Hello everyone… we’ve been working like crazy on the next version of OGS. This is going to be the 4th major version of online-go.com so we are calling it 4.0.

We have two main goals with 4.0:

Reimplement the UI such that it is faster and cleaner

Reimplement the core web service as an api

The first point above is obvious but why the second one? We have been working on the site for over a year now… we started out as nova.gs and merged with the original OGS in October of last year. We’ve realized that there are some things that we wanted to do different and better. We also realized that a lot of the bugs we have been encountering had some common themes and we wanted to fix those and provide a stronger foundation for building more features that our users have been requesting.

We also wanted to provide an api into our system that other programmers can use to integrate into OGS and to build awesome things that work with it. No other Go server in the world does this. We know that other software developers and programmers have good ideas and would be well served with a platform to work on, so we are extremely excited about what the future holds in that regard.

So how can you help? First… we need to make sure the new site works as good as the old one so go here:

online-go.com Online-Go The best place to play Go online!

You’ll need to create a new account as this is a totally clean system. Also, be aware that from time to time we may purge the database and start over. Nothing that happens on the beta site will ever make its way over to the production system.

Now, we still have a little work to do… the things that we know about will be highlighted in bright orange. In the coming days we’ll be fixing those up.

I’d like for all bug reporting and discussion to happen in a new forum category that I’ve created just for this purpose:

Lastly… we are looking for programmers and developers who want to get an early start and help us test out the api. Currently the API is fully browseable from within the web browser by going to:

http://beta.online-go.com/api/

The best way for you to access it from within your own code will be to integrate into our oauth2 authentication scheme and for this you’ll need a client… we haven’t quite finished up our development portal so if you are interested in this please contact me and I will create a client id and secret for you. I’ll also have the development portal up fairly soon but we can go this route in the meantime.