Oh heck Beta, I'm not personally concerned with the sheer number. (Btw from a quick glance, wtf is the problem? less than two dozen. whoopie!) Unless they reached into the hundreds, it is of no consequence to your database…a mere triviality. The website I govern and develop for generates thousands of database entries each day, and it is not funded by the the federal government, the University of Washington, Microsoft, and adobe.
The "nuisance" comes about as a result of a minority group of players that seem to govern the social environment at foldit (and who in my opinion and experience tends to drive this game to a statistically low participation rate when averaged over time with their attitudes). Voting on ideas for improvement? jeez….how very unscientific. In my opinion, almost all voting should be solely internal to the developers and management, since a clique can essentially kill a sensible idea otherwise.
Anyway. this is all trivial. seriously. Aren't there more important issues to address than playing politics with how many suggestions »> a person gives you for free?
I downloaded the most recent version to do a quick evaluation of changes since the last time I did so, and it's still fraught with problems evident since day one, like the overuse of CPU when idle, the lack of a rotate (you still call it tweak for some unknown reason) command that doesn't require manually watching it rotate from angle a to b, rebuild still working much as tweak, etc.
best wishes.
So basically what we need is a FAQ section including common suggestions (and why they're not implemented)…
You should submit a feedback about those issues!
While 19 cases isn't a huge number, it's large enough that the posts are taking up an entire page… which means that some clutter is added in the short term. Of course, a better long-term fix would be adding extra code to the feedback system so that duplicate requests would be automatically converted to an up-vote for the original submission. But that's probably too much AI design when an easier solution is available (translation: manually cleaning up the posts is still practical as long as what we have is the "enthusiastic newbie" case rather than the "real spam" case).
Interesting… you have not played in a year and a half, but have identified "a minority group of players that seem to govern the social environment at foldit" in the few days since you've returned and played 2 puzzles? And your opinion and experience lead you to conclude that these people are driving "this game to a statistically low participation rate when averaged over time with their attitudes"?
You must be referring to the "minority of players" who actually volunteer much of their time by helping and teaching in global - writing scripts - and following and answering feedbacks.
The ones who do these things get exasperated at the fact that some new players do not use search before making suggestions, or think to ask a simple question in global chat first. When someone fills the entire front page - and then reopens after someone has closed their feedback as a duplicate or has answered the feedback - then yes, the "small minority" get a bit testy that they need to go to the second page to follow the conversations about current bugs and issues (i.e. "more important issues" as you refer to).
Yes! Everyone here is always happy when a new player shows enthusiasm for the game - that's how we all started. But there have been a few recent new players to flood feedback with suggestions, and one of the others made it clear that they were indeed seeking the Consultant badges. Had you been around for the past year and a half, you may have been aware of this.
It is a shame that when a new player does this type of feedback flooding, inevitably they are subjected to a lot of negatives. There may have been an idea or two that had some merit. By presenting suggestions at a slower pace, my suspicion is that the suggestions would be evaluated by the community with the individual attention they might deserve.
There are many "more important issues to address". Perhaps if you stuck around, you might become aware of what they are and how the community and the devs are working to address those issues, rather than fluffing everything off as "playing politics".
Relearn the game - become a contributing member. Quite frankly, your "opinion and experience" may lead to doing something positive rather than a hit and run at the devs and the players who do contribute.
Interesting but you're one of the people who prompted me to leave. Blather on deary.
Yes, please look at my Feedbacks, especially if you will be working on the next overhaul of the Foldit game or website. I think they are all good ideas. Maybe you will too!
The simplest and easiest way to resolve the "issue" is to remove the reward.
I understand infjamc and in part I agree, hence my former post. No doubt, true spam has to be accounted for, most likely via manual means with a possible followup blocker for the origination IP if it's true spam, but with the poor overall retention of players over the past four years, it's not (again, I M O) wise to marginalize enthusiastic newer players. And it's why I suggested that perhaps a simple codesil could be employed to encourage posters to collate their suggestions. As I noted, it's not anything close to rocket science to add such a codesil to the opener for new posts. A div, span, or similar for the content "if you're going to post many suggestions, we'd appreciate it if you intend on posting multiple suggestions using a single post, thank you!" or whatever, and an attachment to the JavaScript, HTML5 or other code that opens the editor in the first place. For that matter, if the content span/div/etc is placed within the div in which the editor window occurs, it will be opened by default using the existing code.
For the intent of reducing the effective "spamming by those who are enthusiastic, I think that such a codesil would go at least some way to encouraging a more compact manner in their efforts.
As to the voting, I've already posted what I think of that. I don't like it and never really did. I think it's contrary to the purposes of the research and to science in general and it helps to maintain a very dangerous precedent.
