KGS Issue - Accepting another user's challenge

When a player posts an offer for a game and I challenge them, sometimes they accept another player's challenge. When that happens, the game opens and gives me a message saying that the person has accepted another user's challenge; I am not playing in the game but I can watch it.

This is annoying because the entire game window has to load, and then I have to close it. When I am challenging another player, I want to play, not watch other people play. If the player accepts another person's challenge, CGoban should notify me of this without opening the game window, so I can go look for another game without having to close the window.

This is a minor annoyance, but I am aware of a number of other users who are annoyed by it.

xela: It's sometimes an annoyance, but it's also sometimes a useful feature. Suppose someone (maybe a high dan) posts an offer and you decide that you'd like to watch their game, even though you don't yet know who they'll end up playing. If you open the challenge window, then when they accept someone's challenge you'll see the game. It's easier than periodically checking the game list to see if they've started yet.

Of course, there may be a more elegant way of implementing this particular feature, but that means even more work for wms.

Karl Knechtel: There's an elegant and IMHO perfectly obvious way of implementing it. Put up the dialog (with appropriately modified text), without opening the game. Add a "Watch Game" button that if clicked will open the game.

blubb: Nice idea. Indeed, I find mere notification popups really bothersome where they keep asking for confirmation every time even though their informational value to an experienced user approaches zero. (This concerns the "time to score the game" warning and the re-introduced "this game can't be rated" warning, as well.)

wms has said that he doesn't like players to be challenged, if they just want to relax. So why not set up a game queue for each player? All the people who want to challenge a player place their name on his game queue. When the player is in the mood to start a new game, he picks the most desirable opponent out of his game queue. Some players may want to use this feature to wait for the most desirable opponent, before he decides to start a new game. To place your name on the player's game queue, you right click on his name, and the right click menu has an item called "Challenge". You click on the menu item, and your name is added to his game queue. If you start a new game, or if you flag yourself as inactive, or if you log off, all your challenges are deleted from other players' game queues, and your own game queue is cleared.