First off appreciate your efforts! But I don't understand. You have an old school website with a product being produced on in an old school style. I looked at purchasing your product but held off. Then out of curiosity I checked out your website and saw this:



As someone who is younger and done some web development, I have thought why don't they change their model. You could get webhosting cheaper than producing on CDs and would allow you to keep your product on the market. I am assuming that is what your website is saying that, anyone who wasn't on the list after 2012 will never be able to get the product. With the model I am suggesting, you could keep your product on the market and cut your costs down at the same time. Whenever you update the package send out an email saying download the latest version and even provide a link. The user then can go sign in and dowload the product. I don't know how the site is run, but from an outsider this seems like a better option.

If I am wrong in understanding the website then I am sorry for this post. I just feel that this is a great product talked about by many, but is kind of like an exclusive club that nobody new can get into.

You have misunderstood somewhat. You can still buy GoGoD as a one-off purchase (a CD sent in the post). What you can no longer do is subscribe to get the updates (lots of CDs sent in the post).

But that notwithstanding, switching to an electronic rather than physical distribution model would indeed most likely reduce costs, but with some upfront cost to set up the system.

I think it would be good if TMark and JF did allow purchase of GoGoD in an electronic medium as they'd likely pick up quite a few new customers, but for people like Billy complaining that he can't use GoGoD on the train, the value of GoGoD is the information contained on the CD in files, not the CD itself. Just copy the files onto your tablet/phone, upload to your dropbox or whatever cloudy thing you like and use them there.

Ah thank you. I thought the product itself was the subscription.

Yes forgot to mention that part, there would be some costs to setup like designing a new website and getting it made, but I think long term it would be a cheaper for them to produce.

I should first apologise for my earlier rant; you caught a grumpy old man on a bad morning. While there is much logic in the suggestion of having downloads, we have been rather stick-in-the-mud about the way we have done things, especially when my initial enquiries about download systems and security would have produced costs greater than previous sales. I expect that it is easier now but we have a saying that Real Life intrudes. For me, this was being diagnosed with cancer in March 2012 and spending 6 months on chemotherapy. During that time, I did virtually no work on the database and it was the main determining factor in removing the subscription option. I wanted to have the simplest system possible that I could operate without having long-term commitments. Unfortunately, Real Life is still intruding and I expect to have further hospital treatment for some months to come.

Best wishes.

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No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

That makes sense. Like I said from an outsiders view it would appear easier and more cost effecient.

Best of luck with cancer.

Oh and ... Shapes are cool

I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but I genuinely have no idea who you are. I'm puzzled by the implication that I should. You may not realise that I am rather new to go, and very new to this forum, and my knowledge of you and John is limited to what I've seen you post (very little) and what is on your website (not the things I wanted to know). It may well be due to your absence because of your recent treatment (for which I wish you all the best).


You have the privileged knowledge that you are not just some half-hearted publisher or seller who couldn't really care less about go because it doesn't sell very well. You know that you are helpful. I don't necessarily know this - when I look at your website, all I see is an unhelpful lack of the sort of information I need. Being willing to go out of your way to help someone is rare nowadays, and it's great that you are, but if you don't tell us, we don't know.

Now that I've found out that you're helpful, and I can actually buy GoGoD in a format useful to me, I'll reconsider it a little more seriously, and I may send you an email at some point to check that it will actually be compatible with the machines I want to use it on.


The same complaints apply: 1. I don't have a CD drive to copy the files from, 2. there's no information about what file formats most things are in, so I don't know if my tablet / phone can read them. The sgfs will work; the books are probably just plain pdf or djvu or epub or something, but there's always the slight chance they're locked away behind some unhelpful front-end; the tsumego tester and database searcher almost certainly won't work, and so on.

Anyway, I'll address questions about this to T Mark or John once I've decided whether or not I want / can afford to buy it.

I hope you can recover quickly and fully so you can keep bringing us more great Go resources!

Doesn't Queen Mary have one you could use?

Sure, probably - if not then a central library would. But I can't email 700mb worth of files to myself, and I'm not spending more money on a flash drive. So I have to plug in my tablet and hope that the computer doesn't need to install extra drivers to read it (because I don't have the necessary privileges to). If it does, maybe I could speak to a member of staff, or find friends with CD drives I can use and flash drives I can borrow, or something. All of this for something I'm not even entirely sure will work on my machines.

Don't get me wrong - I never said any of this was impossible. I just thought Charles's complaint of snobbery was ungrounded, and T Mark and John were unwise for not being clearer on their website.

I can understand your frustration as technology is changing. You could PM them and ask what formats they use or you could request for sample material of the GoGoD to be put on the website.

If you have questions as to wether it would be worth it then we should start a thread about it. I would be curious, as someone who doesn't own GoGoD, to see how the community ranks the product and to see if it is worth buying.

oooh.. very sad to hear indeed. Many well wishes and speedy recovery and long life if possible!

billy, TMark already said he'd ship on a USB flash drive if you just ask.

I can tell you, many of the programs are written for Windows machines so if you have some other OS, those won't be useful to you, but the html text files of all kinds of interesting history and other information would still be available to you on any OS, as well as the thousands of games. And apparently, Mr Matthew's book.

the Kombilo database is Python based (and Open Source), so it should run anywhere (though you may need to fiddle with the dials a bit depending on your OS). I've only been successfully at getting Kombilo up and running once or twice myself, and still don't have any other database -- still wondering what all the hype is about

But I still love having all the games, and I dig though them to find stuff from time to time (even without a database).

Or you could import the games into your own database, if you've already purchased something else already.

Its well worth the price. Over the years, I've bought at least 3 CD's (I never went with the subscription service anyway), and I need to buy another just to get the most latest updates. Hoping to do so at this year's US Go Congress in Tacoma.

It is only worthwhile annoying people if it's in a good cause. Of course I realised I was being provocative. Here's the deal: the so-called "valuable resource" is indeed that - it's a huge chunk of the most significant game records, which for the most part existed previously on paper only. They have been digitised for you. This is the "legacy" that is going to make studying go significantly easier for the next generation. The complaint that it is in a "legacy format" - what do think it was in before?

Exactly how people value what they say is "valuable" tells you a lot about them. (Think of the environment?) What I'm reading here is someone giving a consumer complaint.

The book called Fighting Fit was the next project with Kim. Referring to the other thread in which I talk about "exemplars", it was a collection of examples of positions taken from amateur games. So, a middle game book. A couple of British players who saw it didn't like the style. So it was hard to go on after that.

It's a good illustration of the difference between "European" and "Asian" thinking I was talking about, given that the same players liked Shape Up!. If you try to get exhaustive about the middle game, I think what you get instead is exhaustion?

I don't understand your objection in the slightest. Nobody is snubbing CD-ROMs - many modern computers are simply not built to accept them. The games themselves are a valuable resource. A CD-ROM, on the other hand, is as useless to me as a floppy disk or a roll of ticker tape, because I don't have a CD-ROM drive or the money to buy one. Unlike paper, they're not "legacy" - they're obsolete, and soon they'll be extinct.

(And somehow I think it's a gratuitous waste of time to spend countless thousands of hours digitising games to make them more widely available and useful, and then publish them only in a not very widely available, and so not very useful, format. It's none of my business, of course, but I'd have thanked anyone who told me that CDs were obsolete and jumped at the chance to make my product more widely available, whereas the reaction that Toge and I have had is somewhat different. I can't help but find this rather confusing.)

OK, you have had your answer: a polite request to purchase on a memory stick would have done something for you.

As for the rest, 0/10 for attitude. Server go may come to you, but for the rest (NB that server go is the blind leading the blind to some extent) you may have to meet it half way. A trip to Asia; or puzzling out material written in a foreign language ... need I go on? There is nothing at all that says that the information you need about go will automatically be available in English, explained at your current level, and in a format that happens to match the hardware you currently have.

GoGoD doesn't charge a commercial price for its product, you know. (The people who sell you machines very much do that.) I think, in return, you could at least try to be polite and appreciative. If you are confused by being told that the "market" is not the driver, and is not going to be the driver, for the global development of go, so much the better. You might then start to wonder what is.

I am glad that there are people in the world who have this much free time and money to spend on a hobby, but I'm not one of them!


Right. There's nothing at all that promises me that I have some inalienable right from birth for GoGoD to exist. But it does. Why? Because its producers and distributors want it to be as widely available as possible - the same reason you published your book online, and the same reason I help people on this forum. We all want go material to be as widely available as possible.

CDs are becoming obsolete - perhaps you could pop into your local HMV and ask them what this means in practice for those who sell CDs.

I repeat my advice: a simple line on the GoGoD website that says "we're happy to sell in other formats too - just get in touch", and a list of file formats for those who have non-Windows machines, would make this valuable resource far more widely available with 5 minutes' worth of effort. We (here on L19 reading this thread) know this like the back of our hands already, but we are a negligibly small proportion of western go players, and it would help everyone else (including myself before I found L19) to have that information come straight from the horse's mouth - that's all. If you can give me a good reason why this is an unreasonable and/or impolite and/or unappreciative thing to ask, please do. If you can't, feel free to keep criticising my manners / attitude / sense of entitlement / "street cred", I suppose.

It's not a question of "street cred," billywoods. There is nothing wrong with giving advice, and even constructive criticism can be helpful under the right circumstances. I will assume that you are trying to be helpful in your own way.

The problem is that you are coming off as criticizing TMark and JF (and I realize this may not be your intent) for the way they distribute GoGoD, and this is likely to cause some negative reactions. It's important for you to understand that GoGoD is essentially a monumental labor of love from two knowledgeable and dedicated people. It is ludicrously cheap for what is contains, and it is the product of many thousands of hours of work (including the entry of every game in the database by hand) for which its creators have received little, if any, compensation. (I wouldn't be surprised if the money from the sales of GoGoD barely covered the costs of creating it, without any compensation for the huge amount of time and effort involved.) I know you have indicated you are ignorant of the backstory, but in such situations, Google is your friend.

Your comments could be perceived as criticizing TMark and JF for not presenting their material in a format most convenient to you, even though this poses at most a minor inconvenience to you in the face of truly Herculean labors by them. I don't think this is what you meant, but you could perhaps be more careful about how you say things. The fact that this material is available at all to Westerners is the result of what is perceived by many to be a miracle of selflessness on the part of TMark and JF, and you are likely to get some backs up when you seem to be suggesting that they should have done more or done things differently.

Analogy time:

"I personally can't make use of files on CDs. Is there any solution we can work out, maybe a download?....Oh, you'll mail me a flash drive? Great! I think there's a lot of people like me, and you might get business from them if you made a note of that on your website."
:
"CDs are obsolete!"

::

"ehhhh, excooosez-moy, parley-vooze anglez?" ("excuse me, do you speak english?")
:
" WHY DO YOU STUPID FRENCH PEOPLE NOT HAVE SIGNS IN ENGLISH?"

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Occupy Babel!

I've said many times that I cannot access CDs, and I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm being taken seriously. After spending £20 on a CD full of sgf files, it may well seem like only a minor inconvenience to you to then spend another £15 on a trip to and from my nearest public library and a cheap flash drive to transport the files back home, but I hope you understand that money is tight and £35 is two weeks' food for me! And I'm not just talking about myself here, of course - Toge and palapiku have already raised similar concerns about the obsolescence of CDs, and I'd bet there were other people not on L19 who had come across GoGoD in the past and thought the same.


Well, sort of. I'm suggesting that their truly Herculean labours might just go to far more use if they spent 5 minutes updating their website a little bit. If I had put monumental amounts of time and effort into a project and intended to distribute it for free purely for its own sake, I'd be very grateful to know of any way in which I could spread it even further with minimal work. I am neither criticising their efforts nor telling them to do it differently; I'm just saying that there are people out there who want GoGoD and think they can't get it (like me a year ago), and I thought that they would probably be glad to know about this.

I am sorry if I have not come across as grateful for the work that T Mark and John have done. Of course I am grateful. I hope that T Mark and John don't mistake my comments towards Charles for comments towards them. I think they're doing a great job, and my only criticism of them so far is that they haven't advertised well enough how helpful they actually are. I'm a great believer in freedom of access to information, and I hope one day I can contribute like they have. And, indeed, T Mark turned up and told me that he would be willing to send me the files on a flash drive. So I have nothing to complain about.