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cjb / codex-blackboard

Meteor app for coordinating solving for our MIT Mystery Hunt team
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Blackboard too quick to add names to "Working on this" list (also too slow to remove names) #182

Open kai-huang opened 9 years ago

kai-huang commented 9 years ago

I like to visit and quickly skim a lot of puzzles during the hunt. I just did that as a test on of the puzzles currently on the Blackboard, and now I'm listed in the "Working on this" column even though I only quickly went in and I left a while ago. If someone quickly opens all puzzles to scan (e.g. for a new puzzle to work on), currently it seems their name would appear in every "Working on this" list, which would make the list misleading and not as useful. Perhaps make a person only appear on the "Working on this" list if they stay in the puzzle page for a minute or two?

Also, we should remove the name from the list quicker too, when someone leaves. Currently, I've already left a puzzle page a few minutes ago, yet it still shows my name in the "Working on this" list (again, makes it misleading and not as useful).

cscott commented 9 years ago

The delay was intentional, there was too much status bouncing otherwise. The time out is 5 minutes. This is exactly how it was last year, and there weren't any real issues during the hunt.

We could probably add some sort of delay because you are added to the 'working on this list', but it wouldn't be trivial. Punting to next year.

shaunagm commented 9 years ago

I noticed that names were frequently greyed out on the "working on this" list for puzzles. I figured it was some reflection of activity, and tried to use that to measure how hard the puzzle was being worked on.

Is that true, and can you tell us briefly how that works, @cscott?

cscott commented 9 years ago

Greyed out means that that person is in chat, but the chat tab is backgrounded/not visible (according to the browser). So probably a puzzle they are "watching" or "previously worked on" rather than are actively working on. Can I add a tooltip or something to make that clearer? It seems like you understood the basic idea well enough.

(Technically, it means that at least one tab for that chat is visible/foregrounded, since you may have multiple tabs open to the same chat room, intentionally or no.)

shaunagm commented 9 years ago

Seems I correctly figured out how to use the feature, although I wasn't sure precisely how people were being categorized. Quick way to check that approximately everyone did is to email the list to ask. It's pretty intuitive, so maybe a tooltip isn't necessary?