curios's dashboard

I like what Markov said: "co-mingling this [day-trading] with the vast majority of other question scenarios on Hubdub seems to be like mixing oil and water" and "...have a separate Hubdub for it that does not registers earning towards the primary Hubdub site."

I think "separation" is the only way to please both factions: the ordinary, lightly involved majority, and the heavily involved in-game day-traders. However, there should not be a separate Hubdub site, but only a separate assets "counter" for day-trading winnings, and a separate leaderboard for winnings on one-day stock market predictions.

This separate leaderboard could also accommodate in-game betting on sporting events, which I suspect would be very popular.

orlin is correct in what he says and as to a vendetta its the other way around and you now it as we say this side of the world don't fudge i once told you or invited you to take me to admin

if you care to look i have already three lots of $2000 each on mbl matches
and i know nothing about the game i have prove of your gaming

you are only attempting to cover up your short comings if you call one off a $1000 and one of$ 500 large when you game all the time and to you 10000 is nothing one thing to your credit you do keep your predictions open

Yeah I will admit, I have a bad habit of suspending markets before they start. I know curios seems to be on a personal vendetta against me for creating AFL markets with accurate starting odds and suspend times that suspend before the matches begin. All the odds for the AFL markets can be checked at canbet.com, which is the same location I am getting the times for the matches.
As far as odds, of the 8 markets I created for the AFL this week, I did get the odds flipped on one of those markets. Curios made several large wagers to try to benefit from an honest mistake. As soon as I seen the odds were reversed, I quickly voided market and re created with accurate starting odds.
I know that Curios is a fan of the AFL markets, and after having a ton of his markets voided when he attempted to create, I began to create the markets so him and others that are into Aussie Rules Football would have fair and accurate markets to wager on. I even sent Curios a challenge for each of those newly created markets so he could wager on them immediately, not having to wait the 12 hours, that question creators do.

destry is the worst on suspension times as to odds he hasn't a clue.
having said that the biggest one is the dija indices that finish ai one am. talk about a money spinner ,i have to guess i am in bed . the indices is the cash cow as poor old epicur said

Congratulations to all of the new Admins and Super Users, but I wonder if there are getting to be too many?

I can understand the need for a different editor per category, and/or having a given editor monitor more than one of the less used categories.

More admins and super users can be a problem, if they are not "on the same page" when it comes to approving, flagging, voiding, etc. questions, and eventual settlements.

It seems to me at least, there are incidents of admins, etc. making decisions, providing advice, etc. in categories of which they are not responsible. Though this can be a benefit at times, it appears there are conflicting differences. I would think overall, it would be better if editors stick with their own category(ies).

I recognize it can be difficult in some situations to administer a given situation, if things are not clear, but there is still too much inconsistency in the suspension and voiding of questions, etc. Also, when a question is suspended and/or voided, a detailed explanation should be provided for all to see, and not just a simple 3-4 word statement.

As a basic, non-managemnt Hubdub user, all I want to see is fairness, consistency , and as quickly as possible the approval or suspension/voiding of market questions and eventual settlement of those making the cut. I think this will perhaps be more evident, when the amount of commenting has noticeably decreased. Seems there is less comment, when more users are "happy".

Again, congratulations to all of the new admins and super users. Don't get upset over anything I have written above. It is intended to be constructive.

we still have to wait ages , even if they are wrong .
what i wonder is how many are still active members?

In response to your second point, Nigel, I'd like to throw this idea into the ring.

The correct setting of initial odds is REALLY difficult in some (many?) cases. It is also difficult to determine if another's question has good or bad initial odds. And the problem is compounded because we can't (and shouldn't, to be fair to people who have already predicted) change the odds once a question is open.

Now if we had some form of "question holding", by which I assume you mean what was previously discussed here as user-vetting of questions before they go live, then I have a suggestion for getting more acceptable initial odds. If users (or just susperusers and editors and admins) get to quickly pre-approve questions in some form, then it shouldn't be all that hard to allow the "vettor" to also suggest their own odds. If it requires 3 approvals to go live, then the 4 sets of initial odds (creator plus 3 vettors) can be averaged to produce a more palatable result. This would reduce the strain on creators, give assessors a way to make the odds more to their sense of what's right, and generally reduce the number of voids for bad odds. This system would probably work better in the superuser context than in the larger user-base, because it extends what the superusers are already doing in another form (flagging and suspending questions with bad odds to be voided)>

Nigel,

The low "interest" markets come in several flavours. The main reason they come up here is subsequent to the previous discussion in comments for a Hit-By_Pitch daily total market. It was suggested that the amount of extra Cat Ed work to research and gather the relevant stats was not worth the effort given the low activity or number of predictors. This then spilled into a defense of "side-bets". So in this case, the low interest was only seen as a problem wrt the extra load on the Category Editor.

Other "flavours" of low interest markets include in-play foreign exchange trading (where a few players used to be able to make huge profits with little competition - like the Dow questions but without the market instantly responding to the current state of the index) and markets of such small interest that there is insufficient oversight by the community to determine if initial odds are being set reasonably, or if in fact some kind of gaming is going on.

But, in defence of low interest markets, and I paraphrase Chris (admin) here, I like a good prediction on Scottish football, which isn't all that popular at Hubdub. So a sweeper has its uses, but there's a down side as well.

Perhaps each of these "flavours" can be handled individually. Putting some onus on question creator to share the burden of figuring out the winning option should take care of the first example. Superusers are pretty diligent at finding the bad odds, as are all players in general.

The second case could be handled by 2 steps. First reduce the maximum bet to $1000 from $10,000. If that's too drastic, then reduce it on all in-play questions (which after all are only allowed if they gain admin approval -- the Dow/Nasdaq questions have that approval implicitly as of now).

Step 2, and this helps both the last minute series of $10K bets on the Dow as well as low activity/participation questions, consider implementing a formula that restricts the amount (by percent) of domination any player can have on any 1 market. Example: Say the limit is 25%. If the total of open (ie not cashed-in) predictions on a market is $40,000 and I want to drop $10K on an option, I can because my 10K will be one-fifth of the $50K (after I bet). But if I want to drop another $10K immediately afterwards, which would mean I would have 20K of the total 60K (ie 1/3 = 33.3% > 25%), then it wouldn't let me bet that much. I could (math skipped) bet up to $3333. If I want to bet more, I must wait until others have bet up the total to at least 4 times (based on 25% limit) what I have bet.

Notice some form of this also works wonders with low activity markets, because it forces the player who wants to play it heavily to wait for enough activity to justify the big wagers. This also encourages that player to publicize this market with friends or general community.

In my last comment, I was trying to suggest some ways to deal with the upcoming "congestion" on Hubdub.

The first, creating a seperate page or link just for more "complicated" bets(this was with dieseldog's ideas of keeping them totally seperate). As he suggested, make it clear that these questions could take longer to settle. Is there a way to do that?
Could we also include some stipulation where the question creator agrees to help settle? Maybe the part where it says "as reported by mainstream news..." you can have some options and the creator must check off one of them.
ie-
-settled by direct link to outcome (creator must provide a link that brings you to positive settlement)
-question creator agrees to research answer and provide proof of outcome(anyone wagering on a question of this type agrees to let the creator do math, provide proof, etc)

something like that??

When Hubdubbers go to wager, before putting an amount on a question, it will state clearly which option the creator picked. This way the Hubdubber is agreeing to allow the creator to do the math, etc. In the end admin still has to settle, but maybe not do all the tedious work. Also, you can still keep the option of protesting an incorrectly settled question.

Would something like that work? What does everyone think?

Interesting and useful discussion.

Further on lemewinplees ideas. We have actually thought quite a lot about the first two questions. For the first question one feature we have talked about a lot was having a 'question sweeper'. Any question that didn't achieve a minimum level of interest within 24 hours would be unpublished (note also we are hoping to change the terminology from voided to unpublished as it is with less prejudice). We still this is a good one but we haven't got to it yet.

The second idea (having a question holding area) has a more interesting history. We actually designed something like this prior to launch (it worked a bit like www.thestandard.com) however we never had time to implement it. Since launch I've actually started to think it would become a barrier to new users becoming question creators. I've been reading a lot about Wikipedia recently. I've always been fascinated that they kept the ability for any reader to edit any page even without logging in. The reason they kept that is that they have found that is the way they first get new editors. Putting up barriers would reduce spam and vandalism but at the expense of growing the community. One thing I think we could improve is the ability for question creators to converse before creating questions. To help that we are hoping to put in message boards on the site within the next couple of weeks (which would also replace Get Satisfaction).

Wonderful comments....this topic is really moving along smoothly...Infernalmachine makes a great point about providing the necessary information to help settle questions...when you're looking at what will possible be a large number of question for a cat-ed to settle, they'll need help from those who were interested enough to create the question.

On a related topic . . . noticed today a LARGE amount wagered on one of the business questions in the last 3-4 minutes before closing. The question allowed wagering up until 1 minute before the close and several wagers of $H10,000 were made in those last moments.

This goes back to the concerns of some players about the heavy wagering by some of the bigger players when the outcome is pretty darn certain, since there's so little time left for the market to change. That why some have been looking at closing their question 10-15 or more minutes before the end of a market. Now realistically, those who wagered about 50,000 in the last few minutes didn't actually make much compared to what they risked, but it was a pretty safe way to gain an extra 1-2,000 without much risk.

Just something for us to consider...not saying whether it's right or wrong, just that it illustrates what some players are referring to in their discussions about closing times.

I have to admit that infernalmachine's fantasy hockey question was one of my favorite sports questions since I've been on this site. He also did a great job managing and updating the question on a regular basis. If you look back at the question, you can see that he spent a great deal of time on it (which also brings us back to one of the issues that brought this discussion here - what is reasonable to be expected of time and effort put in to the settlement of questions...as well as the timeliness of this discussion prior to the start of the regular season of other sports). So I like the "onus" concept. As those types of questions can be fun, I would hope that we wouldn't have to limit questions to the "who will win" variety only.

letmewinplees, along with some other users have also been very good about providing the results of some of the various stats questions, but as the new category admin, I also feel responsible to check the math and make sure everything is correct.

I'm not sure what the feasibility is, but have to admit that I kind of liked the idea of question approval. Not sure that we're prepared to implement something like that right away, but perhaps an idea to keep in mind. I'm new to the whole admin thing, so I can only share from my new and recent experience, but I've spent a great deal of time responding to flags about starting odds of different events and "what if this happens" scenarios.

Also, I hope that my comments have not sounded like I was not willing to put in some work here. My intentions are directed more at concerns about taking over a very active category, watching the questions and hubdub evolve and anticipating the direction that we are going with the sports questions (as well as others).

Thanks for everyone's feedback

Months back I created this NHL play-off question:
http://www.hubdub.com/e/Market/NHL_Pl...

I then spent 10 minutes a day updating and double checking the stats. Every two days (or games as teams got eliminated) I posted the stats to the comments page so that people could see who was winning and check my stats or figures, When it was all over, I tied my settlement request to the stats in the comments (it was my integrity on the line if someone could find an error).

If I hadn't done all that work, there is no way Donal would have allowed my question. And he would have been right.

If you have a complicated question (and by complicated I mean that it involves stats gathering and math operations) that goes beyond the usual work required to settle a Sports question, then the onus should be on the question creator to gather the stats, do the math, and display the relevant info in a comment on the question page, along with a link to the pages or site you used to get the info. Then submit the settlement request and refer to the comment where all the data and math is.

It's a lot of work. If you feel that you don't want to have to do that, then why should an already overworked Category Editor have to do it for you? In other words, if it's too much hassle to do yourself, your question isn't a good Hubdub question, and shouldn't be submitted.

That seems to me to be the only reasonable way to approach this. It's better than "banning" questions. It also makes more sense than a laissez-faire approach where all the extra work is piled on the Editor. Make it easy for the Category Editor to like your "creative" question by removing the donkey work from them. If all they have to do is check some of your stats (which MUST be correct) and recheck your math, they'll be happy and you'll be happy.

I like all three ideas however......... i dont really see the first two happening , just cause it seems like alot of work for just one question. The third idea seems more doable with just simple questions to do with score or team vs team things . You could also throw in a Over , Under type question based on both teams total points for that particular day.

Ive got a few ideas pertaining to the sidebet/statistic type questions.

One idea I thought of was to have a special page just for sidebets/daily settlements. This would be for the questions that take longer to settle, etc.(that require math or other extensive research). Have some guidelines for posting questions. For example, the question has to be posted for at least 24 hours before suspension. There has to be a minimum number of HDrs wagering (15??) or a minimum total wagers. Once the suspension is reached, if those are not fulfilled, void the question for "lack of user interest". Clearly state these questions could take longer to settle on the page.

Another idea I had was something similar but doesnt require its own page. Is it possible to implement an "approval period". Before your question is actually posted for people to wager on, it goes through a screening process (by admin/super users). The question would have to meet certain guidelines (whatever rules admin settles on). Once it gets approved it will be posted and open for wagers. A nice idea would be to reward the quesiton creators with some Hubdub $$ for creating such a worthy question. A little incentive to want to create "quality" questions.

My third idea was to just simply come up with new guidelines and rules about making sports question. Limit the types of questions that can be posted. Maybe just YES or NO (ie will giants win superbowl, will chargers beat 49rs...with good starting percentages). Anything involving math could be limited to game SCORES only. (no yards, # of interceptions etc) Just SCORES.

What do you all think? Any ideas or thoughts? Are any of these suggestions possible?

I enjoy the who will win catagory, that will work better with the NFL . Seeing as how its only on Sunday, there wont be a problem with settling the questions.
Not a big fan of the ......Will Brett Farve play agian type questions, even tho i realize thats pretty much what this site is all about.

don't doubt it sport this should not be on this forum the subject surely was relative to djia not a fight between you and i – curios, on August 04, 2008 15:43

I'm glad that this question has been raised. Obviously, this has an affect on me as the new Sports Category Editor, but also on the direction that hubdub will take and what users want.

I'm excited about the upcoming football season and am glad to see users getting more creative with their questions recently.

To me, it sounds like the questions that we are trying to answer are these: 1) do we want to limit the number or types of questions that come up in the sports categories to what would be considered more "newsworthy" or what larger numbers of people want to see....or leave this area open, encouraging users to get involved and be creative?
2) if we go for the latter route, what would be the best way for the admins to handle this volumen?

As bayoubear pointed out, there could be multiple questions on each of the 14-16 NFL games each week. I've already seen comments about the possible different fantasy league type questions (have to admit that I'm a big fan of these myself), so I would anticipate a number of questions about different statistics and matchups. Then, throw in the NCAA/College football questions and all of the variations of these. I might have to quit by day job! :)

What are other users thoughts?