Fwd: weekly wow improvements

[Timothy Falconer]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Timothy Falconer <tee...@waveplace.org>

Date: October 11, 2010 8:39:39 AM AST

To: Squeakland List <squea...@squeakland.org>

Cc: Beth Santos <be...@waveplace.org>, etoys-w...@googlegroups.com

Subject: weekly wow improvements

Hi everyone,

This morning I put a few hours in on SQ-729 ... "go back in history when there's no wow for the week".

Last week, the wow was an article from the website, which shouldn't happen.  I've added extra checks to make sure the article-not-project thing can't happen again. I've also made it so that it'll go back in time if there's no ranked wow from the previous week, which means older projects will be highlighted.

For the curious, last week's error was due to two things:  first, there were no ranked articles for the previous week, and second, I must have made a faulty assumption months and months back where I set all article points to 1, even one's without a project attached.

Also for the curious, the weekly wow algorithm is now:

1. START = two monday's ago
2. find a ranked project from the week starting on START
3. has this been a weekly wow before?  if so, then ignore
4. if none found, START = a week earlier
5. goto 2 until it fails 10 times (ie, before sep 2009)
6. if it failed, don't send a weekly wow


Anyway, we'll know if this actually works in three hours when the wow's get sent.

Take care,
Tim

--
Timothy Falconer
Waveplace Foundation
http://waveplace.org
+ 1 610 797 3100 x33

[Steve Thomas]

Thanks Tim,

Question, How does ranking happen?  As I recall an email is sent when someone posts a project allowing that person to rank the project. But does that email only go to one person picked at random?  What happens if that one person doesn't rank the project? Also it seems you can't rank projects unless you get an email.

Stephen

[Timothy Falconer]

Hi Stephan,

The short answer is:

http://squeakland.org/showcase/ranking.jsp

Ten ballots get sent out for each project.  If three days go by, unanswered ballots are sent to someone else.   It's not picked random by the way, there's an algorithm that takes into account past ranking and number of times someone has ranked... it's a merit based system (automatic).  People who have positively contributed to the showcase are asked to rank before strangers.   This is a longer topic :)

I'll be looking at how the ballots doing soon . . . it's possible that we've reached saturation and need to tweak some parameters to open things up again.

Tim

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

At Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:13:03 -0400,

Timothy Falconer wrote:
>
> Hi Stephan,
>
> The short answer is:
>
> http://squeakland.org/showcase/ranking.jsp
>
> Ten ballots get sent out for each project. If three days go by, unanswered ballots are sent to someone else. It's
> not picked random by the way, there's an algorithm that takes into account past ranking and number of times someone has
> ranked... it's a merit based system (automatic). People who have positively contributed to the showcase are asked to
> rank before strangers. This is a longer topic :)
>
> I'll be looking at how the ballots doing soon . . . it's possible that we've reached saturation and need to tweak some
> parameters to open things up again.

Do people get ballots in these days? I thought that since all
projects are visible by default, I haven't gotten any valid ballots
(only one invalid).

-- Yoshiki

[Steve Thomas]

I haven't received any ballots since January 15th.  There have been 45 projects (that were NOT mine) posted since March 18th (I stopped counting).

Stephen

[Carlos y Nenny Rabassa]

I haven´t received ballots as I used to.

Carlos Rabassa

Volunteer

Plan Ceibal Support Network

Montevideo, Uruguay

[Timothy Falconer]

I'll look into this when I can.

[Timothy Falconer]

By the way, I did see points assigned in the last few months.   Most likely you all haven't received ballots because you've received so many in the past.   (The "don't bother people too much" part of the algorithm.)