Hello all,

apparently, at the end of March Yahoo closed their Go server, together with other games … let’s tell them where to play.

Here’s a comment I found that one can vote for (sadly, I can only give it three of my ten votes):

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/2322 ... here-check

Greetings, Tom

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I have not been on that site in years but from what I remember it is not a great loss.

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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).

D’accord, but apparently many people used it who liked that one could play a quick game w/ registration (so I’ve been told).

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

To be fair, IGS, OGS, and KGS are all much more polished and player friendly than Yahoo Games. These servers are for players who are at least moderately serious. If you want to send Yahoo users to a server that is more like their own, you need to send them to FlyOrDie.

That said, this is a sad day for the world of go in America. Thousands of players learned about the game through those servers. I've met several people who said that was the first place they ever played go. Hopefully some of Yahoo's regulars will decide to come to a better go server.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

I'm pretty sure I played Go on Yahoo for the first time. I didn't really pick it up until I met back up with a Korean friend of mine in college and we started playing.

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Occupy Babel!

I think Yahoo is a major loss. Yahoo (whether we like to admit it or not) for most of its run was larger than KGS or IGS often larger than both put together. It did the go community an incredible service in the form of raising awareness of the game.

Yahoo wasn't pretty, the rating system was crap, a lot of the user behavior was annoying, and it's rules implementations were questionable...but perhaps that was the beauty of it. Instead of getting bogged down in all the minutiae as we go players are wont to do, Yahoo ignored all that and gave a wide audience a "play now" button. It didn't care how the stones looked, how fair a pairing it was, or how the exact procedure for ending a game should be...it simply wanted to make go as readily available, as quickly as possible, to as many people as possible, knowing that if they just play they'll fall in love with the game exactly how many of is in this forum have.

If you ask me, we could all learn a thing or two from Yahoo.

I think the now server-less people from Yahoo might feel right at home at http://www.playok.com - the interface is very similar, the rating system pretty much the same, but its overall nicer. And it follows the same multi-game concept as Yahoo.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Bantari, thanks. Their UI is much better than Yahoo Games' ever was:

Xiangqi:Go:Chess:Backgammon:Shogi:Bridge (not very spectator-friendly! ).

Yes.
As I said - it is overall nicer.
What is important, I think, is that conceptually it follows the same idea as Yahoo
So I thought the orphaned Yahoo people can feel more at home there than on KGS or IGS or OGS or WhaterGS.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Thanks for the heads up on this. I'm thinking maybe I should start playing there.

I heard a lot of complaints on KGS yesterday about people from Yahoo Go server coming to KGS. Many people were complaining that they 'cheat'.

"Cheat" in what way? They hide aces in their sleeves? Use counterfeit money to pay for KGS+?

From what I remember from Yahoo, the "culture" there is very low-level, and many people will have to be re-educated to successfully fit into a better behaved community like KGS. This is another reasons I suggested PlayOk - it is a sort-of middle-ground between the mess of Yahoo and the order of proper Go server. Might serve as a half-way house.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Whether interface was bad or not, yahoo go server did great service to go community. They created go server well before any other server was created and made it available to go community. We used to have fantastic tournament for few years before some people migrated to KGS. I used to manage Korean team there and it was fun while lasting.
RIP Yahoo Go Server!!!!!!

Yeah, was my first server as well. It was called Microsoft Gaming Zone then, and looked differently. In '96 or so...
Then I found IGS, NNGS, and the fun begun. Still played on Yahoo occasionally, but then KGS came and I pretty much stopped. Good old times.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

The answer I got was: they mess with the scoring at the end, and try to prolong the game needlessly hoping to win on time.

The only reason why Yahoo had a large-ish userbase is because it's Yahoo. I'm not sure what you can learn from it other than broken rules and non-existent dispute resolution.

It offered a place where you can play surrounded by BS other than the BS on KGS or Tygem or whatever.
Many people preferred it, so it had a large user base. Maybe there is a lesson in there somewhere?
A lesson that upstarts like Kaya or Nova could have learned?

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

You mean a lesson like “How to be loved”? Dale Carnegie, I think, wrote about “How to win friends and influence people”, and there are psychotherapeutic techniques which include creating “rapport” with a client …

but really, the reason that there were so many people on Yahoo is that it was, uhm, similar to AOL in a way and being founded sometime in the Mesozoic it carried generations and generations of people who passed it on to their offspring. Imagine it being a sidearm of homo sapiens.

Uhm, these day dreams, forgive me. I’ll stop it now.


Greetz, Tom

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I am not sure this is true. How do you know that? Have you played there, made any friends there, talked to people at length? What?
Here is what I know:

There were quite a few stronger (or at least - decent strength) players on Yahoo, who knew about other servers and preferred to play on Yahoo. For quite a while I preferred (or at least played there often) even though I have also played on other servers. I have never been an AOL member, so what you say definitely does not apply to me, nor to people I knew there.

From what I have talked to people on Yahoo (and later on PlayOk which is similar) the main advantages of playing there were:

• no hassle - no need for client, no need for even registration, just enjoy
• no worries about pesky dictatorial admins telling you what to do and not do
• more serious servers are generally more uptight, which does not suit everybody
• too many rank-chasers on other servers (not that there were none on Yahoo, but nobody really cared)
• you could play many other fun games with the same account and using similar interface within the same server (almost)
• ...and so on

I think for some people who played there (at least occasionally) - these might be some good advantages, not offered by any of the "serious" servers.
I somehow find it disrespectful of you to be just dismissing it all with "similar to aol " or "funded in mesozoic."
You don't like Yahoo, that's fine. But don't just look down upon people who did.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Yahoo had a large-ish number of players because it was a large search engine/portal. I'd be willing to bet that far more players (both in numbers and in proportion) left it when they discovered other servers than there are players who left other servers to play at Yahoo. If that's true, then "learning" from Yahoo would be the last thing any server wants.