About Kaya.gs

Hey everyone. Its been a really long while since I write a post and I owe all our users more information about what is going on.


Since March I started working for Scribd.com and in July I moved indefinitely to San Francisco. Im part of the front-end team of Scribd and among learning loads of css (thing dp used to do exclusively on Kaya) I work on pages and projects that move millions of users everyday.

That is a tall order and its demanding a lot from me, adding to that moving to another country and living in another language.

Dp himself also has a new job and with it, very big responsibilities and deadlines: he manages a team and he has to deliver projects by very tight deadlines in competition with other teams.

Since March Kaya hasnt advanced the way we wanted and envisioned Kaya to live forever: as a permanent improvement development. Knowing that supporter funding would not be enough in the long run, one of our ideas has always been to open source Kaya and tap community contrinbutions and development power. Thats why OpenKaya exists.

We want to open up the server entirely, but doing so without preparation is stopping us from doing it straight up. It can be very daunting to run thousands of lines of code with a double server architecture as we have.

I personally also applaud the efforts of Nova.gs, which have been doing very well in the past 8 months or so. I suggest they put efforts into the open source side if they ever plan to do it as it becomes more difficult to do later on.

As a post-mortem, my biggest technical regrets are not working towards an open code early on (even if we kept it closed) and not automating server recovery, thing that plagues Kaya even today when there is a system crash.
We were also hit very hard by technologies that changed abruptly from 2011 (when Kaya started being developed) into oblivion, which made me do custom maintenance of code no longer supported by its original writers.

Announcement

On september 2011, DP and I stopped working on our respective jobs to be able to devote full time to Kaya.gs

In less than 3 months we published an alpha version with the most raw of all features. In the following 6 months we expanded the server with features relentlessly and after that more gradually, as we had to also take care of project maturity, scalability and reliability.

Today, Kaya.gs is a very stable project, with only a few nuisances to improve and then only features to pump and improve.

However, although funding has let us spend a huge amount of time into the project, is it s not enough to support our lifehood. Because of that, it became necessary for me to look for a job.

This does not mean Kaya wont be advancing, but the strategy has to change and we are devising a plan for that.

We will stop doing the weekly releases as of now, and we will work towards building a very stable and nice-looking site. Adding features it not our immediate priority: Kaya already has a huge bundle of features that most registered users haven't explored or seen, and adding more will have limited value.

We might include features that are already server supported, but haven't gotten to the client (there are several big ones for that actually) but our priority right now is to finish the site's visual look&feel.

We will be also playing and providing technical support. See you on Kaya.

Regards, Gabriel.

Back from a weekend getaway, and working on getting Kaya up.

Hey everyone! I just arrived to a usable computer and found out Kaya was down for 2 days!.

2 Days ago I went to a small town called Villa General Belgrano in Argentina to spend a few days there eating german cuisine and relax. Unfortunately, because I dont have a usable portable copmuter right now, and Pato is on 100% disconnected vacations on Bolivia, Kaya was vulnerable to issues.

Unfortunately, shortly after i left, Kaya went down and there was no-one around to fix it. This is my responsibility and I deeply apologize for this.

Kaya does not have a sysadmin expert and we are still going through all the infrastructure setup that would make the server more reliable to system issues. In this case, the HD got 100% full, and the site stopped working.

Im working on putting Kaya up, and  I will be answering all the emails I got promptly.


UPDATE: Kaya is now up

Kaya.gs down last night

Fortunately after a moderate time i was able to check the situation and revert it, however, the same crash scenario happened again.

One kaya user was trying out robustness of the site and sent some large data, which seems to have caused one dependency library to crash, provoking a reaction on the core service.

That particular situation was repeated this morning to reproduce, and  it is now adressed to not happen.


Web clients are particularly easy to fool around with and although we dont expect to get critical issues like this, we will promptly fix and address them. Thanks to this user a vulnerability is now known to us and we can not only fix it , but think in the future in terms of preventing it.

Kaya is now up and stable for use.

BadukTV on Kaya

We had always planned to make servers more related to online video. One of the key points we identified missing from servers is the focus on entertainment, on the ability for users to enjoy an experience without playing.

Because of that, we devised the Broadcasts, right off the bat, as our prototype shows.

Broadcasts are simple games with a space dedicated to Video to enjoy extra content such as the players, commentary, interviews and more.

Thanks to Jeansebl we broadcasted several Quebec League games and even I myself held a lecture on a game I played on the Argentinian championship.

Making videos is fun but its also hard. It takes effort and a team, and BadukTV has this problem down.

Considering using BadukTV on Kaya we contacted them, and they kindly provided us with a testing stream for a month. 

We will hold events to make use of this stream and  see how valuable this is for users and how important it can be for us to hire BadukTV's services.

Check out the Kaya Countdown to see which is the next event. It might very well be one of the Broadcasts with BadukTV!

Preparing some vacation time

No, its not a vacation feature for Correspondence!

We are actually starting to plan some developing vacations for ourselves.
We started Kaya.gs full time on september 2011. Kaya.gs first version came out on christmas that year and for the following 6 months, I worked weekends and more than 10 hours a day !

Lots of effort has been put in and Kaya is better than ever. Now that emergencies are rare and can be handled easily, we need some rest time.

We are still working over the dates.

Moreover, the past two weeks were insane for me. My grandfather passed away and I spent a few days with my family last week.

This happened midweek and definitely changed plans, both on Kaya and daily life. Even worse, my computer finally broke down again!

So until today i wasnt able to work, hence the thin but important fixes for correspondence, and the next big feature was put on hold until the next week.


Im also glad to see so many correspondence games being played, and people enjoying the server at all times. Shikkis problem solving has become a classic, and Franciscos constant challenge in the server is thrilling :)

Stay tuned for the next newsletter!

The first newsletter

We just sent Kaya.gs's first newsletter.

We had planned on making it a long time ago and surprisingly, styling it and give it a feel took  a lot more effort than was expected.

Since inception 100's of correspondence games were started and we expect a lot more to come. This way, starting and continuing games is super easy in our platform, while you can also enjoy the novel features of the real time go server, such as malkovich comments, live chat and more.

Because we didn't think about the newsletter until later of 2012, we didnt include the classic opt-in in user sign up, so we sent an initial newsletter to people that had it off and from before the time we had the opt-in.

This is only a one time sending for them, with the option to join in the newsletter. The rest of the users will get the regular newsletter very shortly! Stay tuned, it looks awesome :).

Regards, Gabriel.

The Killer feature: Correspondence games

A few versions back we finally release the Killer Feature.

Over the course of Kaya we noticed that many users are very busy and use the server at Work or visiting friends, so they have a small window of opportunity to play a few moves and then come back.

Thats why we implemented correspondence games, becoming the First Hybrid server of live/correspondence games out there.

Over 100 correspondence games are ongoing right now and it is extremely easy to get a game on Kaya.
Furthermore you can also play the game live just as any other if your opponent is online.

We also gave correspondence games the ability to use the score estimator and also being able to use the edit-offline feature giving the players absolute ease of study and time to produce and think the best move possible.

Try it out! Get on kaya and get a correspondence game, and play at your own pace :)

Meijin, Open Kaya and Sports Accord.

As promised on the last post, i was going to talk more about OpenKaya.

Part of our original plan and strategy for Kaya is to be a open platform. The go community has a high degree of computer scientists and mathematicians, including famous Ruby programmer Ryan Bates (who did the GovsGo site).

And thus we opened the OpenKaya Github Repository.

There are many features and independent projects to be run from OpenKaya and that will get into the server.
Actually Kaya has many things done by collaborators: The scoring algorithm, the Score Estimator, the rating system.
Ideas for the rank graph, the gtp bot client and more came from there. And there are a big number of things to do to.

All work done on OpenKaya is open-sourced: anyone can use code made available from there , thus enriching the community.

We help out by providing an outline, tests and code for contributors to hack into problems directly and provide a solution that we assess and decide to put on the server later.

Right now there are a few collaborators with tasks, such as JQ and crodgers (Yes guys, im totally burning you. If you dont commit soon this post will be your shame :) ) and Enders.

This brings us to one huge collaborator of the project: Enders. He has provided high quality code on the covert-ops projects of Kaya, and the scoring algorithm. And this week he became a Meijin of the project, helping us out even further.

Kaya is run thanks to the donations of the users, that had not been here, we would not be able to dedicate all the time we do to the project.

Last but not least, programming is not the only way to collaborate or do something for the Go community. Kaya has the unique broadcast system and next week there is an awesome opportunity: The SportsAccord tournament.
Several users have contacted me about broadcasting them, but the more the merrier, as there is a game every day and we should not strain collaborators :).
IF you want to get the collaborator kanji and a load of karma, contact us at the server and we will show you how to make broadcasts.

Next week i will be around surely to comment the games and make sure all goes smoothly.

More UI changes on 1.17

On the last release we finally removed the footer, and we used a Kongregate-style menu to organize different links.

We are happy with the practicality of the new location, although we are sure to ask a designer for extra tips on how to make it look best.

This week we also had several adjustment because of a big server improvement regarding game saving. The process is not always foolproof in the sense that our storage db does not always answer quickly. 

So I improved the way storing is handled to make sure data is saved properly and it does not affect the server itself when there are delays or inconveniences.

December also started now and we have to get ready for 25th of december : the birthday of Kaya;s server!. We are planning some changes for then, i hope we make it on time :).

This week was rough because a pervasive problem has been happening a lot since the latest change. We had smoe heavy discussion on some of the tools we use on Kaya.

Kaya is built with state of the art tools, servers , libraries and services and that is a double edged sword: we are super ahead in html5 gaming services , as we are truly pioneers of such a complex experience on a browser. However, these technologies dont have the same level of maturity and as such, we have to patch or work over weaknesses in these new technologies.

I worked a lot for almost a month in making kaya work more stable an w e are getting to the point where any issue that arises is small and easy to handle.

 

For the moment, stay tuned for the Killer Feature, we might be able to make it for 1.18!

Also i have more news for OpenKaya, as more collaborators join the open side of the project, but that will be another post :)

See you guys on Kaya!

1.16, Best Score Estimator Ever and Header improvements, and the Killer Feature

Kaya 1.16 Beta brought some delicious features.

Although we've been assigning resources to the Killer Feature (yet to be disclosed) we were able to pull through some changes.

The most important one is the final version of the Score Estimator, that user aleski did, and we merged into Gospeed, our Go Board technology.

This final version is fully editable. You can not only select living/dead groups, you can also single out single points of territory and mark them as you wish, for the most accurate and comfortable Score Estimator out there.

We also improved the header to show more information, mainly how many games you need to rank up and how far from it are you.

As the server matures, more and more tasks that are (almost) invisible to the users show up, improving performance, reliability. 

Currently the Killer Feature is VERY advanced. We may be able to release the first version of it next week. It is really a neat and important feature and we have advanced on its own subfeatures a lot. 

We are excited and it will make Kaya a more lively place :).

Enjoy 1.16!

Updates, Facebook and a Live video commentary.

Many new features have been implemented on Kaya.

This week we made a visual change on the main page, displaying a new header : smaller and more compact, giving more space to the whole site.
And it came with a vast improvement to the inbox: it works more like Facebook now. Its fancy and practical.

Lately both DP and I have been working a lot on some new and exciting changes. Because they are so big, they wont get into the server until they are more or less complete, and we have devoting a lot of resources to them.

I must say that these 2 changes are huge and will change a lot how Kaya is experienced. One of them is what is known on the server as "The killer feature". Hopefully we will be able to deploy it by december, and it will change everything :).

Speaking of Facebook, we also added a very cool feature: Facebook sharing. Its cool because not only you can share a game, but as you do it a snapshot is taken and the board is shared right as you see it on that moment.

Non Kaya users can still see the game after its over, as the whole archiving system does not require an account, and other kaya users can just click and join the game and start chatting!

Also, today i will be making a broadcast from my home commenting the most important match of the Argentinian 2012 Championship.
The event is going to be broadcasted on Kaya and observers will not only be able to see the game, but participate in the discussion. The scribe will check variations and send them back to me and i will respond on them on the mural board.

The whole event will be recorded and used as an example on the power of Broadcasts. Interactive Video can only happen at Kaya :).

You can check the site's countdown(or the servers) to see when its going to start.
site's.


See you on Kaya!

Amazon is down( and so is Kaya)

Unfortunately, our server provider is having huge technical issues, ones we cant go around with (as they affect the server themselves).

We will be back up as soon as they fix it up.

Related news:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/reddit-netflix-down-amazon_n_2002656.html?utm_hp_ref=technology

Sorry for the inconvenience! Amazon is pretty good most of the time, but it can also be pretty mean some of the other time.

Regards, Gabriel.

UPDATE: and as soon as i published this, the server went back up.

Is customer complaining THAT effective? :)

Newsletter, Account releases, 38 community requested features, Rank Graphs and more

Its been a while since i posted, mainly because  I've been giving most announcements through the site's countdown and inside the server.

We are preparing now a newsletter so we can send announcements and important news to all the users of Kaya.gs , which since our consistent releases, has reached over 2000 users.

We are growing steadily as a community, but also growing a lot technically, providing a richer and better experience each week.

Today I checked out our UserVoice Feedback section, which is used to suggest ideas and powerful features for the server.
We have completed 38 community requested features. Most of them absolutely novel ideas, not in any other server in the world.

We really care what our users have to tell us, and we go through a lot of information constantly, and make decisions based on our technical assessment and value of each idea.

Last week we finished what was the #1 Voted requested feature which was the rank graph. We added some basic stats and estimation on how many wins are needed to rank up.

The graph, with the appropiate zoom, also displays individual game results, and links to those games, making it greatly interactive.
And we are working on it right now to add some extra delicacies.

You can check it out on my profile here :
https://beta.kaya.gs/users/conanbatt

We also announced more accounts to be released this wednesday. You can visit kaya.gs for the latest date release.

See you on the server!

Releasing 200 accounts Tomorrow

We are announcing another account release for tomorrow.
Since we started opening up accounts, players have registered within 6 hours! and the last time, they went up in only 3 hours.

1.5 Brought huge changes and the server is healthier than ever. And 1.6 is already packing  a punch for this Friday.  We are focusing on the core playing experience more than ever, and changes to the game page will come frequently.

As users that followed up past the last year, we have been doing a very regular and expected update, improving a lot each week.  Be sure to not miss out the great experience of looking at a server grow, and be here in time to participate in the creation of it.

Kaya has more feedback channels than any other server in the world. Between the idea forum, the tweaki, the constant presence of the developers, the quick-same-day response policy we have on emails, and we've been hearing out everyone. Many of the features we have implemented came from users suggestions.

The countdown is up on the site ! don't miss it .

1.5, Custom Handicap, reliablity and ASR League

This week we havent made an account release. This is because we knew we were going to work on very sensitive stuff and we wouldnt want a whole new wave of players get in so close to this release.

A very large change was done on how Kaya processes and reads SGF, making it much better and more resilient. We are now confident that we can read a lot more games and we now support uploading SGFs and opening a Sandbox with them.

This way you can custom review a game with your friends and other go players.

Also, we added an option to start games with  a desired handicap.

Kaya's  regular autohandicap system means its much easier to start a game, and all games are balanced out, both for rating and for probability of winning.

The more balanced a game is, the more exciting it is and the more worthy towards accurate ratings.

However,  not all games to be played are rated and competitive, and it was impossible to pick any handicap for any opponent before. Now we finally implemented a better challenging system so you can also pick the handicap and komi you wish for a specific opponent.

On the last note, the ASR league has been very successful so far, and over 100 games have been played. We are very happy with this collaboration and i hope this helps the ASR grow as well.


See you guys on the server for 1.5.

ASR Integration on Beta 1.4, Game reviewing and Game Negotiation.

This past week was packed with a lot of action again. This weeks 200 account release was over in 3 hours! Faster than any other release.

And it was a breeze. There was absolutely no lag, marking for us a milestone since the Beta release.
We are technically ready to open up for more and more users.

The great number of users and games has given us a huge amount of feedback. The Tweaki has grown into a 7 headed-Hydra and we are cutting heads as quickly as we can :).

As we improve the quality and reliability of the server, there are a few features in the vecinity.


Two of the most missed features on Kaya right now are the ability to quickly set up a game review, and  being able to pre-set handicap before a game.

They are both in the making and they will be included in the near Future, so be patient about it :).


However, today we are releasing an new feature. Collaborating with the ASR League, specially with founder Stalkor, we have set up an integration of the league into the server.

Starting a league game is extremely easy to do, and the reporting is done automatically. Game rules are enforced, and only other league members are able to accept an ASR game challenge. Of course, you can also pick who you want to play specifically in the league.

Right now there is only one group as this is very new and the first run of the integration. You can quickly sign up by sending a pm to stalkor or to other league admins on the ASR channel.
There are more detailed instructions in the server,  including links with more information.

Server improvements and further account releasing

Last week some famous Kaya users accompanied me in an all-niter i pulled last  Wednesday. 

I had returned from a gathering and found someone online that i could make a technical consultation about, and when i heard the answer i started working immediately. At 1 am. I went straight on until 7am working and polishing a solution that was unavoidable for the server.

Because it was quite grand a change i chose not to do it for 1.3. But today  i did it. It took me less than 5 minutes and all the work i did last week made lots of sense.

The server is now faster and more responsive than ever. It working super fast and this should clear out all the sporadic lag we had in the past week, where we released 400 accoutns in a matter of 3 days.

Provided the new solution is stable today and tomorrow, we will be releasing more accounts this week. Kaya is healthier and getting better really fast thanks to all the feedback and excitement players have enjoyed .

Beta Craze, 1.2 Beta and scalability.

Its been a while since the last post and a lot happened since.

The Beta launch was a success! 200 accounts were registered within 6 hours. Lots of people could check Kaya, play and watch games.
Beta Launch was crazy. The server has now people active all day long. And it kept me very busy the past two weeks.
The main reason why we opened a limited number of accounts is to see how the whole system behaved as it increased users, in a very reliable way. The feedback we got, both on this subject and on the overall server features and tweaks was amazing and helped us improve things a lot.

Beta 1.1 came with major improvements both client and server side.

As we still polish and improve our ability to scale (that is, to serve more users at the same time) we will be opening more and more accounts until being absolutely open. And Beta 1.1 and 1.2 are focused on that.

Those that didnt get an account on beta will have an opportunity very soon!

Kaya.gs 1.0.0 Beta Launched!

We JUST released the 200 accounts, they are up for grabs.

We worked VERY intensely the past two weeks to deliver the best experience we could.
We have a long road ahead, but we also traveled a lot! Kaya is looking beautiful, and we have several novelties that make both the chatting and the playing experience unique and new.

I hope everyone can enjoy it. We will be on the server providing live technical support and with the rest of the founders, help out so new users can set up quickly.

Check it out at beta.kaya.gs !