Lesley's dashboard

Hi Brooks
The reason for that is that you've predicted on a brand new question which is less than 6 hours old. It's a precaution we've put in place to try to prevent gaming activity (aka cheating!) whereby someone could create a new question with bad odds and someone else could predict on it and cash out before an administrator has checked the odds.

@Destry - good idea. I'll speak to Rob about it.

Hello Everyone

Well, it's taken me a while to catch up on all this impassioned commenting and I am truly sad to see that things have spiralled downwards into such personal and embittered attacks.

It is clear that the question should have been voided. It may have helped if someone had flagged the question at some point (it received no flags at any point). There have also been lessons learned about dealing with different currencies. I will consider amending the rules if we think it is necessary.

I'm not going to lower myself to discussing the rights and wrongs of who called whom which name and what that name actually means. Frankly, I spend more than enough time refereeing between my children, I'm not about to start doing the same thing here.

To the more pressing issue... the responsbilities of a Super User. Yes, with the rights come responsibilities. And yes, we thought very carefully before picking the current Super Users, and yes we did choose them, amongst other reasons, because we felt that they would give a balanced view and judgement. We did not, however, ask them to be "representatives" of Hubdub, nor have they signed any contract with us. They are simply enthusiastic users with the ability to Suspend questions. The "responsibility" is that they will help in policing the game. So far they have all been doing an outstanding job. We do not expect Super Users to react in the same manner as Admins - they are not being paid and are doing it for the love of the game.

The Super User concept is obviously beta, and we are, as always, open to suggestions on how we can improve things, so all genuine suggestions will be taken on board. If you all have any thoughts or ideas on how best to improve the concept, then I suggest opening a new thread here (and doing it without the flamewars please. Life is too short).

Lesley.

Wow, I'm so impressed with all these ideas guys. There are some super ones. I personally (NOT an official response!) think this sort of thing would work brilliantly as a wiki. And I'll certainly speak to the team about it.

We're always so impressed with the amount of time and effort dedicated Hubdubbers put into the site, and we definitely want to have some way of showing their brilliance, other than pure hard (fake) cash!

It's all fantastic food for thought, and we should be able to focus time on it during the 2nd half of this year.

Thanks, and keep the ideas flowing!!

Lesley.

Guys

It's just been brought to my attention that this thread has gone unanswered. Please accept my apologies.

I will go and get my baseball bat and clobber a few people...

You'll get an official response soon, you have my word!

Lesley

I appreciate your support Markov. – Lesley, on May 29, 2008 22:11

Stephen
Thanks for your interest in becoming a Super User. More will be coming. For now, follow Jenni's advice....

Guys, I totally appreciate all your input, and we've discussed this amongst the team again, but have come to the conclusion that a TEMPORARY ban is necessary.

I can't right now give you a timescale unfortunately, but as soon as we feel we're in a position to open them up again, (and by making them non-in-running, that will hopefully be sooner rather than later) we will do it.

I hope you can all understand that we're trying to make the game as fair as possible for all involved.

Thanks for your understanding.

Lesley.

p.s. existing questions on other indices would be settled, only new ones would be voided.

Hi Guys

I can see there's a lot of frustration here, and can totally understand it. As far as I can see, and please correct me if I'm wrong, there are the following problems:

1. The rule cited to you epicur doesn't specifically exclude all other indices. - I will change that. To be clear though, in Section 2.1 of the Rules, it does state: "No user-created in-running questions are allowed apart from on the DJIA, NASDAQ, FTSE 100, DAX, BSE, Nikkei and Hang Seng"

2. We suddenly decided to "get tough" on banning these excluded indices without prior warning - we should have communicated our intentions beforehand - please accept our apologies. Lesson learned.

3. The Nikkei question was voided rather than settled with an early cut off - again, this shouldn't have happened. Sorry. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it as we cannot "unvoid", but I will flag it to all the Category Editors as another Lesson Learned.

I think I have captured the main issues, but please shout if I've missed something.

Best wishes and Happy Hubdubbing

Lesley.

Hey guys

I'll be completely honest here and admit that this question was a rather blatent attempt at marketing our new Facebook page. I'm really hoping that everyone will become a fan...primarily because if I get lots of new users coming from Facebook then Nigel has promised me that I'll get a night off work..... ;-)

More seriously, we are planning to post some interesting stuff there in coming weeks, which should be a lot of fun.

Meanwhile though, I genuinely think there is absolute minimal scope for gaming on this question. The chance of one user being able to manipulate the outcome by joining or leaving the Page is negligible. I will of course keep a close eye on the market and if there is any suspicious activity then it will be voided.

Mrs Eccles