Suggested Change for SC rules (2018)

Ongoing language-learning challenges, and team challenge logs (but not individual logs)
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby Serpent » Tue Apr 17, 2018 9:58 pm

Cavesa wrote:Perhaps it is time to define SC beginner-intermediate and SC intermediate-advanced as two variants? The same date, time limit, two versions? It might be a nice compromise between one size that doesn't fit most of us, and the highly divided "everyone designs their own challenge" attitude?
This wouldn't work for language families.
Maybe we could add a column for an optional short comment (10-20 characters)? So a free text field where the participant can acknowledge whatever advantage they have, such as "I live in Spain", "Fluent, maintenance" or simply mention whatever makes sense to them? Ideally this would be something you can edit during the challenge if your situation changes (for example "on hold", "focus language"). Presumably this would encourage us to check the stats of other members more often :)
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby kanewai » Tue Apr 17, 2018 10:45 pm

Cavesa wrote:It might be cool to have the actual number of books there. For example in the profile, you could see that ExampleParticipant has read 1230 pages so far, that is the counted part compared to others, and finished four real books (that would be just for information, not the ladder).

Would any of this be possible without too much work from the bot makers? And would anyone else even like it?


From a community perspective, I think it's far more interesting to see what people are reading, or have read, rather than just the number of pages. I'd be worried about making the bot too messy, though.

follow up: I looked at a few other sites to get ideas for tracking books - not to replace the twitter bot, or to do official SC tracking, but just a way to get a quick glance at who was reading what. Goodreads has the reading challenges, but those looked complicated to set up.
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Apr 18, 2018 5:13 am

I think changing it at all at this late stage seems unlikely. And a lot of potential changes are more complicated than they might seem at first glance. Having a column for level seems good, but as Serpent pointed out, it wouldn’t work well for language families, languages where the person’s skills are very uneven or languages that are related to a language they know. A list of actual books would be cool, but some people read parts of books or read things that aren’t books. We do have the possibility of including the title though, so you can click on the person’s name to see their list. Sometimes the list is very long if the person logs every day and some people don’t include titles, but I still find it useful. So, I don’t feel the feature is really needed. We could try actually using the book/movie review threads on this forum. That would be useful if you’re just looking for ideas of what to read/watch.
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby Serpent » Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:00 am

The free text column wouldn't have to be used for the level. It's for anything you want your fellow participants to know, as long as it's something that can be explained with a handful of words. For a language family it can be a range of levels or the level in your best language.
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby tiia » Wed Apr 18, 2018 9:55 am

I'm not sure, whether I would prefer a free text column (with character limitation) or just a certain set of possibilities. While a free text has the advantage of writing whatever seems interesting to others, the fixed set would allow to know the type of challenge from every participant and give the opportunity to have make some kind of statistics like "How many people achieved the goal they were aiming for?" or "Are half-challenges more likely to fail?" The "I live in Spain" option would mean that we don't know whether the person signed up for a half, full or double challenge.
Maybe someone with more knowledge on the technical aspects of the twitter bot could say something here? How difficult is it to add such a column and which one would be easier to implement?
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby Serpent » Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:28 pm

Um I don't have the actual skills but I do have a general understanding of how the bot works. Technically I don't believe either of the options is significantly harder, but for a fixed set we have to agree on the options and come up with hashtags.

The suggestion wasn't intended for long-term analysis but rather for sharing your current status. Neither level nor challenge choice is permanent.

Maybe we can do some optional surveys separately from the bot.
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby rdearman » Wed Apr 18, 2018 10:07 pm

Changes to columns isn't the problem. The issue would be adding all the extra functionality on the Twitter bot to process the tweet and of course modification of the database to hold and query the information. All of this is possible, but not before the first of May and once we start I wouldn't like to change the bot in mid challenge.

However, we have modified the bot while the bot was running before, just have to test it better.

Changes at this stage isn't a good idea, but most people announce their intended challenge, half, double whatever in the thread on this forum. Painful but it is possible to find out. Also you have the option to tweet the title of the book or film so if you look at the text rather than the graph for that person you can see what they read or watched in that language.
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby PeterMollenburg » Thu Apr 19, 2018 12:38 am

I'm hoping to see something appear soon in the way of SC 2018-2019. I'm assuming a thread will appear soon, am I correct? I'm pretty stupid when it comes to computer functionality so I'd like to have it spelled out to me (yet again) how to sign up via Twitter bot and other such details. Point me in the right direction if all this has already been done please for SC 2018-19 (and be dumbfounded that I'm too ridiculous to find that information already).

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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby Xenops » Thu Apr 19, 2018 1:39 am

This might be a dumb question: but do you need the Twitter bot? Since it doesn't seem like anyone here is that familiar with it?
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Re: Suggested Change for SC rules

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:01 am

Xenops wrote:This might be a dumb question: but do you need the Twitter bot? Since it doesn't seem like anyone here is that familiar with it?

It’s like a car or a computer, most of us are reasonably familiar with how to use one, but we wouldn’t know how to build or fix one. I don’t think you actually need to use it if you don’t want to, you can keep track in some other way, but it’s more fun and easier to see where everyone stands if we all use it.
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