search

PuzzleServer / mainpuzzleserver

The main repo for the Puzzle Hunt and Puzzleday servers.
MIT License
9 stars 32 forks source link

Add "ask the author" hints #299

Open morganbr opened 5 years ago

morganbr commented 5 years ago

Teams should pay hint coins to contact the author as part of hinting. Ideally, it would also show if the author is likely to see the email.

tabascq commented 5 years ago

Easy enough to verify by looking at hints taken. I don't think any engineering is needed here.

Vroo commented 3 months ago

Should be considered as part of #912. This should be done before allowing a person to ask a question since having the authors ignore questions because people didn't use hints is a bad experience. Better to not let them ask a question in that case.

Some options:

  1. A hunt or puzzle field that specifies the number of hint coins necessary to enable help chat for a puzzle; when they click the help button, it confirms they want to spend the coins just like it does for buying hints. (Preferred as per-puzzle value but could have a hunt default value for convenience.)

  2. A threshold value of the number of hint coins that must be spent on pre-written hints before help chat is enabled.

There should be a way to refund the coins used for a hint in case the puzzle had a bug in it.