Hozzászólások - ImLittleJon

Here's some thoughts. Hopefully we'll get a good discussion going.

Number one, and I can't stress this enough, Miklos or some other admin should read the forums and engage in the discussion so that the community feels that our opinions are being heard and not just ignored. Looking back, I can see that Miklos used to post a lot more often than he does now, but even then, his posts were not the type that I am looking for here. Experienced players can and do answer questions like why player X can attack me but I can't attack him. What I would like to see is responses to suggestions, such as "I like that suggestion, and I will relay it to the appropriate people" or "That would be nice, but it would cost way too much to implement" or "I think that would make the game worse, not better". I'd even be happy with "Stop bugging me, you pathetic loser", as that would still show that he's paying attention.

Next, I am going to collect all the suggestions I have made in the past on this topic and put them here.

- Require each quiz question to be accepted by 2 out of 3 evaluators. This would require a lot more evaluators, so in practice it would probably mean accepting any and all volunteers to become evaluators. Miklos has explicitly rejected this idea in the past, but I believe his reasoning was flawed.

- Get more evaluators to cut down on the time it takes to get a quiz question evaluated. I think this one might have actually been done already. When I posted the suggestion, it was taking 3-6 days to get my questions evaluated. Now, it's usually about 1 day.

- Add a field for the evaluator to explain his reasoning / suggest fixes when rejecting a question.

- Add a field when submitting questions to say something to the evaluator that is not part of the question.

- Add controls on the hunt screen to allow users to flag existing questions for review by moderators. The existing process of posting the question to the Quiz errors thread is clunky and slow, and I'm sure most users never do it.

- Allow evaluators to set questions as provisional. Originally, my idea was this would send the question to the members to approve it or not. But I do buy Miklos's argument that the general player population has little to no interest in doing a good job of evaluating questions. So now I think this suggestion should be modified and combined with the 2 out of 3 idea. An evaluator should be able to approve or reject questions on their own if they think it's clear cut. But if it's a gray area, they should force it to go to a larger pool of evaluators.


Now, on to new suggestions.

- A pool of evaluators should be selected to draft explicit guidelines for what questions should be accepted and what should be rejected. Some guidelines have been posted, but since there is all this confusion, I think that is strong evidence that we need better guidelines. Once the guidelines have been drawn up, they should be posted on the forums. Thereafter, the committee should meet periodically to review the guidelines and make changes as necessary.

- For the categories of too specific and uninteresting lexical knowledge, the default should be to allow the question, not reject it. Especially if the correct answer is easily found using Google.


What does everyone think?

Idézet: Phalanxii - 2010.05.01. 22:13:35

http://forum.doomlord.net/index.php/topic,53.0

Got a busy week at work ahead of me, but I'll try to get something coherent written up and posted there soon with my views.

Idézet: Svante64 - 2010.05.02. 18:30:28

I'm sure the issue was the grammar errors, though if I were evaluating it, I'd put that in the spelling category, rather than calling it ambiguous. "Haven't" is misspelled, but "movie" is singular, so it would be "hasn't" anyway, except that directing a movie is a one time thing, so it should be "wasn't" instead of "hasn't been".

This is yet another example of why the game would be better if evaluators had a space where they could explain their judgments.

If he's already got a lot in skills, the path of least resistance might be to make a beeline for Transcendal Projection.

Idézet: Mewkybar - 2010.04.30. 04:11:42

Under Skills in the left nav bar. But you have to buy your Learning skill up to 3 first.

See http://web.me.com/loquacious_4ever/Tina/quests.html

Idézet: Miklos - 2009.09.01. 11:34:17

I think this is the crux of the issue. If a question needs to be passed by, say, 2 out of 3 evaluators, that would cut down on the "bad" questions getting through. It does mean you would need 3 times as many evaluators, but there is a huge difference between appointing anyone who volunteers and your case 1. Most of the players have no interest whatsoever in performing evaluations, so their opinions are essentially a random number generator. Volunteers are a self selected group, so more of them would actually take the time to consider their evaluations.

Idézet: Phalanxii - 2010.04.30. 15:48:14

There seem to be a large and growing number of people in that particular boat.

Idézet: Phalanxii - 2010.04.30. 15:48:14

Linguistically, Xbox appears to be a broader category that would encompass Xbox 360, as well as hypothetical other versions, like Xbox 180, Xbox 720, etc. Perhaps it is the case that within the gaming console community, Xbox by itself would refer unambiguously to a particular console. Not being a part of the gaming console community, your answers would definitely be ambiguous to me. Presumably, that's why the evaluator rejected your question.

Idézet: Phalanxii - 2010.04.30. 15:48:14

Therein lies the crux of the problem. Where do you draw the line, and who decides where the line is? You are advocating for there to be no line at all. I'm not sure that would be an improvement. I don't really want to have to answer questions about what your aunt's hair color is. So I think there should be a line. The complaints generally boil down to the fact that each evaluator has a different line, and I'm not sure how to fix that. Viridel has proposed a theory (which I'm too lazy to track down and link) but I believe it's too similar to what the admins tried and rejected before. I have also proposed some changes. I would encourage anyone who is dissatisfied with the current system to join the discussion on how to improve it (there's a different thread for that, though). I haven't seen any sign that the admins read any of it, but I am ever hopeful.

Idézet: Phalanxii - 2010.04.30. 15:48:14

As an American, that would still pass my general interest/knowledge test, personally. But I could imagine that to an evaluator who had never heard of Doctor Who, they wouldn't even know enough about it to know that it is common knowledge. I would try not to take it personally.

Idézet: Phalanxii - 2010.04.30. 15:48:14

When I get presented with questions like that from other cultures, I try to take the view that it's an opportunity for me to learn about the other culture. Sometimes the trivia gets too, um, trivial for me, though, which is annoying.

On the whole, although I think the system could be improved, it's still a fun part of the game.

I have to share this one, because it's too funny.

Which is the correct definition of "complement"?

something that completes or makes perfect
an expression of praise, commendation, or admiration
the quantity by which an angle or an arc falls short of 180° or a semicircle
appearance; aspect; character

The question is valued as "Bad, incorrect question"!
Your answers are ambiguous or wrong to this question.

All answers were copied from dictionary.reference.com. The first one is the definition of complement. The second is the definition of compliment. The third is supplement. The last is complexion. Obviously, the evaluator didn't know the difference between complement and compliment, which was the whole point of the question. Ah well, I'm sure it would have been kicked because everyone would get it wrong anyway. But a couple of people might have learned something about one of the most misused words in the English language.

Idézet: Valkyrie - 2010.04.28. 11:14:05

Speaking as an engineer, that's not strictly a bug, but I agree with you. There definitely should be something that informs all the clan members whenever there is a new forum post, no matter what page they are on. And turning the main clan button red would be consistent with the rest of the UI. I would also say that they don't need to turn the main clan button red every time someone builds from the soul well.

Idézet: Ciphas - 2010.04.26. 16:41:03

That's a guideline that some people use for how much luck they try to have. Your mileage may vary.

how many ponds does one player get at the beginning of a chess game?

pawns, not ponds.

How much time the moon needs to make one full rotation around its axis?
360 days
300 minutes
24 hours
Moon is not rotating around its axis

Correct answer was marked Moon is not rotating around its axis

The (Earth's) moon does rotate around its axis, but it takes exactly the same amount of time to rotate as it does to orbit the Earth. That's why we always see the same face of the moon.

Links:
http://www.wonderquest.com/MoonSpin.htm
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/ About_how_long_does_it_take_the_moon_to_rotate_on_its_axis
http://www.learner.org/courses/essential/earthspace/session7/closer1.html
http://www.grantchronicles.com/astro29.htm

Please delete this question quickly.

Idézet: ChaoticGemini - 2010.04.23. 04:55:25

I figured that out through trial and error. It would be nice if rules of thumb like that were somewhere that we could read before we post questions, so we don't waste our time (and yours, though I mostly care about mine ). Got any more?

Idézet: Boar - 2010.04.19. 09:36:22

Actually, I have a very good idea. Discussion boards and other forms of social media are my actual job (which is probably why I'm still here beating this very dead horse...). We used to have a few clients that thought like you and made it so only their employees could start new topics. One of them hit the scale issue, and the rest we eventually convinced to switch over just to increase usability. When they switched, everyone was happier. If you look around at other forums on the web, starting a new topic for every single question is the industry standard, and it works really well. Especially in conjunction with some mechanism for deleting old topics that nobody has posted to in a while. As for search, it will help you find answers, but it's useless for following the flow of a conversation.

That's your point of view. Most people find it much easier to follow discussions when they each have their own topic than when a bunch of unrelated discussions are all shuffled together in the same topic. Also, this board isn't big enough to run into any scale issues yet, but if it does eventually grow, the speed will be much better with thousands of topics having just a few messages in each than with just a few topics having thousands of messages each.

I've got this quest: Lose at least 100 SE in a duel which you initiate.

I'm wondering if anyone else in world 2 has the same quest and wants to arrange to lose 100 SE to each other. PM me if interested.

For non-Americans or even younger Americans, you're right. But every American who was at least 8 at the time of the 85 Superbowl would be able to pick the right answer out of a list of 4 options. It was all over the media, on the top singles charts, and got a Grammy nomination. It's no worse than half the questions in the database.

My understanding is John Hanson's title was President of Congress, so the question is fine as is.

I've been thinking about this issue, and the way I see it, there are 4 issues:

1) How long it takes to get a question moderated. My first question took 6 days. My other ones have been about 3 days. If it usually took only 1 day to get a response, it would be less of a big deal to have to re-submit. Solution: get more moderators. Effort on the part of the game developers: extremely low.

2) Lack of communication between user and moderator. It's frustrating to have a question rejected and not understand why. Solution: there should be an additional field for the moderator to be able to type a (short) explanation, in addition to the broad category of spelling / too specific / etc. In addition, there should be an extra field on the page where you submit the question to add a message to the moderator that is not part of the question, such as urls of supporting documents. Now, this would make the moderation process take longer, so even more moderators would be needed to handle the additional load. Effort on the part of the game developers: minimal.

3) False positives: seeing quiz questions that were accepted which should have been rejected. Solution: on every quiz question, there should be a button to allow users to flag it as bad. Ideally, they could then pick from the same list of rejection categories as the moderators do and fill in the (short) explanation for why it should be rejected. The question should then be sent into the moderation queue, with the values pre-filled out. If the moderator agrees, they should be able to delete the question using the reporter's text with the click of a single button. If the moderator agrees but doesn't like the reporter's text, they can edit the text first and then delete the question. If the moderator disagrees, they should be able to reject the report by clicking a different button. In that situation, it might make sense to give the reporter 1 bad question on their tally. Effort on the part of the game developers: low to medium.

4) False negatives: getting your question rejected by a moderator, when other moderators would approve it. There is no way to fully avoid this issue other than doing away with judgment calls by moderators entirely. Which has been proposed a few times by different people lately. But those proposals would basically put the game back into the state where everyone was a moderator, which the game designers tried and didn't like. So I think those proposals have very little chance of being implemented. So within the current system, what could be done to alleviate the issue? Well, if the response time was quicker, there was some explanation as to why it got rejected, and there were fewer false positives, that would go a long way. Maybe that's all we can hope for.

Here's one other, more radical, idea (though I expect it also has very little chance of being implemented). Maybe the moderators could give a question a status of provisional, in addition to accepting or rejecting it. Provisional questions would then go into a state where everyone was a moderator, either with a yes/no control or simply by how many answered it correctly. Then, after a specified time period, it would either attain permanent status or be deleted.

Just for the record, this is fixed now.