A new SciCast ad campaign has created ~1,000 registrations per day for the past couple of days. That has doubled our forecaster community and created a lot of activity, which is great. But it also generated a lot of email notifications for users who had opted to receive updates for new comments, and more email is not always great.
After a dozen or so complaints and a review of some comments, we have disabled email notifications until we add some more controls.
We hope to release an update this week that:
- Requires a verified email in order to comment.
- Provides limited ability to flag comments as spam
- Offers participants better “opt-in” control for their inbox
We will announce the update — it should have some interesting new features as well.
Please pardon the dust as we adjust to greater activity, and consider doing a little coaching in the comment fields as you correct forecasts. Thanks!
Oh: some sample ads:
could you guys run a question “what percentage of the new scicast accounts created during our ad campaign will make a trade when their account is 30-37 days old?” it’ll need a logarithmic scale, so we can quibble over teeny tiny percentages without blowing all our points.
Those were actually helpful sometimes. I will miss them.
On a side note, are there any plans for a user forum? Individual question comments sections aren’t convenient for broader discussions. For example, the question of how the assets are allocated on trades has been asked repeatedly in many places.
I like the notifications too — they will be back.
We had intended the blog or Help/FAQ to be places for general discussion, but I’m not sure they are working. We could build a forum, but perhaps we could use an existing service or channel. Any suggestions? (My favorite is the Stack Exchange family, but I’m not sure what it takes to get one.)
hm, i’d never even noticed the help/faq before. i had to hunt for it to figure out what you were referring to. even now i’m not sure how i’d communicate with anyone except scicast staff with it.
you used to be able to basically buy a stackexchange site, but they changed their revenue model to just advertising, so they run all of them now. the only way to get a new one is through their area51 process: http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq which would be slow and (imo) unlikely to complete successfully.
the best other forum/discussion group options i can think of are: 1) make a google group, or 2) pay for “vbulletin in the cloud”: http://www.vbulletin.com/en/vbulletin-cloud
Thanks for posting the update. I was wondering why I had stopped receiving SciCast comments. Guess I need to read the blog more often.
Also check our Twitter account @scicasters for faster updates.