It will have the following differences from Sprachprofi's bot:
- It will run throughout the whole year, with each challenge being separated from the previous one by only a few days.
- It will have more relevant categories to classify students in, namely intensity (extensive vs intensive students), and level (beginner vs intermediate vs advanced). Everybody will be dumped together by default on the website (as it is done now), but you will be able to filter people by the categories easily. (Sprachprofi's categories, work and forum origin, will not be used at all.)
- It will have a much better list of languages you can sign up with. I will simply use the list of languages the UniLang forum uses. If it has covered that forum's needs, it will cover ours. (I could always add extra languages as well.)
("Beginner" would be defined as "working towards finishing A2", "intermediate" as "working towards finishing B2", and "advanced" as "working past B2".)
However, I am not sure how long it should run, and figured I could just ask the forum.
Note that I will only be considering the five options I put in the poll. I deem two weeks as too short and anything above two months as too long. Others are welcome to make such Twitter bots with my code if they want challenges 3+ months long, as my code will be Apache-licensed and public. I will not necessarily choose the most popular option if the discussion in this thread goes elsewhere.
The poll is open for 20 days from today (March 4th).
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EDIT: Some details about what I intend to make
Ser wrote:Okay, after spending an hour thinking about the nature of the challenge, this is what I've come up with for what I'm going to make. I am assuming the poll will remain as it is with the three-week option winning.
Intention of the challenge
* To focus on language learning for a short time in a spirit of competition over hours spent learning, against people of a similar intensity and skill level.
* To focus on language learning in a spirit of competition against yourself, as you compare yourself with your own previous challenge runs in a similar intensity and skill level. This is almost certainly going to be three weeks looking at the poll, which means you'll be able to accumulate your own data quickly. (You can always request to delete your data from the website too, even long after the challenge run ends.)
What you do
* You register with one Focus Language you want to be compared by against other people in the leaderboard, specifying intensity and skill level.
* Once the challenge run starts, you report how long you study in a language, optionally with what materials you use. You can report as many languages as you wish, but only your Focus Language will count towards the leaderboard. Then the three weeks are up.
* You are asked to study at least one hour for every week of the challenge has (so at least three hours total). Otherwise, in an automatic fashion, your data for this one challenge run is politely removed at the end of the challenge.
What happens (what the bot and website do)
* At the end of each week, the Twitter bot and the website announce the leading people in each category where there's two or more participants. This means the 1st and 2nd weeks have mid-way prizes by themselves. At the end of the 3rd week, the leaderboard is frozen into the history page.
* You are able to compare participants in a given leaderboard according to time spent studying, filtering people by intensity and skill level.
* You are able to see numbers and pretty graphs of how much you have studied each language in a given challenge run or all challenge runs and with which materials.
* You are able to see how much a language is reported to have been studied so far.