InfernalMachine's dashboard

InfernalMachine started following the idea "Should there be a mechanism for joining duplicat markets?" in Hubdub.

InfernalMachine replied on February 14, 2008 01:07 to the idea "Should there be a mechanism for joining duplicat markets?" in Hubdub:

Yes.. Because the user has no way of telling which of the duplicated markets is the "real" one. They are playing in good faith. I still think there should be a distinction drawn between markets voided for being rubbishy and ones voided for a technicality as Ferdinand describes. In the latter case, it seems unfair to penalize the bettors on the popular choice.

InfernalMachine replied on February 14, 2008 00:52 to the idea "Question creators should be able to Add/Remove news tags for heir questions" in Hubdub:

It wouldn't be a bad idea to allow some extra editing ability on other parts of the question (at least the second text box under the question, but maybe the whole thing). Many voids could be eliminated, especially if a flag was like the contact us page (I mean the flagger could explain their reason for flagging), and was sent to both the editor and the question writer. Of course you couldn't edit after you had predicted on the question, and changes couldn't be so extreme that other people who had already wagered felt cheated. At the least it wouldn't be a bad idea to allow editing for a few minutes (like here at Get Satisfaction) before the question goes live. Sometimes it's only when you inspect the final question page that you notice something you wish you could fix.

I agree fully about the tags. You don't know how irrelevant the articles that match your tags are going to be until you see them.

InfernalMachine started following the problem "Delays in settlement" in Hubdub.

InfernalMachine replied on February 14, 2008 00:38 to the problem "Delays in settlement" in Hubdub:

if a user is settling questions, i hope they can't predict on those questions, and maybe not predict in that category. also, it would have to be transparent, not the honour system. it's okay for editors and admins to do it on trust. it's not worth your while to damage the image of hubdub for personal gain and glory. but other users would have to submit to scrutiny, i think, if they're settling questions.

InfernalMachine started following the idea "How Many Hubdubbers Are There?" in Hubdub.

InfernalMachine replied on February 13, 2008 05:13 to the idea "How Many Hubdubbers Are There?" in Hubdub:

I agree about more names on the leaderboard - I'd like to have pages of them so everyone could find themselves in the list.

On a note of encouragement to newcomers, you only need to increase your worth 25% a day to be as wealthy as the top of the leaderboard now in 20 days. Another thing I found was that making money is a little tough at first, because you're figuring things out and because it's easy to run out of cash, gets easier to about 25 thousand, and gets really sluggish and hard again after that. The reason is that to keep increasing your wealth you either have a gazillion predictions which you can't easily keep track of, or you run into certain penalties that betting large entail (you swamp markets, the percent gain for correct answers is reduced proportional to how big your bet is, cash-ins and current worth are also reduced percentage-wise proportional to the size of your wager). This is good news really. It means that there's a speed limit imposed on the people up front which will probably show a lot more new names appearing on the board.

Maybe we should have a bank, where people when they reach 11K, 21K, etc can bank everything but 1K, go back to the bottom of the leaderboard, but have a separate leaderboard for total assets where it's like it is now. This would mix things up a bit.

InfernalMachine marked one of anaverageamerican's replies in Hubdub as useful. anaverageamerican replied to the idea "Product development: Power user vetting and leaderboards".

InfernalMachine replied on February 12, 2008 20:19 to the problem "404 Error" in Hubdub:

Only no-one can profit on the information

InfernalMachine reported a problem in Hubdub on February 12, 2008 20:16:

404 Error

Where did Hubdub go?

InfernalMachine replied on February 12, 2008 15:31 to the question "How should primary/caucus 2008 election markets be answered (Politics)?" in Hubdub:

Yes. The left side is broken down that way, but if you check the bottom of the page, the asterix next to Total Delegates (which is what they use on that page for the state by state breakdown) includes superdelegates. AFAIK, the MSNBC policy is not to include them. It's all very confusing, and I wish you luck in finding a happy solution.

InfernalMachine replied on February 12, 2008 14:43 to the question "How should primary/caucus 2008 election markets be answered (Politics)?" in Hubdub:

CNN, for national figures, includes the super delegates in the totals. Not so good for that. But the state figures are probably okay, but so are the other two. AP is the source for most newspapers popular vote figures, but their delegate count is a little artistic (like CNN)

InfernalMachine replied on February 12, 2008 00:18 to the question "Has the voiding mechanism changed?" in Hubdub:

Just a thought. Elsewhere there's an ongoing discussion about clawing back cashed-in predictions that are later voided. Perhaps that's why they have been moved. See my idea below for a way to clean up the page. All you'd need to do is have a mark or text colour to distinguish cash-ins from straight voids.

InfernalMachine replied on February 12, 2008 00:09 to the problem "voided question = loss of dollars?" in Hubdub:

This is discussed in the topic "Has the voiding mechanism changed?", a few comments down. If you are looking in My Predictions: Void, and you find negative amounts (or positive amounts) of profit, these are cash-ins you made on the question before it was voided. The loss (compared to what you initially wagered) was something you agreed to at the time.

InfernalMachine replied on February 11, 2008 23:59 to the idea "Proposed product fix: Claw-back of winnings on void" in Hubdub:

The scheme I "don't entirely agree with" is the original concept brought up by Nigel, not the scheme for flagging questions and displaying the flagging level by Golwar and electroaffinity, which I like very much. Just wanted to make that clear.

InfernalMachine marked one of electroaffinity's replies in Hubdub as useful. electroaffinity replied to the idea "Proposed product fix: Claw-back of winnings on void".

InfernalMachine marked one of Golwar's replies in Hubdub as useful. Golwar replied to the idea "Proposed product fix: Claw-back of winnings on void".

InfernalMachine replied on February 11, 2008 23:54 to the idea "Proposed product fix: Claw-back of winnings on void" in Hubdub:

That's a great idea. It both signals to the editor that this question requires their attention, and warns users encountering the question. Perfect.

InfernalMachine replied on February 11, 2008 23:46 to the question "Has the voiding mechanism changed?" in Hubdub:

Thanks. Now I get it.

How about only automatically listing the questions that were voided, with a "+" button when we want to see the individual wagers? That might be good for all the various tabs inside My Hubdub. Lots less to send and lots less to wade through. Just a thought.

InfernalMachine reported a problem in Hubdub on February 11, 2008 23:39:

Slow Question screen updates

While buying and selling on the US markets questions today, I encountered excruciating delays. If anyone else has these two issues, please say so.

1. The biggest slowdown is around the drawing of the small graphs at the top left of the page, particularly in multiple-choice questions with more than 3 choices. These Flash drawings start to crawl when there's too many lines to draw.

Personally, I only need them occasionally and would LOVE to be able to disable them (provided the odds are still displayed in text). I think this might not only be of benefit to the users, but would take a huge load off the server, especially during in-play markets, when people are refreshing their screens over and over. (Not every refresh demands a redrawn graph). Perhaps a scheme like we currently have for the display or not of news items? Or a button to request a graph draw in place?

2. When I make a prediction, I get sent back to the screen from which I came. Makes sense. I might want to see how I affected the market, or wager again. But when I cash-in, I end up in the middle of what is, in my case at least, an enormous list of my previous cash-ins. I don't want to be there (not to mention how increasingly slow that page is to load). I want to be back in the page from which I pressed the cash-in button (ie the question page or my open predictions page). Again, a huge potential savings in time and effort for me, and in load for the server.