Ben Dodson's dashboard

When an STE merges duplicate spots, the items that are stored within the spot that gets deleted are never copied to the merged spot leading to items missing in action. Interestingly, the "founded" status does get copied across so if you founded the deleted spot you'll automatically get copied as a founder to the new spot. This leads to a mismatch between the number of founders and the number of items (although founders aren't duplicated if they dropped items at both locations).

For example take a look at the following two spots:

* http://gowalla.com/spots/16607
* http://gowalla.com/spots/32695 (deleted spot)

The deleted spot had 2 items whereas the remaining has 6 items. The remaining spot now has 7 founders (as one of them founded both spots) but still only 6 items. The 2 items that were in the remaining spot are now unattainable - their details pages are:

* http://gowalla.com/icons/222498
* http://gowalla.com/icons/127341

The most obvious problem is that items are disappearing (in some cases difficult to obtain items as detailed in a Twitter conversation between @angelsk and @joncarroll - http://twitter.com/angelsk/statuses/5...) which makes it tricky as a player to balance between merging duplicate spots if rare items are going to go missing during the process.

I can see why it works as it does at present - what would happen for instance if both spots had the maximum 10 items and they were merged? The expected pattern would be you would then have a spot with 20 items but this isn't allowed under the rules of the game (and you could have any number of founders from 10-20 depending on if they'd founded both).

My proposed solution is that the oldest spot retains its items and founders (as those people were there first). Then, the items from the other spot are copied over until they are all used up or there are 10. If there are 10 items, but still items remaining to be transferred, then these items should be randomly distributed to nearby spots so that they can still be picked up. The original spot would list only the first 10 founders in order of date at either spot (so the first 10 unique people to found either spot would be listed). The others lose founded status.

This solution ensures that the people who were at the spot first (regardless of merge) are credited as founders whilst also ensuring no items go missing.

Ben

ps. this process may also happen when Gowalla themselves merge a spot and may not be limited just to the STE merge functionality - I don't have any test cases for this though so don't know.

On the Twitter feeds (both for spots and people), if a tweet is in reply to somebody, clicking the "reply" link when you hover over the tweet just takes you to the Twitter homepage and not to the status that was replied to.

E.g. clicking the reply link in the photo below takes me to http://twitter.com/?status=@Gamedigital%20&in_reply_to_status_id=5822080796&in_reply_to=Gamedigital - notice that it's put a lot of relevant data into the URL but it doesn't actually do anything, just loads the Twitter homepage.