I'm pretty new to the idea of correspondence go, but it's growing on me quickly. I like the idea of having so much time to think about moves and variations that isn't possible in live games. However, I'd like to find a way to memorialize these thoughts, so that I can go back to them in review/if things go wrong. (plus, I find it's a really useful discipline device to prevent me from playing too quickly.) Basically, I'm looking for something like the Malkovich game threads, but just on my computer for any correspondence games I might have going.

Does anyone have suggestions for the best way to track this? The best I've thought of so far is to just have a separate SGF file for the game, and play 2 passes before showing my thinking, so that the game record isn't too messed up, but that feels a bit awkward.

OGS lets you do Malkovich comments, though I'm not sure if it does variations.

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Occupy Babel!

I would think that the easiest way to do this would be to use the editor of your choice and keep a separate copy with comments. That way you can play on multiple servers and use exactly the same format for tracking the games, thus making your documentation consistent.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

DGS has 2 ways for storing comments during a game:

• hidden comments (a ka "Malkovich" comments with the difference, that hidden-comments stay hidden also to observers, because on a turn-based server you may create another account and view your opponents "Malkovich" comments meant only for yourself and observers)
• private game notes that are independent of moves

Both will be included in the SGF, that can be downloaded.

Jug, you first comment does make sense to me.

Are you saying that the hidden comments are visible only to the author, even in download, or can the observers ever see them at any point? It is not clear.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

You can see them at all times. Your opponent and others can only see them when the game has ended.

OK, maybe either DGS or OGS will implement a way to store variations privately too. For now, I'll work with the offline SGF idea.

As S2W stated, DGS hidden comments are only visible to the author at any time (on the game board, game-comments-page and sgf-download), and visible to everyone else only after the game has ended.

That's what I thought, but all that stuff about Malkovich comments, whatever they are, confused me.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Malkovich games were invented here on this forum

OGS definitely has private variation storage!

I use it to keep my pathetic dreams in a place where they can continue to deceive me.

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

Oh, interesting! I'll have to poke around more to try to find that.

Where?

I need to know too!