Recently active ideas in Hubdub

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

Hubdub is growing and we need your help! So we're looking to hire a number of passionate Hubdubbers to join our Admin team. For more info go here -
http://www.hubdub.com/public/jobs

Just wanted to tell y'all about my HubDub Blog... I was on an unannounced hiatus, which is now over.
http://ravingsofahubdubmaniac.blogspo...
(Infernal Machine now also has a blog, look at my newest blog post for a link)

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.

All In-Play markets which can roughly be defined as sports markets in which the suspend time is set for after the event begins. These markets need to be approved by the Category Editor before being created.
If someone wants to create a market and have it labeled "In Play" then they should either first contact the Category Editor and get pre-approval, or create the question and set suspend date in accordance with current rules, then request that the market be designated In Play and suspend date moved.

We have all seen over the last few days how much the admins listen to the people who speak up and let thier voices be heard. So now lets do it to agin, and give them our ideas for improvements we want to see.
So feel free to share your ideas. And lets hope the admins can give us some feedback on the probability of them actually happening. Also what might be coming along.

The Hubdub Super Users are now labelled as such on the customer satisfaction site. This means that whenever someone posts a new topic to GetSatisfaction, the Super Users will receive an email telling them about the new post.

This means that they will be able to respond quickly to help other users with some of the more straightforward queries, thereby freeing up the time of the Hubdub admin team to develop and improve Hubdub further. More complex queries will continue to be dealt with by Hubdub admins.

We hope that this change will ensure that users receive faster responses to their queries on getsatisfaction and it will be clear who the Super Users are for everyone.

p.s.
Unfortunately, due to restrictions in getsatisfaction's functionality, in order for Super USers to receive these email notifications, they have to be labelled "Employee" - as you may notice from their avatars. Please be assured that SUPER USERS ARE NOT EMPLOYEES OF HUBDUB! They have NO contract with us and we are not paying them a penny or indeed a cent. They haven't even got a free t-shirt out of it (much to their dismay!) They're just really nice users who are madly enthusiastic about Hubdub (see Hubdub FAQs for further details on how they were chosen if you're interested)

I think it would be interesting to have a leaderboard category for questin creation. Something like a top 10 or top 20 questions defined by activity. This would identify people who have done the best job of creating the most interesting questions with the broadest interest.

I would also suggest against a leaderboard for the MOST questions as that would be too easily achievable and would promote boring, low interest questions only for the sake of creating a lot of questions.

The true goal would be to get people thinking about how to create the BEST questions.

I know the default time is set for PST. I am wondering if there is a feature possible so that you can set the site on your locations time zone. I would love to see the times in EST automatically instead of having to convert in my head from PST.
Is this possible? let me know

It would be nice to see select leaderboard numbers depicted in the "My Hubdub" tab. There is a lot of open space in this page and since users frequent this page to check on their open questions, etc. it would be more user friendly to have access to those numbers right there rather than having to click through a bunch of stuff on the leaderboard tab. The addition of 8 numbers would suffice:

- All time net worth relative to all Hubdubbers
- All time net worth relative to friends
- Weekly percent gain relative to all Hubdubbers
- Weekly percent gain relative to friends
- Quarterly earnings relative to all Hubdubbers
- Quarterly earnings relative to friends
- Quarterly percent gain relative to all Hubdubbers
- Quarterly percent gain relative to friends

These numbers are all available in the leaderboard tab but require a lot of clicking around. By having them neatly in one place on the "My Hubdub" page it would offer an immediate snapshot of each user's personal status. Additionally, if the user wanted to "drill down" into the details there could be a hyperlink for each of the above categories that would take them directly to the regular leaderboard page for that category of interest. This would reduce the number of clicks necessary to obtain information while offering an excellent summary on a page most frequented by users that has space to spare.

Hubdub should create a tool that allows users to "flag" questions for themselves to revisit on a date closer to closing time.

I, like many users, tend to shy away from questions with lengthy closing dates because they tie up H$ too long and stagnate quickly. However, many of these questions are very interesting and I would like to wager on them except for the aforementioned problem. By sorting through "closing soon" users are confronted with a large number of questions in which they have no interest AND they would have to dig pretty deep to find one that is say a month out. This presents the following problems:

1) users don't wager on questions that interest them
2) markets stagnate and lock in the bettors
3) the site gets choked with a high volume of low activity questions

Here is how the proposed tool would work:

- an icon on the question page allows the user to flag a question for future review
- by clicking the icon the user is prompted to specify a single date or scheduled dates upon which the question will be presented to them again in the future
- a link to these questions would then be posted on the "My Hubdub" page so they can periodically review or modify the settings for the questions
- when a question review date is reached a message will appear to the user upon login, much like the "challenges received" message

Would anyone find this of value? Is there a better way to do it or a modification that would make it more useful?

I'm thinking that a good addition to each person's profile would be to add a "highest net worth reached". So giving the highest net worth the person had ever reached and on what date it occurred.
Just a suggestion, hoping to be considered!

Valornhonor mentioned this to me and we both agreed it was a good idea
so this is what we were thinking:

A hubdub hall of fame "HDHOF"
it would entail the following and possibly more;
-List of people who held the number 1 position in net worth at any period of time
-list of people who have has 500 or another number of questions successfully settled
-Other things like most gained in a quarter

Do you guys like this idea? and do you have any more suggestions for what should be in the hall of fame?

As we all know it is extremely difficult for new users to start with the meagre $1000 , so how's about providing low interest loans to new users who are willing to take the risk . But there must be a cap for the amount borrowed and borrowing should not be allowed after a user passes a certain stage.

This idea started in another forum topic as a slightly whimsical possible solution to the increasingly intimidating wealth of the top 20 to a newcomer to the game. The idea was essentially that rich players could park some of their money such that it would remain in their total worth but be removed from their betting use and quarterly gain. It would mix things up a little.

But while contemplating a situation that came up in play today, I realized it is a much more useful idea than I had realized. Here's why.

There are more and more people with net worth over H$20,000, and presumably many more to come. What happens when you get around that level is that you discover that the strategies you used to get to 20K won't get you to 40K or beyond. (NB The numbers are relative to the total wealth in play - double the number of players and the 20K would be, say, 30K)

So what do you do? Well, you can bet 10K on long shots, just because you can. But there's not enough cash in most markets to make 10K betting worth much. The bet you thought you were making at 10:1 odds ends up being at something like 5:4 for such a large wager, and where's the fun in that.

So you find that you bet less after a while on each market, and so you try more and more markets at the same time. But you can't keep up with 500 markets at the same time, certainly not with the rudimentary portfolio organization tools available.

So next you keep most of your money out of the market(s), where it has 0% return, and only wager a fraction. But you're used to a, say, 20% daily growth rate that got you into the top 20 in the first place, and you've got hungry competitors ahead and behind you, so if you wager half your wealth, you want 40% return to make up for the half that's just sitting.

Well, finally you accept your growth rate may decline, but you still want growth, so you figure out what to do. You start betting large amounts on "safe" questions with one portion of your cash (and continue your robber baron ways with the rest). You're 90% sure X will happen, and the market's currently 75% sure of the same thing, and so you plug as much cash as it takes to make the market agree with you. Well, the world agrees with you, and soon 90% becomes 99% confidence. Great, you think. I'm not greedy ;) -- I'll cash-in at 99%. But cash-in is calculated at what the market will be at *after* you take out your wager, and you've been betting in 2-5 thousand dollar chunks. And now cash-in holds no value to you, so you let your money sit until settlement.

And so that market then sits at 99% for one choice, but the most likely choice, so that other players are wasting their time betting with you (1% return or less) and throwing their money away betting against you. So the market stops. But there's no duplicate questions, so that topic is effectively dead unless real-world conditions shock the market back into action.

I did this with/to several markets today, and felt like a shit afterwards. Without meaning to, I had effectively stopped play on questions I have no doubt other players wanted in on. All I wanted was a safe investment with a low rate of return on the growing amount of my wealth that I can't use aggressively in the normal HubDub way. What I want is a bank to keep some of my money in at low or no risk, with a low rate of interest.
Or perhaps a HubDub bond which I lock up for a period of time at a rate of return proportional to the time I keep it in there.

How would such a scheme work? Well I like the bond idea, so I'll explain that. I buy a 2 week or 1 month or 3 month, etc bond with some of my cash at a rate of interest due on cash-in date. The bank takes that money, and loans it out at interest to players who've flamed out, or just want to play with more moolah.

My excess cash is no longer doing nothing in my "wallet", is no longer clogging up the game's markets, and is in fact back in play in someone else's hands. My net worth grows, but my in-play cash is reduced, opening up the leaderboard (until the next time I conquer it ;-| ) I'll leave to others the issues of rates of return and defaulting on loans and bankruptcy.

What do you think?

Another idea.
I know hubdub all ready gives us notifications about challenges and friend requests.
I think that they should also give us those notifications whenever someone gives a 'shout' on our wall.
Tell me what you think!

I think HubDub should get an IRC room
I have registered irc://irc.quakenet.org/HubDub
to join you type (into an IRC client) /server irc.quakenet.org; then /join #HubDub
Shout on my profile if you need help!

I want to nominate "Wild card - Odd or Even" by Destry for the craziest question of HubDub as of yet (possibly as of ever)
http://www.hubdub.com/m7663/Wildcard_...

I think that another feature I would like to see would be like a status bar for each user. SImilar to facebooks status updates where you could enter a status message and on a certain page all of your friends could see it

I recommend a "First Prediction" on each question page:
Slightly like the "latest Predictors" but a special section that has the first prediction on that question.