[meta] Jolly Roger feature priorities for Team Left Out

[egnor]

I'm filing this to capture the rest of various discussions after Team Left Out used Jolly Roger for the 2024 Mystery Hunt.

1. applause sounds from everyone's laptop when a puzzle is solved
2. an easy API to add puzzles (and list puzzles, to avoid adding dupes), for ad-hoc hunt-site scrapers to use
3. better ability to see how many people are on a puzzle, and where (geographically) they are, and who they are, also who has been active previously. people find the activity sparklines a bit confusing and mysterious.
4. [edit: added] reduction of screen space used in the top and sidebar, ability to hide the sidebar
5. some more obvious/automatic way to enter audio chat, or be alerted that someone is there? otherwise it's hard to get started
6. conversely, ability to see which puzzles a given hunter has been active on
7. notifications are easy to miss and also tend to pile up. maybe desktop notifications would work better?
8. would be nice if chat activity in a starred puzzle gave a notification, so you could see progress in puzzles of interest

The first 3 or 4 are the important ones.

[egnor]

Commentary: Several of these reflect the difference between a system where people sort of roam around dabbling at will, and a system where people "dive in" and declare that they are "working on" a particular puzzle -- in Left Out's old Czar setup, that immediately warped you to the corresponding Jitsi room for example. However that had the problem that people might forget to do that, and we had specific job roles to go around and nag people to update their status! So that's not exactly a perfect situation.

We probably need some "product level" discussion to figure out how we might approach this?

My starting point would just be to surface the implicit activity signals which show up in the sparklines. This would probably need to be configurable. But basically when you hover over a puzzle, instead of or in addition to the activity sparklines, you'd see a "leaderboard" of people who have sent chat messages, edited the doc, joined an audio call, etc.. We'd have some function to gestalt that into a sort order, and some way to present the relevant stats quickly, so you could see at a glance what's going on.

Also, if the user has a puzzle page up and has interacted with it / moused over it recently (and more recently than any other puzzle page), and an audio call starts, I might join them to it automatically (but with mic muted). So yeah your laptop might just start talking to you. This would need to be something people could disable.

[jpd236]

3. better ability to see how many people are on a puzzle, and where (geographically) they are, and who they are, also who has been active previously. people find the activity sparklines a bit confusing and mysterious.

We had a few teams give JR a test run for Galactic Puzzle Hunt this weekend, and based on their feedback, I wanted to +1 this. In particular, a couple of folks mentioned they didn't really feel the sparklines were reliable / didn't understand how they were counting. I think maybe the biggest gap here is that simply viewing a puzzle doesn't seem to create activity - you have to send messages in chat or make edits to the sheet, IIUC? And of course, as noted, just knowing the number of people isn't the same as knowing who they are.

Overall, it didn't feel like it gave people a clear picture of where the other folks on the team were currently solving.