and KGS will become great (and development of the other will have been a waste of time); at worst, kaya will be abandoned and KGS will continue to break.

No that routine was funny, you are just repeating yourself.

If KGS was the only place on the internet to play go, I might agree with you that WMS would have a certain obligation to the go playing community. But this is not the case. Nobody is dependent on KGS's technology. People can play go wherever they please. What exactly is WMS's obligation, and why does he have it?



I'm not sure if this is a semantic argument or not. First of all, you have stated your reason for not feeling any gratitude, and although it seems to me like an odd choice to let a psychological wound fester instead of heal, it makes perfect sense. I also agree that gratitude is something that occurs naturally, and if it doesn't then it can't be forced upon somebody. I guess I should re-examine my above comment.

Lot's of companies offer me free things that I don't want and don't feel any gratitude for. In this case though, I do want what WMS is giving me for free. I want it, and I feel grateful for it. As you or others demonstrate though, this isn't implicit in the offering. It is however implicit when the offer is accepted. What I am hearing from others is that they take what WMS gives them for free, use it regularly, and then complain about it. To me this is ungrateful. Do they owe WMS gratitude? This is the semantic part. What does "owe" mean? If you owe somebody something, and then you give it to them, you don't owe it anymore. So maybe people have already given their gratitude, and think that it only goes so far, and if someone doesn't fix broken stone sounds then their gratitude has been exhausted. I don't buy it.

As far as I'm concerned, WMS has built a playground where I can play with my friends. He's put up a sign with the rules, and has a few people stand around like teachers at recess. After a while, one of the swings breaks and nobody fixes it. The difference is that we don't have to go to school there, and can play wherever we want. I don't know what's wrong with the statement "if you don't like it, go somewhere else." It may be a bit callous, but on the other hand, why should I let it stop me from having fun with my friends?

I wonder to what extent this discussion is motivated by the fact that half of us are software developers ourselves and hold WMS to some set of standards that plain old users such as myself don't concern themselves with. From my viewpoint, making software is incredible, and sounds much more like work than fun. I'm glad so many of you do stuff like this as on the side as a hobby, and give it away for free. Thanks.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Perhaps you would be interested in following the development of the html5 client: https://plus.google.com/108736506961432085848

What a bombastic, self-righteous header. (just wanted to write that before somebody else had the chance).

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Patience, grasshopper.

Well that's one perspective.

Ultimately it is a sliding scale.
At one end you have a Go server where if you type "Dude, I am hungry" the owner of the server sends you a pizza BECAUSE HE CARES SO MUCH
At the other end you have a server where if you are banned if you commit a thought crime.

Where is KGS in this imaginary scale? I don't think that maintaining the KGS+ system, funding the Meijin tournament, maintaining admins to help users / manage game broadcasts, spending 10 years of their own time and money developing a client, still working on an HTML client, even when we just look at a small space of time, is not doing anything for us. Sure it ain't perfect, but lets not go overboard here.
There are a lot of other go servers out there - where do they fit on the sliding scale of Mr Nice? That's your own personal preference. Many people in this world prefer other servers to KGS. That's not a reason for Kaya to exist. It's not a reason for NNGS or UGS to have existed. If somebody wants to make a new Go server, that's their choice, and they can go ahead and do what they want to do.

Something like the Shodan Challenge didn't come into existence because GTL failed, or KTL failed.

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North Lecale

Hello,



That's a rather remarkable statement. I'd like to identify a few ways in which Bill's work on KGS is actually helping the go community quite a bit.

1. Support go professionals and strong amateur teachers by providing an environment where they can teach others (thereby earning money to support themselves, their families and their go activities). Professionals can teach on other go sites, but KGS offers an easily-accessible avenue into the English-speaking go community.

2. Provide a free site for tens of thousands of people across the world to learn to play go. The game review facilities on KGS are quite good and were developed specifically for this purpose.

3. Support development of go in a variety of countries by publicising national tournaments via relays of top games. As one of the people who responds to e-mails to the admin mailbox, I can assure you that KGS receives numerous and regular requests from tournament organisers to provide assistance.

4. Enable parents to be comfortable letting their children play on a site where swearing and other anti-social activities are controlled. Some teenagers obviously resent this family-friendly approach, but we receive frequent feedback from parents and teachers who appreciate this feature of KGS.

5. Support numerous teaching organisations (both schools and go academies) by providing dedicated rooms on KGS without cost or any obligation.

6. Support a variety of tournaments either by direct financial contributions or free KGS Plus memberships and other prizes.

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list. These are just the contributions which I thought of in the last couple of minutes.

I think it's rather foolish to claim that Bill doesn't make significant contributions. To be honest, I think we're fortunate that he puts so much of his free time into KGS. If he were to lose interest and shut down KGS, the worldwide go community would be poorer for it.

I didn't say that he didn't make significant contributions. I said that he didn't make them for us.

We are all very well aware that KGS is wms's own personal project that he undertook for his own amusement; I dare say he likes the fact that KGS has become incredibly popular and widely used, and he probably takes a lot of pride in that. There was probably a time at which he enjoyed serving his users and fixing bugs and adding new features. Sadly - and of course we are sad about it - that time is long gone, and we are left with KGS as it stands now. Here is a list of just a few things that would have happened already if KGS was around specifically for our benefit.

1. There wouldn't be an intermittent ten-second lag which makes games at best annoying, and at worst unplayable. There has not been a ten-second lag on anything on the internet anywhere since dial-up.

2. A Java update wouldn't have broken CGoban and stopped me using it for a year.

3. Minor updates and fixes wouldn't have been untended to for years. They may not all have been implemented, but one or two might have. The community would not have to get together and discuss / create hacks to make stones click and add timestamps to chat - wms would just spend 10 minutes doing it and KGS would be awesome again.

4. Users of L19 wouldn't constantly complain about feeling unlistened to, and progress on KGS wouldn't be heading in directions that no one has asked for while the current KGS falls apart. This thread wouldn't exist. The admins wouldn't be the only people constantly in wms's defence.

Let's be honest: wms has done the bits of KGS that he wanted to do, and he's enjoyed it. Now that there's boring maintenance in sight, he's given up. I hardly blame him for that, and I respect his efforts. But thanking him for his kindness feels a bit like thanking someone who lends me a half-rusted bike. His kindness might get me to my destination, or the bike might break into pieces half way, but either way I have to accept because he's the only person in the village who owns a bike, and "thanks but no thanks" isn't much of an option. I feel we can do so much better as a community, but because KGS and kaya and others exist, we're all holding out hope for them.


"Prefer other servers to KGS" is a very misleading choice of phrase, I think. It's not a case of preference. I would wager that kaya started up because someone thought they could do a genuinely, objectively better job - no lag, no clunky buggy client, no refusal to implement features, no whatever else people complain about on KGS, while retaining all the good points. That would never have happened if KGS had been regularly maintained. Kaya was probably born out of the neglect of KGS.

I take the point to be not that WMS has an obligation to deja as a matter of ethical theory, but that WMS would have an obligation if he chose to recognize one, and since he has chosen not to recognize one, deja does not wish to play on his server. In a similar way you might wish not to live in a country where the ruling party recognized no obligation to its people; not a universal attitude, but one that is easy to understand.

(Now I do think that WMS probably has some obligations to other go players, under the same principle that a host has some obligation to his guests when he invites them to a party. But we've had this discussion before.)

There are some good things that have come out of WMS desire to run KGS 100% as a hobby (that is to say, no project management, no large base of paying customers). For example, the interface is still beautifully minimalist - design by committee would have undoubtedly cluttered it up with "improvements".

Let's keep the chain of responses and context in perspective. I responded to Mike Novack's response to Kaseki, who stated, "...once one takes responsibility for something relatively public and highly popular, even if privately owned, maintenance is an ownership tax that one has a duty to pay."

I couldn't agree more with Kaseki's point. The duty is not an obligation to any single individual but to the community that has emerged as a result. When technology is freely introduced into the public domain an inherent responsibility to that community comes with it. The KGS community IS dependent on the client insofar as they've invested huge amounts of time establishing their ranks, relationships with other players, livelihood through teaching, etc. Mike Novack apparently disagrees with this sentiment, as I suspect is the case for many of you.

The fact that KGS continues to be free is not accidental in this respect, which is why I think everyone would be better off if KGS were a paid client/server in its entirety. At least if you require payment for your work, there's a transactional basis on which your users/customers can expect and demand support. But of course that's not going to happen now is it...

At the same time, the community has inherent responsibilities as well like civility and cooperation - add your favorite to the list. I think failure exists on both sides of that equation to some degree, which is normal and expected. Tenets sometimes shirk their responsibilities as do landlords (yes, I know the analogy doesn't quite fit, "which is why I think everyone would be better off if KGS were a paid client/server").

The main reason why I've chosen not to play on KGS is not because WMS has shirked his "responsibilities" per se - I think he's done well enough in that regard - it's because of his I don't owe you anything, take a hike if you don't like it attitude that he's never been shy to express over the years. I've taken that hike and wish you well in yours.

A big thank you to jts for grasping my point.

_________________
"This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought."
-Jonas Skarssen