Nigel Eccles's dashboard

Nigel Eccles replied on May 31, 2008 19:03 to the idea "Hubdub Question Reminder Tool" in Hubdub:

We had certainly thought of the first part of your suggestion, giving users the ability to bookmark questions. I would be interested to know what other users thought of the other elements.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 21, 2008 09:47 to the discussion "Unfairly voided question." in Hubdub:

It is a fair point.

We have been planning to update the business rules for a while and a couple of events have meant that we are thinking of making some larger changes to the category.

We will propose the changes on Thursday or Friday of this week via Get Satisfaction.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 21, 2008 09:24 to the discussion "Unfairly voided question." in Hubdub:

Given that additional indices don't have liquidity it is too easy for users to use them to easily buy money. That spoils the challenge. The CAC, MIBTEL and S&P questions have got through but we are going to be stricter on these in future. We actually get more users emailing us requesting we restrict indices rather than adding them.

When our user base grows we will open up the indices that users can predict on.

Sorry about your question being voided.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 21, 2008 08:24 to the problem "How can i fix my hubdub question ???????" in Hubdub:

Hi Lewisdotcom,

I will void the question and then you can edit and re-submit. Could you also put in a settlement source. I would suggest Twitterholic (although it has been playing up for a couple of days).

Nigel Eccles replied on May 15, 2008 10:43 to the discussion "Strike" in Hubdub:

If you actually analyse the top users rate of net worth growth I think you will find that it has slowed down rather than accelerated. I think this is purely due to the challenge of managing a large amount of money. It is much more difficult to double your money when you have H$100,000 than when you have H$10,000.

There is no evidence that any of these or in fact any of the top users are gaming (and we do conduct regular checks). The secrets of fast net worth growth are generally high activity and some of the gems outlined here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/hubdub/top...

Nigel Eccles replied on May 10, 2008 18:44 to the question "New Leaderboard Idea? (Predictions Percentages)" in Hubdub:

That is an interesting suggestion. The leaderboards is something we want to get back to at some point. There are a number of things we could do but we still want to keep it fairly straightforward. As before, if we make changes to the leaderboards we will share our ideas before implementing it.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 08, 2008 13:23 to the problem "Type of gaming and how to stop it." in Hubdub:

This is actually one of the easiest types of gaming to spot and in general hasn't been a big problem. Most of the top users have a zero cash balance as they want to stay fully invested.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 07, 2008 16:08 to the discussion "New market layout and recent predictions window (Yuck)" in Hubdub:

Oh, last one: Punditwatch. That is a new marketing feature we are launching next week. We are going to use it to track predictions of A-list pundits to see how they get on. We'll add an icon to it (and the other PW user id's). More details early next week.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 07, 2008 16:02 to the discussion "New market layout and recent predictions window (Yuck)" in Hubdub:

Comma is now fixed. Thanks for letting us know.

On the new page, we actually did do a fair bit of testing on it to try to get it right. However I recognise it is a big change and there are parts of it that aren't quite right. One problem with the old look was it was very flat and didn't convey the activity that was going on behind the scenes. Also, settlement details which are very important in some markets, where getting buried.

Please do offer your suggestions on how to improve the current design. Additionally, you might find it useful to try the new design for a while to see if it grows on you. That way any suggestions can combine the best of the new and the old.

Finally, while this feature came out first we are working on 'super user' functionality in parallel (in general Tom works on the front end dev, Chris works on back end). It is a more difficult feature to get right so it is taking slightly longer to get out.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 04, 2008 20:21 to the idea "Suggestion: Settlement Request/Flag feedback." in Hubdub:

It is a good suggestion. We will be working over the next month on trying to improve the email communication so that users are updated when something happens to a question they are on.

Nigel Eccles replied on May 01, 2008 12:38 to the problem "Is "Will Jesus return by the end of 2008" a good question????" in Hubdub:

Just to follow on Chris's point. That question was created in the early 'Wild West' days when there wasn't any rules. Now a question like that would have to be started at an appropriate starting price and also be linked to an existing news story.

Nigel Eccles replied on April 15, 2008 08:41 to the question "Any objections to me making predictions?" in Hubdub:

Thanks everyone for their input. I'm 24th out of 32 on my weekly friend leaderboard now! (If anyone has a return of less than -1.2% I am accepting friends :-)

@ AAA Good point, I will feed that into the site refresh

Nigel Eccles replied on April 12, 2008 23:36 to the question "Any objections to me making predictions?" in Hubdub:

Oh the communications question, the guide would be:
Commenting: Probably 50/50 on whether it gets picked up, depends on the category and question
Flagging: Cat eds get an email and a flag appears on admin view. They will resolve it when they get to it. They generally don't respond though.
Settlement request: Cat eds get an email. They wil either settle or put up a clarification
Get Satisfaction: All 10 of us geta an email. That can actually be a bad thing as sometimes we assume someone else is looking at it. We've changed the process so the person on contact form duty should respond
Contact us: Goes to the person on contact form duty. You will always get a response here although they may have to forward it to the category editor
Email: I always like getting email and I always respond. Probably isn't as fast as the contact form though

With question escalations best to either flag for review or send to the contact form. It is only when the category editor can't figure out the right answer (or their is disagreement) is the question then escalated to Get Satisfaction.

Nigel Eccles replied on April 12, 2008 23:25 to the question "Any objections to me making predictions?" in Hubdub:

I am not responsible for any categories but time to time I do settle questions (mostly to speed up settlement).

I settled that one earlier based on the 99.9% rule. Given the reports I thought it highly unlikely (i.e. <0.1%) that he would relapse and buy the farm within 3 days. Therefore I moved to settle it early. Did we not discuss this around the question of whether this was a news prediction site or an event prediction site?

A comment on the question "Any objections to me making predictions?" in Hubdub:

The admins have a very progressive employer who sees that playing Hubdub is good for their cognitive and team playing skills. In fact it is encouraged :-) – Nigel Eccles, on April 11, 2008 10:43

Nigel Eccles asked a question in Hubdub on April 10, 2008 21:44:

Any objections to me making predictions?

Just after we launched we placed the limitation on category editors that they couldn't place predictions on questions in their category. That was to ensure that there was no hint of a conflict of interest when settling questions.

At the same time I placed the restriction on myself that I would predict on any categories as I thought questions would get escalated to me for resolution. In actual fact questions that get escalated go to Get Satisfaction so I don't play that role. Additionally, the tech category is now handled by Tom.

Not being able to make predictions has meant that my understanding of how the site actually works isn't as good as it should be. I've no idea how challenges work and I generally only find about about bugs from contact notes and emails. Our focus over the next month is to really improve the core game element of Hubdub and it is tough to do that without actually playing it.

So I am proposing that I release myself those self-imposed constraints. All my predictions will be public so you can have full insight into how terrible a predictor I think will probably turn out to be.

Any objections?

Nigel Eccles replied on April 10, 2008 15:38 to the idea "NEW and IMPROVED" in Hubdub:

Thanks for the suggestions, these are great. Unfortunately the wiki idea is going to take a bit longer than I thought. Still trying to figure out how it might work so in the mean time keep posting here.

Some of the problems we are trying to solve at the moment are:
1. Better default sorting of questions
2. Ability to watch questions
3. Incentivising question creation
4. Getting more action on longer term questions

There is some good ideas above that would improve these problems. I like the idea of users being able to bookmark questions. Then we could switch the default sort to most new bookmarks in the last 24 hours. To get an idea of what the front page would look like, which questions would you bookmark?

Nigel Eccles replied on April 10, 2008 15:25 to the discussion "(Almost) duplicate markets" in Hubdub:

Good time to be having this discussion. We are currently in the process of updating the rules. One rule going in is very relevant here:
• A question will be considered a duplicate if its true forecast probability is 95% or greater similar to an existing question (e.g. ‘Will candidate X drop out of the race by March 3rd?’ would generally be considered a duplicate of ‘Will candidate X drop out of the race by March 2nd?’)

95% about right? Too high? Too low?

Nigel Eccles replied on April 09, 2008 09:49 to the idea "NEW and IMPROVED" in Hubdub:

This is a great idea. Behind me on the wall is 5 posters with about 50 sticky post its each one of which has a product idea. I'm currently trying to figure out a way we could share that with you and everyone could add to it and discuss. I think a wiki might be the best solution. I'll try to have something up this week.

Nigel Eccles replied on April 09, 2008 09:45 to the problem "Delays between settlement requests and actual settlement" in Hubdub:

We are looking into power user suspend along with the user question approval functionality. I don't think that is much additional work (don't tell Tom I said that!)