Hi go players,

I recently published my new website http://www.go-academy.eu which is a place to share games and get them reviewed by stronger players. The whole website completely focusses on this topic therefore I hope that I will be able to provide a really nice workflow even though there are still some steps to be made to improve the process. Of course it's completely free and 100% non-commercial - there are no ads or something.

I would be super happy if some of you would check out my page and tell me whether you like the concept. I am happy about any kind of feedback! Maybe even some of you decide to upload one of their games to get it reviewed. Even though the website is still very new several reviewers registered already who are willing to comment your games.

Thanks for your help!

A few things jump out to me at first glance.

I can't see if a review has video or not without clicking on it. What if someone wants to see only the ones with video? There's no way to search for that.

There's no indication of the playing strength of the reviewer and I really miss being able to search reviews by level of players.

You might want to consider giving the recipient of the review an option to thank or rate the reviewer, which would add imaginary internet points to the reviewer's account.


I kinda like the concept, but currently it feels very barebones.

I too like the concept...



yet there is a venerable 20 year old page that offers exactly this: the go teaching ladder -> http://gtl.xmp.net.

Do younger players not know the go teaching ladder? Otherwise I can't think of a good reason why I would want to duplicate it.

Or here, for that matter. But maybe this site will fill a need for the community, so I don't want to discourage it.

I immediately thought of the gtl, but the gtl site is pretty primitive. It does the job, I guess, but it could really do with some modernizing. If the author of goacademy really intends to keep it free, then there may merit in some kind of a collaboration.

It has everything required, a table with the necessary information, sgf-download, sgf-viewer and people, who actually maintain and use it. + You don't need to create an account to request a review. I hope this may be one of the rare cases, where cooperation and common sense prevails.

The one point GTL does not do well is different languages. For me as reviewer on GTL this would be the only reason to consider another page doing otherwise exactly the same thing: Make a page that caters to all languages (or some languages), but English, it may succeed.

Thanks for your feedback - this is super helpful! It will take a while to implement suggested changes but we will definitely add them to the roadmap.

• Mark video reviews in the overview - that should be easy. Done
• Indicate reviewer strength - already realized that this is missing. So the first step was to enable users to tell us their rank either during registration or on their user's page: http://go-academy.eu/user Done
• Search reviews by level of players - basic functionality should be relatively easy to add. Might be a bit tricky to provide good UX here.
• Give recipients of reviews an option to thank or rate the reviewer - yes, we absolutely want that. Done
• Multi language support - in general not so easy. But if we just start by allowing the players to indicate the language of the review and show it in the overview maybe that's a good first step.

It is completely for sure that the service will stay free. Users will always have the possibility to upload their games and review other players games without paying. The only exception I would like to make here is that I know that there are strong amateurs and pros who make money with reviewing games. If these people wanted to join the community and provide their paid services on the website I would not deny. Anyway I don't see this happening at all.

I appreciate all attempts to raise the bar on Western go. Good luck!

_________________
- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Same here, as much as I can.

However, I just can't shake the question tapir raised - what is wrong with GTL? I am sorry of the below sounds negative, but I just can't help feeling like that.

From what I can see, GTL cannot (or at least - doesn not) use videos, and maybe could use some interface facelift... But it is a very solid service, with a lot of data and years of usage, pros participation, and tons of other good stuff. A tremendous resource to all Go players over the past two decades or so. What is the advantage of trying to re-create the same functionality over again on another website? It will take years and a ton of work fot GoAcademy to get where GTL already is, and when that happens, if it happens, what will it give us that we do not already have?

It is my opinion that it would be much better to approach the GTL people and offer help maintaining the code, maybe restyling, or including media streams and such. If somebody has time and motivation to make a difference.

All in all, just like with servers, forums, blogs, streams, SL, and so on - I think we pretty much have a lot of services already, and I presonally cannot think of a need which is not yet met to a large degree. I think we should integrate, not divide and split, in the long run this will benefit the community more and so this is where the efforts of eager programmers should go. Not into another "Look daddy, I can make a website too!"project. No disrespect...

Some ideas for integration? Sure... For example - when there is a hot game on KGS/OGS/IGS/whatever and a lot of good kibitz, this can automatically get saved as a "commented" game on GTL? Or a RT searchable GLT reviewed game index on SL? Or a linkage between KGS/OGS/IGS/whatever which allows players to look up go terms without leaving the server interface? Or load games directly from GTL to the server for reviews/sharing, and vice-versa: saving reviewed games directly from server to GTL? There are plenty of possibilities, if one have time, motivation, and know-how. Why duplicate what already exists and works well?

Unless, of course, GTL does not work well, or there is a solid need that GTL does not fulfill, and is unwilling to fulfill, in which case creating a service which fulfills that need makes sense. But it is unclear to me what that need is. Anybody knows?

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Hi Bantari,

Thanks for your reply! Unfortunately I just became aware of your post otherwise I would have answered earlier.

As said before there's absolutely nothing wrong with GTL - it's a great service! My personal experience with the platform was just not too good and I had some ideas how to make it better. That is what made me after months of consideration and back and forth finally start building http://www.go-academy.org .

I can not deny that it feels great to create something new and though it sometimes is hard to spend nights and weeksends on fixing bugs I really love to work on the platform and see people use it. This is the "Look daddy, I can make a website too!" feeling that you describe although in my case it's more a "Look kiddies, daddy made his own website!".

But I disagree with you in one point. I don't think it's bad to reinvent ideas that are already there. If you just keep improving existing solutions you will continuously make some progress but you will not really innovate things. Sometimes it's just better to start from scratch to get to the next level.

Finally we just started the project. At the moment we provide some basic functionality which we hope people like. This doesn't mean that we do not have ideas how to evolve the platform. If we see that people like the service and use it we will keep working on this and add other stuff we consider useful. In the medium-term this should also lead to a clearer differentiation to GTL.

Hey, was just wondering.
What you are doing looks really nice, and I wish you all the luck with it.

About reinventing ideas... you have a point there. But this usually happens when existing ideas are not sufficient for some reason, and this is why I asked and said what I did. Still, there are other reasons for doing things from scratch, one of them is sheer joy of doing it - and this is important too.

On the other hand, there is not just the effort which will be duplicated (which is your effort, and so your prerogative to make it) but also the community and the resources possibly splintered - people will have to search two sites (or more) to find good reviewed games instead of having it all in one place. And this was what I was talking about.

But regardless, it is all small things.
The important issue is that you are building something good and having fun doing it, so don't let nobody stop you!

_________________
- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

If you want your page to work, get rid of this: "Access denied. You are not authorized to access this page."

Why do I have to register to get a review?

Hi tapir,

Thanks for your reply. You only have to register to post a review request. This enables us to notify you when your request has been accepted or when a review has been uploaded. And we don't ask you for more than a username and your email.

All the content on the website can be seen without registration. That's not too bad, is it?