John modestly described New In Go as icing, but icing is delicious.

It's a complex issue, and I haven't made my mind up - and don't plan to until the first anniversary of T Mark's death, which will be marked by the Winter 2014 edition.

But for those seeking to understand, some of the factors that go into the mix, in no special order, are:

1. Poor sales on site. This may have been overtaken but when I last queried how many sales the Summer 2014 edition had so far, it was 1. For comparison, a couple of years ago we would expect about a dozen at this juncture, but we could always get a boost of another 20 or so when Mark went to the European or US Congress. I don't go to congresses.

2. I had lunch with macelee not long ago. We confirmed to each other that piracy was a problem. You may not choose to agree, but as he pointed out in a recent post, Sensei's Library continues to encourage people to download "free" databases that contain much work done by GoGoD. Encapsulating the GoGoD database inside SmartGo, whilst it is not fool-proof, does offer some protection.

3. I haven't got time to do everything myself. One of my daughters looks after the site (and dealings with Anders, which is why I'm always a bit hazy on what the latest situation is), but she is not a go player, and I feel a bit reluctant to burden her with the sort of queries that come with a site. For example, a recent buyer apparently bought the Winter 2013 edition then complained that he wanted games from 2014. These niggles also tend to come back to me for resolution, taking time I can ill afford.

4. Much of the old guard, often people I know personally, are fading from the go scene (including L19). I miss them, and find the new guard, while they do bring new things to the game, don't seem to have much time for the particular sense of go community that I cherish.

May I ask what that is?

Hi John,

Have you considered that you are now asking people to essentially just purchase the games. (If I understand this right.) I bought the Winter2013 download version. (I didn't realize that it had only the games, but as the price was so low, I can't complain about this bargain!) I can see buying database updates, or purchasing some sort of update subscription, but I can't justify buying the whole database every time a new edition comes out--especially if you plan on semi-annual revisions. Do you think that reservations such as mine could have been a factor in poor sales of GoGoD?

In any case, I hope that you do not become so discouraged that you abandon distribution of simple sgf files. (I bought SmartGo for Windows but refuse to buy a Kindle, and I hate locking into proprietary software. Perhaps because I was locked into the Mac world from 1985 till about 2000, when I finally started building my own PCs.)

Hi virre, at work I also deal with wordpress sites. We do have load balancers and caching for the largest, but the smalles ones don't care. Even the intermediate could handle perfectly fine without it (as we've been required to do when doing some maintenance work.) I don't expect gogod to reach up of 2k/visits day, and a normal, plain WP install should handles this without many issues even in the most modest EC2-on-demand instance.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

What exactly do you feel is missing from the new guard, or their idea of community? Having come to the go community this century, I'm decidedly curious about this, as I can certainly see a split in our own club: between an older generation who have worked with running the AGA, setting up go congresses, etc. and a newer one that haven't done these things, as yet, but will eventually need to grow into them.

Looks like that was the purchase I made right after I found out about the new edition. I definitely prefer a collection of sgf over just access via Smartgo Kifu.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Have you tried to reach out to somebody to help you out? This community is full of good web admins developers, and I am sure somebody can be found to run the site for nothing more than a free GoGoD copy each time it updates.

Also, why do you have a beef with piracy? While I understand it in general, and religiously hate it as a concept, in your particular situation it should be meaningless. If you drop the site there will be less privacy, true, but then there will also be 0 sales so nobody wins. Or are you worried that the few people ripping off the database will seriously undercut SmartGo sales? I always thought that people buy SmartGo for the interface and search engine, whoever wants just the raw game records can always get them somewhere, more than they can possibly need, I think.

As a matter of fact - why not just offer the old non-database GoGoD content to download for free? Its better than just shelving it, methinks, and the cost on your part is next to nothing - again, you can probably find dozens of people willing to host and run the download site for free with minimum fuss and absolutely no effort. Or put it yourself on one of the free hosting platforms, really.

All in all, I think what is happening to GoGoD over the past year and what is going to happen from what you say in the future - it is a huge loss, makes me sad. I understand where you are coming from, but I cannot believe there is no resources in the community to get'er done so that everybody is happy.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

John, you may or may not know already that that buyer was me. I just wanted to clarify how your new website works, because I was using it for the first time (my previous copy was still on disc). I'm sorry if the question caused undue stress.

We were (are) working on a book of game commentaries and wanted to double check some of Younggil's intuitive statements about recent fuseki trends against a database of games from 2014.

I first went to http://www.gogod.co.uk/ to update GoGoD. That site is dead. Most of your existing customers probably have it bookmarked like I did and now think that you've just disappeared or gone out of business. I've since updated all of your links at Go Game Guru, but other webmasters probably don't even know you have a new site. Do you still have control of gogod.co.uk? You could plug a major leak by just redirecting it to your new website and that can't hurt sales.

After some more digging, I found your new site and ordered GoGoD. We thought the games from 2014 were already included. It turned out that they weren't so we couldn't use it for the intended purpose. So we just let it go for the time being and got back to work while waiting for an update.

Shortly afterwards, Alison sent us an email saying "Dear Subscriber, We are pleased to announce that the Summer edition of the GoGoD database is now available on our website gogodonline.co.uk". Great! I logged into our account and tried to download the update, but there was no way to do so. At this point I realised that your website might require a new payment for every download and I replied to Alison's email to clarify this.

Since getting an answer we've ordered GoGoD from you again, and have paid you twice in as many weeks.

Why am I wasting time telling you this story? Because sometimes it's helpful to be able to see things from a customer's perspective. A lot of really good ideas can come from customer feedback if you pay attention.

You might think I'm an idiot. Perhaps I am compared to you. However, the fact that I don't automatically have perfect knowledge about how your website works doesn't make me an idiot. It just makes me normal.

You're not the only one who's busy or who feels stressed. Unfortunately, a lot of people these days have to deal with hundreds of emails per day. Most people doing 'knowledge work' are really busy and stressed. A lot of them are probably your customers (or would be customers). They don't have time to figure out how your website works or read every page on it. They expect you to follow certain conventions and provide important information up front.

If you don't make things clear and straightforward for customers (which isn't that easy and is always a work in progress), they'll probably do one of two things:

1. Leave and probably never come back, or
2. Send you an email asking for clarification before buying.

Does that make them annoying idiots? No, it makes them normal. Your website is a lot less important to them than it is to you. If it's confusing, the vast majority of people will just move on. The people who email you are actually doing you a favour, by letting you know that your website is confusing and giving you a second chance to make a sale.

If you're receiving too many of these kinds of emails, the way to fix it is to listen to what they're saying and gradually improve your website. The hive mind is actually really smart about certain things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU

I know that GoGoD is in part a hobby for you and that the Go market is relatively small. I know probably better than most people how hard it is to make money doing something Go related. I've offered before to work with you and to take care of the web development, marketing and customer service side of GoGoD (the parts of the process that you seem to dislike doing). That offer is still open if you ever change your mind. We already deal with the daily onslaught of emails, so a few more is neither here nor there. We already have a website about Go which people visit to buy Go related products.

If you don't want to work with us for whatever reason, there are probably other people here who'd be willing to team up with you (as Bantari suggests). It's important to work with someone who's knowledgeable enough about Go to answer questions (Mace Lee seems like another obvious person to team up with, though I imagine that has occurred to you already too). I briefly tried hiring a non-Go player to help with answering emails at one stage, and it didn't work out well at all. It ended up being more stressful and making more work for me.

Also, I don't think piracy deserves the attention that you sometimes seem to give it. Yes it's disappointing, but it's totally outside of our control and worrying about it just leads to a useless and distracting feeling of weltschmerz. It's better for all of us to focus on what we can do and to focus on making things better for the customers who are paying for things. Forget about piracy.

Anyway, I guess I'll leave it at that because I already fear that this will come across in a more preachy way than I'd intended and may not be well received. I know that things aren't easy, but I'm another one of your customers who'd be very disappointed if GoGoD stopped.

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

...what David said.

There's nothing here that cannot be feasibly and profitably solved, and any number of go players visibly willing to pitch in and solve it, if their effort would result in a recognisable GoGoD going forward, with more than a bare (or DRM'd!) library of games in it. I am certain that any reasonably necessary sum of cash could be crowdsourced, hosting would be readily volunteered, and volunteers could pitch in to update the non-game material that John no longer wants to burn daylight working on.

In the end, it's a matter of will, not logistics nor finance. We neither could nor should dictate to John's conscience in this matter, and if he's no longer willing to try to fulfil the promise he said up-thread that he'd made to try and keep GoGoD going, then he isn't, and it isn't going to be, and we might as well let go.

It was a gift that we had it as long as we did. But gifts are not things we are entitled to. They're...gifts.

Having made the purchase of the GoGoD database and in the process of downloading I feel I can comment on this further. The website worked well, I saw others were having issues but it worked flawlessly for me. The download is now 87% done and I'm looking forward to checking it out.

I don't know what extra features the others speak of but it sounds like some good material that shouldn't be left in the dark reaches of the nether. I have to agree, make it purchasable or hand it out for free - making it widely available to all. Again, this is all relevant if you have no plans to revamp that part. If not then why not make it available to all? It might be a good way to get others into the game. Its just a thought.

Anyway, thanks for the work and I hope this project doesn't die. I for one would love to see it move forward with some of the suggestions others have made - and while I can't say I would pay 15 bucks every time and update is added looking at other means to keep it alive sounds reasonable.

May I ask what exactly encouraging people to download free databases that contain much work done by GoGoD amounts to?*

I can't help feeling misled, when a relevant adverse effect on sales is attributed to the existence of a few pages / inclusion in lists / mentions on SL, while as far as I can tell none of the content providers bothered to use / reactivate SL community advertisements since the data loss in March 2013.