KGSWishlist/KGSPlus

Sub-page of KGSWishlist

5. KGS-Plus

Preface

While most features of KGS-plus are limited to KGS-Plus subscribers, some parts can also be used by normal KGS users: watching and listening free lessons or sometimes enter a KGS-Plus tournament.

Table of contents


Unsorted ideas and requests

KGS-Tournaments: use rank at time of tournament start, not at registration

  • TonyAdria: This is generally for those of us FURIOUS about the tournaments... They bite you too often if someone enters at the start and improves the least bit! Giving 3 stones to 1 rank weaker? wow jeeze thanks for not letting me play :(!! I would suggest that you change it so its rank at time of PLAY START not at REGISTRATION START. Otherwise people could just underplay and account up to registration then bump it to regular and voila... 3 extra stones on the board bada-bing bada-boom victory! (ive been kicked by this in BOTH iron man tournaments on KGS now... THREE TIMES in the first one and already once in the second one in roun d 6... it NEEDS to be fixed)

Voting on new features

  • Batavia?: It would be nice if KGS+ members could vote on which new features they find important. Transgaming (cedega/winex) let their subscribers vote on which features/games they found most important and wanted supported. Of course this wouldn't have to be a free for all but if you (wms) had two features that you wanted to implement in the near future it would be nice to let kgs+ members decide which one gets implemented first.

Accessing old lectures

  • i'd like to be able to set the start date of my subscription so that I can watch older lectures. (excession)
    • wms restricted the access to prevent people seeing older lectures. If anything maybe one can hope that he'll make them availible by extensing your time backwards at a lower cost (as no turnaments and such would be availible...)... Reuven
    • claintThis is actually a very bad marketing stragedy. If you let the older lessons be viewable, the 'value' of the kgs membership increases with time, thus will cause more subscriptions as more lessons pile up. Right now, you make people wait for their investment, they don't get immediate reward when they sign up. You think you are forcing people to sign up early, but you are forgetting that you are also forcing some to not to sign up, because you are not treating everyone equal.
    • wms: Claint, I think you have it backwards. If KGS plus would let you see all lectures ever, no matter when you sign up, then the longer you wait to sign up, the more you get for your money. To me it seems that any business plan that encourages people to wait as long as they possibly can before paying for anything is extremely foolish. Like most people running a business, I want my orders to come in as soon as possible, so I set it up so that the sooner you sign up, the sooner you start building up a library of lectures that you can watch!
      • claint I guess I should have been more clear. What i am against, is that you can never see the old lectures. I am not against old lectures being accessable by money. That is why I wrote the previous post as a subtopic to the above wish item. But this got me thinking about the business model. I feel we both made the same wrong assumption on our above posts. I had moved that discussion to KGSOldLecturesDiscussion.
    • SirLyric: Though I can see Claint's point as well, wms is exactly right about the disincentive to subscribe. What I would like to see, though, is the capability to access old lectures when you renew a lapsed membership. Of course not those that occurred while you were lapsed (otherwise, again, disincentive), but if I'm a member for five years, say, and I let my membership lapse for a month, and then come back, I think it's only fair to still be able to access the older lectures I could before, rather than losing all access to them. This would obviously have to be specific to a username, of course. Thoughts? (Thanks for putting together such a great service, I'm really enjoying it!)
    • SirLyric: As a further thought, wms, I wonder if you might consider letting KGS Plus lectures lapse into public accessibility, say, after two years, or maybe a selection of the very best? This might also help to build demand as users get a taste of what they'd see...
    • wms: Ah, now I see it. Yes, I do hope to offer old lectures eventually. I just am not ready for that yet, but I hope to eventually either offer people a way to buy a "backdating" of their subscription, or else possibly just put up the old lessons on a pay-per-view type system. We'll have to see which works out. For the pay-per-view, I'll probably have to talk to the original instructors first; my agreement with them is very weak (well, there is none, I just send them a check and they give a lecture), but doing a pay-per-view system is "different" enough from the original use that I think I would have to talk to them about it first.
    • RiffRaff: What I'd like to see is not pay-per-view, but a way of "upgrading" an existing subscription to include the older lectures through a one-time fee. Basically paying once to backdate your subscription. I also think it'd be a good idea to designate one of the older lectures as a free lecture that can be viewed by anyone, as an example to non-subscribers of what KGS Plus lectures are like.
    • CulleyHarrelson I run several on-line businesses. In the online world content = traffic = money. You have a great set of content here. You are limiting your business by not providing access to the old lectures in some form. For my part, I have favorite lecturers-- I would like to see old content based on the teacher, or the subject if there is an old lecture that meets my current study topics. I understand your hesitation to make *all* old lectures available with a membership but I think you would be surprised of the effect. I work for a $1.5M+ company that has a similar ever-growing library of content and you get full access to all the content when you join. Your renewal rates would increase. On another note I would love to see regular new commentaries of pro games by pros included with the plus membership.
    • blubb: How about something along the lines of [ext] http://www.audioeurogolessons.com? As far as I see, many lectures offered there stem from KGS anyway, but the set of teachers is restricted. Maybe the projects could cooperate for KGS+ in general?
      Anyway, that's just another idea. Actually, I find the "membership backdating" most reasonable, where you can buy some months' lessons later on (preferrably for a somewhat reduced price, since you don't get tournaments nor interactive live lectures).
    • satie: How about to give for each month subscription also access to one month further in the past. So each month subscription extends your access by one month towards the future as well towards the past. If you'll subscribe long enough you get everything. For a better business model you might even consider to extend backwards only after some waiting time.

"Lectures" submenu, show format, length etc.

  • nachtrabe In the "Lectures" submenu it would be nice if by each lecture we could see the format (e.g., audio/text), the language (so far all English?), the length, and one or two words describing the topic (e.g., the 5 March 2005 Lecture by Shen Jing, 2p was on Joseki).
    • Babibo Also, being able to see the level of the lecture at a glance would help me choose the lectures I'll watch (e.g beginner / low kyu / high kyu / dan player)

"Lectures" submenu, sort, checkbox for "already watched"

  • oren Allow users to sort by lecturer rather than by just month and year. Also allow users to mark that a lecture has been watched previously with a checkbox.
    • Babibo In general, allow users to mark the lectures as "seen", "to be watched again", "didn't like", etc...

Teachers could be able to record lessons

  • gottago I don't know if this counts as a lecture suggestions, but I'd like teachers on the KGS to be able to record audio review sessions of their private lessons for students to playback later. I love Mr. Yangs lectures, and I take occasional private lessons from him, but in those private lessons he has to type in all of his comments, which consumes valuable lesson time.

Buy old lectures

  • Usagi My account was deleted even though I had recently logged on (still waiting for an explanation from the admins), and I lost access to months and months of KGS Plus lectures. I was told I can't get them back. So I really don't feel like paying for KGS plus again. And I do not understand why you can't pay the pro or whatever extra money for the rights to broadcast or resell the lectures. Or buy old lectures. Oh come on, let us buy old lectures. Or at least keep the ones we paid for. Sign it into their contract. Just double their fee if they sign off to let you sell the collection piece by piece. EVERYONE WINS. Is it really so hard?

Email reminder before the kgs+ suscription expires

  • Rythmic? EMAIL reminder 1-2 weeks before the kgs+ suscription expires. This is so you don't lose your saved lectures when the account expires before you renew. Also, I agree: you pay for lectures for 1 year, so those should be saved whatever, even after account expires.

Title for past lectures

  • feature? Title for past lectures would make it much easier to remember which lectures we havent watched yet or find interesting. For example "Value of Stones" or "Review Tengen Title Match #2".

Stone sound for moves, bell (or some such) for text

jfc: I just signed up for KGS plus and have been watching an old lecture. It would be nice if there were sounds to tell me when to look at a new text message. Perhaps all KGS game boards could allow the player to enable/disable stone sounds and a kibitz bell independently.

During the lecture the presenter often sets up a position and then asks a question. At this point I stare at the board and think. Having a kibitz bell would tell me when the teacher (or anyone else) has "spoken" again.

Reminder emails for lectures

SirLyric: It would be great to be able to sign up for reminder emails about lectures, perhaps the morning of, or n hours beforehand. I always forget! This would also help with situations like this month, where guojuan's lecture time is tentative.

Saving non plus lectures

Batavia?: It would also be nice if KGS-Plus members could save non plus lectures. The Ing foundation and Skyghost are offering free lectures. At this moment the best i can do is to save the sgf. It would be nice if KGS Plus members could also save the soundtrack (just like normal plus lectures). Maybe, to save harddisk space, this could be done only for the few 'big' lectures like those of the Ing Foundation and Skyghost so it would only have to be saved once for all kgs plus memers.

beans?: To respond to Batavia; the KGS Plus schedule is available on Google Calendar (link on the schedule page), so you can add the events to your own account and Google will email or alert you (there is an SMS alert option available in some places).

Lecture metadata

Pel?: The main reason I'd like this is that I often find myself wanting to review something I remember from a lecture by someone sometime ago.. even if i know it's goujuan a couple of months ago - it's really time consuming to find it.

Tags for lectures

It would be really awesome if I could tag lectures with keywords that are relevant to me, that doesn't have to be stored serverside even though i'd prefer it (same thing goes for buddies btw). E.g.: "ThreeSpaceJump?", "HoninboGame?", "3-3Joseki".

Lesson titles editable for subscribers

Another cool alternative would be if there was a text associated with each lesson that subscribers could edit so you'd get an idea what the lesson covers.

Language tag for each lecture

Batavia?: Also it would be VERY convenient to at least have a language tag for each lecture. especially now there are frequent lectures in English, French German i believe i've heared Japanese. you do get to know some teachers but it's starting to get (slightly) annoying at times to have to go through 4 lectures before you find the next one in your language.

Batavia?: look at the Kgs Lectures page

KGS Plus user account associated with an email address

tealeaf Whilst I imagine multiple user accounts are discouraged, many people do maintain them. Would it be possible for a KGS Plus subscription to be associated with an email address rather than a user account? This would allow a user with multiple accounts to always access KGS Plus lectures without logging in and out, or to allow easy access when an old account falls into disuse.

wms: Here's a problem that will mean I can't possibly do it: If teahouse@gmail.com (for account "teahouse") has KGS Plus, then I just set my own email to be teahouse@gmail.com, watch a few lectures, then put it back to wms@igoweb.org again. Wow, free KGS Plus! :-( Sure, I could say "well, you have to *set up* the account with that email address, so that it is confirmed," but that adds a whole lot of mess. And what about when you change to teahouse@hotmail.com? Etc. It just isn't practical.

Audio Overdrive (? = normalization?)

Many of the lectures do not know how to set their levels and their audio can be inaudible over laptop speakers without significant rerouting. Audio overdrive similar to what's avaliable on audiogolessons.com would be very useful.

Rating certificate

rs220675?: What about a rating certificate like IGS already has. Would be very motivating to get KGSPlus plus you could demand some extra money for it. Of course the rating would have to be somehow realistic.

Audio Lecture Captions

Make available a captioned version of kgsplus lectures. Maybe multiple versions for different languages. I'm sure we could get volunteers to help transcribing. (There are deaf kgs plus subscribers)

- I always wanted to do that (and even asked some admins about it).
I am ready to help transcribing (French-English, and English-French) if this ever becomes possible.
This would give many KGS+ subscribers access to lecture from Fan Hui and Motoki, for example, and vice-versa.
(You're unfortunately missing on something very nice if you are hearing impaired or can't understand the langage they are given in)
(Many great lectures should be available in other langages!).
I'm EdhelDil? on KGS.

Tag ever seen lectures

lorl? : I do not come frequently on KGS+, and I would like to visualize what are the lecture I've already seen, and what are these I never seen? Would it be possible to tag lectures already read ? (by example by put them in 'grey' in the list).

Turbo Typing

cling? : In recorded games with no audio, some people type their comments rather slowly. It would be great if, in reviews, the timing could be dynamically compressed to compensate. This would reduce time spent waiting by 10s of minutes.

Navigation in the tree diagram

cling? : I often wish to rewind a sequence that has just been shown in a recorded game. Right now this means using the playback bar, with not-so-great time resolution. It would be nice if clicking a stone in the tree diagram would jump back to the point in the recording when it was most recently used.

Audio and game buffered client side

It would be even nicer if the audio and game were buffered client side (to disk I guess, though most people could handle it in RAM) so that these navigations were instant. Right now, the audio buffers play out when paused, and I assume the game state is retrieved from the server when you rewind.

KGS+ lectures: by topic

blue88?: We need a new column for the kgs+ menu containing the topic of each lecture. You advertise a library of KGS+ lectures for subscribers but there is no way to use the 'saved lectures' menu as a library without such a topic column. :)

KGS+ lectures: by lecturer

rottenhat? It would be good if the list of saved lectures for KGS Plus Users could be sorted by lecturer rather than by date only.

Wishes granted

wukong There are a number of items in the wishlist which I've addressed on plusOne.


KGSWishlist/KGSPlus last edited by satie on June 18, 2012 - 15:16
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