Recently active problems in Hubdub

Users may have been experiencing problems accessing the site this afternoon due to a problem with the autologin mechanism. This has resulted in 'too many redirect' errors.

This problem should be fixed now, but unfortunately all automatic logins have been lost. People should only have to log back in once and it should then remember them as usual from now on.

It's a result of some work we're doing to the back end of the site to improve things for everyone.

If you're still having the problem, simply close/quit the browser and start it up again.

Thanks for you patience with this.

Happy hubdubbing.
Rob.

Usually users complains about a late suspending, probably because of vastly popular gaming paranoia.
Here's my complaints about the opposite: the earlier suspend times.
This apply mostly in sport questions category. There are far too many cases when question creators put their suspend times way earlier than the sport event begins. Only some examples: User Jake recently has put great effort of making many football questions, namely on the Olympics football quarterfinals and English football championship. This is good in general. But all his football questions suspends many hours before the games starts. There were some olympic questions (in athletics, for example) which were suspended at the beginning (or even earlier) of the Games, although the athletics tournament was to begin a whole weak later. This apply to some questions created by user Valornhonor who obviously put more attention to invent the most possible strange and complicated version of a question rather to a precise suspend time. Examples could be found in Motorsport subcategory where some questions on Formula 1, Indycar etc were suspended 12 and even 24 and more hours before the start of the given race. There are such cases in many other occasions (rugby etc).
All this is not good.
While there is explicite rule on the suspend time of sport events which cannot be after the event begins, there is not a firm reciproque rule against the unnecessary earlier suspention.
In my opinion this is great problem which decreases the pleasure as well as the activity on those questions.
A good example of well created and usually precise in suspend times questions are the efforts of SDCharger.
My note to the question creators of the sport questions: please, do this little effort to check the exact start times of the sport events. Generally, most sport events have firm start times and it is not at all hard to find them.
And to the category editors and superusers: please, pay attention not only at late, but also at too early suspend times.
This will be good for the game of Hubdub, for its popularity and the activity as well as for the users and their pleasure of participating in those type of questions which are of the most popular ones.
Thank you.

This is a continuation of a "market activity" bug, that began in this comment thread:

<http://www.hubdub.com/m11802/Where_wi...>

This bug concerns the fact the for some users, when they cash out a prediction, that amount is ADDED to the market "Activity", while for other users the amount of the cashed out wager is DEDUCTED from the market "Activity".

Please refer to the market thread comments for the background comments on this problem.

two of my predictions have been suspended,why?

my account ain't updating correctly. i've tried the contact us link and no response for 3 days.

Hi everybody, I am keen to avoid a potential Spitzer in this market and have therefore escalated it to Get Satisfaction. The market in question regards a proposed merger between Delta and Northwest airlines, and the question asks if it will happen "before June 1st".

http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/Will_D...

The "Spitzer clause" in the rules for the politics category (2.3.1) is of obvious relevance and I think a good outcome would be to end up with a rule for similar circumstances in the Business category.

My personal position would be to settle yes if they announced a merger tomorrow, but I know some will have differing viewpoints if they don't actually become one company before June 1st. Therefore I am very interested to hear your views so that a sensible conclusion can be made if they do announce a merger. As always please reveal any positions you have in the market.

Thanks,

Andrew
Hubdub Business Category Manager

http://tinyurl.com/4buxup Dr Death needs 3000 signatures to run for Congress

Basically, the outcome as decided by Ryan J on this question is incorrect. It would seem from the links given by supahusah Newswrangler is that in fact Jack Kervokian has INDEED gotten the 3000 signatures necessary to run for Congress. As outlined by NW:

"Assisted Suicide Crusader Jack Kevorkian Makes Congressional Bid Official"

" March 24, 2008

Detroit, MI (LifeNews.com) -- Convicted murderer and assisted suicide crusader Jack Kevorkian made his candidacy for a Detroit-area Congressional seat official on Monday. ...

"State law required Kevorkian to gather 3,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot and he turned in papers with those signatures to local election officials."

<http://www.lifenews.com/bio2376.html>

and here: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNew...

DisealDog (who is having two weeks off in Belize) and I both agree the q should be re-settled or perhaps suspended once again at least until July 17th: From the Oakland Press:

"Kevorkian, a Pontiac native now living in south Oakland County, will have to gather a minimum of 3,000 signatures on nominating petitions by July 17 to appear as an independent on the November ballot, the Michigan Secretary of State's office said."

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/storie...

SO>>>>> either:...

1. resettle as yes
2. suspend until (July 17th) another news source pops up to confirm it.

I made about 4,300 on this, but I know the overworked admin will screw up again and accidentally give me more again one day. So I'll get it back. The important thing I think is that it's settled correctly - that's it! What do you think Ryan? BTW this is nobody's fault: I found the Oakland Press link on Wikipedia, so otherwise it would have been very difficult to determine online that the correct suspension date was July 17th, which is essentially why this problem arose in the first place. I myself couldn't locate anything much on it, and I was interested in the outcome.

Hi,

With it becoming more and more likely that Obama is going to be the nominee I'm finding some markets which will cause us some trouble in the Politics category once Obama is the official nominee.

For example here's one market titled "If Obama is nominated, who will win the Presidency?"
http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/If_Oba...

So the problem we have here is that the market will be pretty much an exact duplicate of the "Who will be the next President?" market. We do have other markets that are duplicates or very close to being and I'm trying to do some overdue spring cleaning.

But, how do we deal with this market? Right now I see two possibilties:

1. Suspend market once Clinton drop's out. This may set a bad precedent though.
2. Void the market saying it's a duplicate and that I failed to recognize the implications of this type of market beforehand.

So any thoughts?

Regards,

Ryan
Hubdub Category Editor

Problem with a hubdub representative (super user) cursing, making accusations without evidence, and making bigoted sexual orientation slurs. See comments #14, 23 & 31 of the following question : http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/Will_B...

If Hubdub is going to allow its representatives to act this way, then it is no place for me.

I am not allowed to create a question that has a suspend date in 2029... I have a real question... really

Currently i am trying to create the following question;
NHL Stanley Cup Finals- Detroit Red Wings at Pittsburgh Penguins - Who will win on June 2nd, 2008?

I type it in and then say multiple outcome, one winner
then hit next to get to step two in the process

the computer thinks for a bit and then comes up with a hubdub page(the border has the hubdub stuff) but it lacks the thing to check for duplicates and also the ability to get to step 3

help!!
i was just creating questions without a problem but now i cant
what am i doing wrong or does hubdub have a bug?

The suspend time for questions is always reported an hour off from what it actually is. This applies to market pages and the closing soon lists. The same problem exists for the time created reporting (this can be important when predicting on a question under the 12 hour cash-in ban which is closing soon).

I assume the problem is daylight savings time (particularly in the PST zone), but if that's not fixable we should move over the HubDub standard to GMT. Each user can figure out for themselves how their region compares to GMT (and adjust if required for daylight savings), but it's really confusing as it is right now.

Example: I'm in EST which is three hours before PST. If a question was created at 3am PST, I know to add twelve hours for the cash-in ban and then three hours for time difference. So I could start cashing out at 6pm EST. Wrong! I have to add an extra hour (because of the HD clock problem), and can only cash out after 7pm. Similarly, when the question approaches suspend time, I'll be warned 2 hours left, 1 hour left, and then, bam, it suspends. There is no longer an "x minutes left" warning, because of the clock.

Please can this be fixed? Or can we have GMT as the standard time zone?
(This was discussed here previously - when US and Canada changed over to d.s.t. - but I assumed it would have been fixed by now.)

This concerns the market "Will Hillary Clinton be awarded delegates from Florida and Michigan?"

The market thread can be viewed here:
<http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/Will_H...>

In my view, this market has been mis-handled by the last comment in the market thread made by Ryan. For nearly three months, the clarifications on what this market meant have been consistent ... as well as confirmed.

Then, his last comment, in the opinion of virtually everyone who has commented in the thread since (who have predictions on both sides of the market) was a complete reversal, and Spitzed the market.

I am too tired to go into it here at this moment, but I did want to open the discussion.

I would ask you to read the market comments which include most of my thoughts on this issue.

I would ask that this market not be voided until a discussion can be held, and any alternative solutions to voiding be proposed.

The market was Suspended by a Super User, and remains suspended. Note that my first post to the thread after Ryan's, had a missing html tag, resulting in every comment thereafter being underscored. I have reposted a corrected version of that comment, and asked that the malformed comment be removed. Hopefully that will have been done by the time folks read the thread.

i messed up a question and made the percents all wrong(made one way to high).How can i fix this?

Here is the question i made http://www.hubdub.com/m7715/What_host...

Two issues (one horribly crippling) on iPodbTouch:
on the screen to put money on a question and I choose to enter my own amount it recognizes the number one decimal place too small (so 1000 shows the payout 100 would have, etc)
Secondly the white sub-caragoties aren't on the blue bar, they are low.

I have noticed many people in the leaderboard who have $0, this lead me to belive that people are making an extra Hubdub account and using the extra one to place a bet on the opposite answer to tip the scale, then they bet on the actual answer with the real account so when they win they will get more money.

We could solve this by looking at every accounts IP address and delete all the accounts with the same IP address exept the one with the highest Net Worth.

On my iPod Touch the 'Hubdub' logo covers the "HOME" and "LEADERBOARDS" tabs at the top of the screen.

There is a question called Will Jesus return by the end of 2008 at http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/Will_J.... I think this is not a good question since it implies that Jesus has already been here and Jesus is real. I AM NOT AGAINST ANY RELIGION. I AM NOT SAYING THAT CHRISTIANITY IS NOT REAL. I am just saying can this question be proved????

Ok... this one should be settled, and I'll give my reasons why:

http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/Will_t...

There's a bit of a time disconnect, I admit, wherein the question asks for the value as it will be on April 30 ... yet the provider of the data specifically to be used for settlement only gives weekly results, and the latest was April 28. My thinking is that this question should be settled as NO, because the latest available data point (April 28) is the only one that can be considered according to the settlement rules link. And that data point was clearly less than $4.00. Therefore, on April 30, the PRICE LISTED ON THE LINKED SITE was less than $4.00, and voila... the answer resolves to "NO".

I've said this in several occasions, but I will not be tired to repeat it until the problem disappears.
The BIGGEST problem and the GREATEST defect and flow of Hubdub is the late settlement of the questions, when the settlement is due.
It is normal and understandable the delay of some settlement to be 2-3 or even 4 and more hours, especially if this is in the middle of the night where admins (or editors) are.
But it is NOT normal if the delay extend over 8 to 10 to 12 and more hours (and sometimes a days), which is a heavy relapse in many occasions.
This is not normal even when the settlement requires some profound or time-eating research or reading.
But this continue to happen and in various categories.
With the growing of Hubdub and the growing community of users, this will become more and more problematic.
There must be editors on permanent duty and working on a shifts. A full interchangeability may also help.
We are invited to participate and play. We are promised of a prompt in a reasonable limits settlement. We are in the rights to expect this.
The delay in the settlement eliminate a great part of the pleasure of all of this.
Something - whatever it is - should and must be done. And - wishfully - quickly.