I posted this last year to godiscussions before it died: http://fuseki.net/home/kgs-pledge.html

quick summary - I love kgs, and i'm willing to put money behind my ideas, to support it becoming even better.

I am writing now because the new version of kgs stops cgoban-h from logging in - which means the wonderful features it added are no longer available. quick summary - these are:

1. mouse wheel moves forward/back in moves - so great. I missed this immediately whenever I have to use the normal client.
2. mousing over coordinates in kibitz highlights that spot on board - this is brilliant for talking about variations - just mouse over the sequence and see what they mean! it's also good for single moves - no more tracing out the position from the edges!
3. colors in user info game history - wins are one color, losses another (rather than them both being black!)

I threw a couple other ideas I like into the pledge:

1. fischer timing - this is an old hobby horse and people can take both sides.

I think the recent trend for high dans to play weird time settings like 99 x 10s shows that there is change in timings and there is a desire for timings which allow a lot of in-game variation in time spent per move. Fischer is the best of these. and to step back a little bit - in general, if there is an argument about an action C, and person A says let's just TRY it one time, and B insists that he can prove that the action is incorrect or useless, I think B's stance is a lot harder to defend. And in the case of fischer, what about if a bunch of domain experts are just begging to try action C for a while, and see if it works? I think that makes it even harder for B to defend the stance. Because they can't even use their go knowledge as an argument from authority for why they would forbid people from trying it. Not every good player wants to try it, but hey, some smart players do want to try it and think it would be a good way to play! (and I have used it at my go club a lot, and like it more than any other setting)

if it's too much work to implement that's another story - but the argument that it's provably not any good is just untenable. and so i added fischer timing to the pledge because i'd like to try it as well.

2. uneven timing - this is just something i'd like to try for free games. it'd let W play as hard as they can in handi games and still make the game interesting and fair, while allowing a more normal opening.

anyway, your thoughts are appreciated, thanks KGSers!

Ernie

Oh yeah, this would be really awesome.

While there are many great features in cgoban-h that are not in cgoban, the one feature I care about far more than the others is the the human byo-yomi countdown. That is unbelievably useful for maximizing my thinking time during byo-yomi, and is the one feature I notice most when it is missing.

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Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
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