No, the message is that the powers that be want a new system, and are willing to pay for it.

There is an absolutely huge amount of money waiting in the wings for someone to come along and do it right. By "It" I mean, the Western Go scene as a whole, of course, not just the servers. There was a lot of hope for Kaya. They raised a lot of money on nothing but a promise. Just a hint, something I heard blowing in the wind. There are a lot of changes coming, hopefully for the better, and hopefully sooner than later.

Well, Nova.gs is still alive and running, don't understand why people don't play there with their friends.

I think it would help if you explained what you mean by 'right'.

And speaking of servers, we already have a lot. Other than a few selected individuals clamming up with talks of "freedom, liberty, and white picket fence" (but there will *always* be some of those, just like there have always been some) - I don't see what is wrong with what we have. Why do people think the multitude of IGS, KGS, Tygem, WBaduk, Nova, and a bunch of minors is insufficient to have a good game? A click-sound surely cannot be *that* important.

PS>
I was hoping the message would be: The community is always ready to support interesting and courageous projects.

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- Bantari
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I read his post as "The community wants to support interesting and courageous projects."

I read his posts as "The Powers-That-Be (who is that?) are not happy with what we have and want something else." There is a subtle yet profound difference.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

*shrugs*

The people will always take something better, just so long as it doesn't change the parts they want to keep (see: lack of good review tools in Kaya at least up until I stopped playing there for reference)..

I think mainly there are already a lot of good options out there. Nova is filling the void for people who want to play in a browser right now.

I have no problem giving Kaya cash as it wasn't a great deal of dollar and was excited at what a modern Go server could be, but I guess that was pretty naive. I believe the saying goes, "a fool and his money are soon parted". In hindsight it is clear there was a bit of an attitude problem and a total lack of focus and direction about the whole project.

Fortunately while we were all busy looking the other way, Nova happened and it's already a far better server than Kaya was. Let's hope it develops over the next couple of years. I'd go so far as to say we should drop this forum and erect a Nova one in its place.

My hope is that someone with the knowledge and ressources will take over the kaya server and client and continues with the project ...

I think a great asset has been built and it would be a pity not to use it.

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

Many people have offered but they've refused repeated requests to release the source. Maybe another $17000 will convince them?

I guess the reason why it didn't go well is because people like to have a client. I hate having to open my browser and navigate to a website when I can just doubleclick on my kgs client. That seems like an unfair reason to not play on kaya, which honestly is twice as good as any other server but this small little thing just completely ruins it for me to the point of me sticking to KGS.

I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion. There has been a fair amount of discussion recently regarding Nova.gs, which is also a web-based client. WMS has also been working on a web version of KGS. It seems web clients are the future, not dedicated apps. In my opinion, I would rather have a single web client that I can use from my phone, tablet, and linux computer. Also one that is centrally managed and therefore doesn't require any new downloads for people when new features are added.

The current trend is to try to put everything in the browser which I also find rather annoying (despite being a web developer). A native client is much more convenient, as it runs as a separate task and we have operating systems that are designed to isolate processes and allow us to quickly switch between tasks.

I appreciate that I can stay logged in for hours into KGS and restart my browser as needed during that time for example.

I made the same sloppy comment earlier, and Bantari pointed it out to me, so you're in ok company, but it's important to distinguish between native apps and dedicated apps. You can create a dedicated app that is more or less just a stripped down browser for a single site. Many mobile apps do exactly that. That gets you the benefits of tab switching and process isolation, without the difficulty of writing a custom native app.

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Occupy Babel!

Actually there are tools that do this. I have tried two in the past, Prism by Mozilla Labs and a more proprietary version which I don't remember how it was named.

In the end, I have resorted to just using a different browser in case of work+play time.

Even though I don't completely like the all-in-the-web trend (I prefer native speed), the thing is, web-only is the best way to ensure all systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, derivatives, tablets) have the most current version of the software, at the same time. Native means you don't get iOS or Android updates as fast, or Windows if the developers work mostly in *nix. I have seen it happen in countless projects (Mac guy, wait, Windows guy, wait, Arch guy, compile and wait, etc).

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

I think it's a shame that everything becomes more and more browser based. At least that's my reason to stick with KGS and Tygem. I hope nova will get a client some day, at least a android one.

From the original Kaya announcement thread:

About the business plan. We do have one, a well written one, with statistics, estimates, development schedule, pronostications, details of the team, techonologies, market, reference businesses, competitors, etc etc.
Its just not public. We ARE talking to investors. We have moved our business plan in angel rings and VC's, contests and gaming companies. That's actually how we found our will-be iPad publisher.
[...]
We have a few strategies in the planning regarding the Asian community, but there is no rush to them. The Bar to compare to Asian clients is higher than to compare to KGS. In the line of production, we believe we will provide more than KGS sooner that providing more than those servers.
That said we have a few ideas (impossible to reproduce by Asian Servers) that have the potential to attract professional players. We think that if we get them, the asian community will follow. This very OCtober i want to stay there for a couple of weeks to make some quick-dirty demos to show some high level pros and get some feedback, and use as research.

I'm going to be charitable and assume that all of that was true and they did have a business plan and it fell through. It's entirely plausible that even with best intentions and business experience there's no room for a Western-based commercial go server to compete with all the established Asian ones and attract pro players.

Well, yeah... Its nice to be charitable.
However - since they refused multiple requests/questions to tell us/me what the business plan is, I have to assume that either there was none (regardless of what the website said) or it was such that it would not gather much support from the community. But be it as it may - I simply have not seen them implementing any 'business plan', unless it was all going to be 'behind the scenes'. Which is weird in a 'community driven' server like Kaya was supposed to be. Especially after they asked for donations. This is one of the thing I was unable to reconcile for myself - asking for donations and refusing to disclose any business plan, even in vague details.

And this still leaves the lack of solid development strategy.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I prefer dedicated clients too but,

eh,

you can run more than one browser at once. Pro Tip.

Given that Kaya's officially dead now, what do you guys think about this sub-forum? Should I leave it up to discuss alternatives/the (hopefully) eventual open-sourcing of the code, or shut it down to clean up the front page a bit?

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The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less!