chris's dashboard

chris replied on August 29, 2008 00:12 to the idea "Challenged to a Question I've already made predictions on." in Hubdub:

I tend to agree this is a little bit frustrating. We are planning on doing some work which will improve this, and make challenging more fun by comparing the results when the question is settled, but I'm not sure when this will happen

chris replied on August 17, 2008 11:11 to the question "How can we change line graph colours?" in Hubdub:

It's on the list of things we intend to do, but it's a long list so it probably won't happen for a month or so

chris replied on August 01, 2008 18:14 to the discussion "Friends automatically seeing questions wagered on" in Hubdub:

Friends don't have access to any more information than any other users on predictions which you have kept private, which is to say that the fact that you made a prediction on a market is available, and the amount you predicted, but not what your prediction was.

chris replied on July 23, 2008 10:19 to the problem "Bug Report - Market Activity" in Hubdub:

fingers_of_fury is precisely correct about the intended working of the system, and the reasons for it.

public/private shouldn't have any effect since it isn't checked by this code.

chris replied on July 09, 2008 09:20 to the question "What constitutes as Nokia's version of the iPhone?" in Hubdub:

n810 is an internet tablet, not a phone. It doesn't do GSM. More like an iPod Touch than anything else.

I would suggest that the question be settled as yes if Nokia add hundreds of pounds to the price of an N95 and install a crap camera.

A comment on the idea "Tags - now useful" in Hubdub:

Ahh, fair enough - I've got to admit I didn't look at that page when I was making changes - I'll try to change it this weekend (actually we could probably lose the news preview altogether and speed up the creation process).

News is now gathered on the basis of all text (title/description/options and tags), and tags have no greater priority than any other words in this set. This was our intention in the first place, but unfortunately our original news provider wasn't really geared up to operate that way.

Good points though. Thanks as ever for the feedback – chris, on July 04, 2008 20:30

chris shared an idea in Hubdub on July 03, 2008 10:08:

Tags - now useful

As you may have noticed, we have carried on working on the tagging system, putting lots of pretty tag clouds all over place. I hope you're finding this useful - all feedback welcome as ever.

We don't use these tags for news gathering any more, so there is no longer any need to type contorted and repetitive phrases to try and find news articles

Just a couple of other tips for question creators, so that we minimize duplicate tags:
- The best tags autocomplete when you start typing - we like these tags best because we know they already exist
- Tag the country in the world section (except in UK, where we already know it)
- Tag the league or competition in sport (unless there's actually a subcat for it, eg. MLB). 'English Premier League', 'Bundesliga' and 'Wimbledon' are good tags. Also try to tag the team/teams ('toronto blue jays', 'fulham fc', 'ny mets', 'la galaxy' are good examples)
- Don't put in a tag that means the same as the category or subcategory (eg, there is no need for 'us election 08' or similar on a question when that is the subcategory. Same for 'mlb'/'major league baseball' etc.
- We prefer full names for people, eg Barack Obama rather than Obama, and Didier Drogba instead of Drogba. Dubya is 'George W Bush', and I don't think anybody has ever mentioned his dad on the site anyway
- Avoid plurals 'republican' is better than 'republicans'

Hope you enjoy anyway

A comment on the problem "keeping account updated" in Hubdub:

I asked you for further information. Specifically, a copy of your open predictions screen at a point in time, and then of the open and closed predictions screen later when you think some settlements have failed to update the total correctly. I'm sorry that we aren't treating this as a priority, but it is painfully obvious that the problem is that you don't understand what the figures mean, rather than there being a fault. We just need the information we've requested so we can try to resolve your misunderstanding. – chris, on July 01, 2008 08:42

A comment on the problem "keeping account updated" in Hubdub:

Feel free to – chris, on June 29, 2008 17:18

chris replied on June 29, 2008 16:52 to the problem "keeping account updated" in Hubdub:

But a week after you made the H$1000 prediction it could be worth more like H$1300 because the outcome has become more likely (this is the cash-in value listed in your open predictions), so actually your net value would have moved to H$5300. The win value of the prediction is still H$1500 though, so when it does win your net worth would move to H$5500 (as expected), but this would be an increase of H$200 rather than the H$500 you were expecting.

chris replied on June 29, 2008 11:34 to the problem "keeping account updated" in Hubdub:

Hi.

I got a message yesterday, which appeared to be a settlement request so I passed it on to the relevant category editor - I didn't realise you had an ongoing issue. As you have followed it with a quite bizarre one-line missive asking about the whereabouts of tom, I still had no idea whatsoever the problem you are having.

From the questions you asked at the start of the month (to which i'm sorry if you didn't receive a reply) I think that you are mistaken about the meaning of net worth. Net worth is the total value of the H$ you have in your account, plus the current value of all your predictions. It is common for the value of winning predictions to move from the price at which you bought them towards the win value over time (for example a league position will become more and more certain towards the end of the season and the value of the prediction will rise). This means that when you actually finally do win, you net worth may not change very much at all and will certainly not move in line with the size of your win.

I'm sorry if this explanation is unclear, but what you are seeing is expected behaviour, and certainly not any kind of bug.

chris shared an idea in Hubdub on June 26, 2008 11:32:

New stuff on the site

Hi, just a quick update on some changes I've made to question creation

1. You can now add your own images. If you have a picture which illustrates your question you can upload as part of the process

2. Easier tag input. We have recently introduced tag pages to allow you to browse related questions. You can add tags to your questions in the same way that news keywords were previously added, but many of the more common tags should now auto-complete. If you start typing and the tag you want appears, just hit enter and move onto the next tag. If the wrong tag appears just keep typing

We've also added an option to your site settings which allows you to skip the confirmation screen when you are cashing in your options. This means that you can now complete the sale without ever leaving the open predictions screen.

A comment on the idea "Time Zones?" in Hubdub:

What specific time is off by an hour? – chris, on June 13, 2008 19:49

chris replied on June 13, 2008 13:18 to the idea "Time Zones?" in Hubdub:

If the automatically-selected timezone is not correct, you can now select your own by going the Site Settings section of the My Account area.

chris replied on June 12, 2008 11:02 to the idea "Time Zones?" in Hubdub:

So I don't know if anybody noticed, but we implemented some code which automatically picks a timezone for you based on your IP address. I'd be interested to know how well this is working out for people. I aim to let people override this default setting and explicitly choose a time but this may take a while.

chris replied on June 09, 2008 10:53 to the discussion "Username editing?" in Hubdub:

This is a good way down the list I'm afraid. It will happen, but I wouldn't hold your breath waiting

chris replied on June 04, 2008 23:36 to the problem "Cannot create a question suspending in 2029!" in Hubdub:

I would say set it for as late as possible and note in the background that it's just set for review and should be kept open until 2029. Just gives us a diary date so we can check whether the world has moved on and left your question behind.

That said, I'm not sure I'd bother - I can't see a question that long term getting any predictions on it. Are there any interesting things that might happen on the subject slightly earlier?

chris replied on June 04, 2008 23:30 to the discussion "Username editing?" in Hubdub:

This is a good question. I'm not sure why the usernames are quite so restricted. The code involved dates back to our previous project so there might have been a good reason there. I don't think we want to allow spaces or fancy punctuation because it would restrict us long term (we intend to introduce profiles with URLs that include the username rather than the user id for example). Capitalization probably shouldn't be a massive problem though, since we could just ignore it where necessary.

I don't see this as being a particularly high priority though, so I doubt anything will change until we happen to be working on that section of code for some other reason.

chris replied on May 30, 2008 21:07 to the problem ""Question suspends in" clock is off by an hour" in Hubdub:

The server runs on Pacific Time and does not change for daylight savings. To the best of my knowledge this means it runs year-round PST (PDT being the daylight-savings time which is currently in force on the west coast). Please correct me if I'm wrong about this.

Ideally the server would not be set to PST, rather it would be on UTC (GMT), since this is the only standard which doesn't ever change for daylight savings or other such shenanighans. It isn't however due to a piece of unfortunate planning when we developed the site.

Definately the appropriate fix for the problem is to make dates change to suit users timezones. This will happen eventually. It's an absolute pain to implement however, and we simply haven't had the time / people haven't complained loudly enough about the problems.

In terms of being out by a few minutes, the server is set to automatically update on a regular basis against internet time servers (this is fairly normal practice), and I've never noticed it to be out at all since this was implemented in february.

Sorry I haven't replied to this thread - it must have slipped through the net somehow

chris replied on May 15, 2008 12:34 to the problem "iPod Touch issues2" in Hubdub:

Sadly we can't emulate these problems on the full-size version of Safari, and if we could afford an iPod touch we'd be straight off down the shops to spend the money on a good bottle of whisky,

I suspect you might find selecting somewhere else on the screen and then back on the input box for the amount helps, since it's probably to do with the touchscreen keypad not doing what we'd expect when you press a button