Welcome to all of our new participants!  We’re happy to see so much new activity and we’re pleased to let you know we have more questions in the pipeline, and more links between questions, too.

On Saturday (18-JAN) we released some minor updates to Predict:

1. Improved registration & password reset.  Our #1 helpdesk item was from people who didn’t know to look for an activation email.  We’ve improved the registration flow and added smarter errors should someone try to login verifying an account.
2. Made ‘Show Chances’ automatic, and removed the checkbox. We discovered we had no use case for ‘Hide chances.’ (Multi-choice questions still require you to expand them first - that’s just to conserve vertical space.)
3. Increased number of “Recent Activities” on the exchange dashboard. Because you’re so active!

Upcoming changes in the next couple of weeks:

• Public Links - view questions without login!
• Scaled Continuous questions - adjust a quantity rather than a probability

We’ve also made the following updates to Spark:

1. Challenges are now organized by the same high level categories that show up on Predict, making it easier to understand where we’re looking for new forecast questions.
2. We’ve turned on email alerts for various events in the system so you can keep better track of when your questions have been published or you have comments to respond to.
3. Everyone now has a simple profile where they can post something about themselves that others can see.
4. Your Spark account can now be tied directly to your Predict account. Data now syncs.
5. Challenges are now organized by the same high level categories that show up on Predict, making it easier to understand where we’re looking for new forecast questions.
6. Topic Leaders - the people who have volunteered to manage question challenges - can now publish directly to Predict.
7. We’ve made several bug fixes and performance improvements.

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” ~Churchill