Question

Hey All,

Some questions regarding the interactions that you see on the site: (1) It is difficult to reply to inbox messages since you cannot easily read both the senders message and your message that you are writing (maybe have them both visible at the same time?)

Answer 1

(2) I find that if I am doing an openstudy session and trying to answer/ask a bunch of questions, many tabs begin to appear. It seems that all these tabs are continuously updating in real time and it makes the process very slow and even freezes my page at times. Is there a way to keep the real time feel of the site, while improving speed (i.e. cutting out some processing power on extraneous/redundant tasks)?

Answer 2

(3) I really like the rating system that this site has, but I think it is also limiting in some ways: You find rapid increases in points for barely doing anything in the beginning, while there are only small increases found at the higher levels. While this is good in its own right, the graph across time, which you see on your profile, does not capture your "true" progress, because it is scale in a non linear way to be bound between 0-100.

Answer 3

I think it is possible to have both measures to be available, i.e. the 0-100 number is a quick estimate of one's progress, appearing in their profile icon, while there might be another statistic that is not scaled and is your "raw smarscore". This could be used for one's own progress and see how much contribution you have made over time (personally I would find that very useful). Is this a good idea or am I over-stepping my own "bounds" :)?

Answer 4

OpenStudy is a heavy site, I would be surprised if it did not run slow.
I do not think OpenStudy developers can stop your browser from freezing but I may have a solution for your number two question. I used to load OS off my school laptop (which was not that high end), and it used to freeze after opening around ten OS tabs, so I created a Firefox add-on which checked for active tabs, meaning if you went to another tab that tab would unload, although that is not a proper term for it, it basically stop any scripts from running until it became the active tab. I have the add-on somewhere on my other drives I would be fine with uploading it for you if you would want to use it.

For your first question messaging works fine as long as you do not click on the page when you are typing.

Answer 5

One thing I wish they had the ability to do was to close the question list and all the code associated with it. Then if you were working multiple questions, there would be less overhead.

As for the SmartScore progress, this is a very typical thing in gaming systems. Lower levels are easier and quicker to attain than later ones. This makes sense since SmartScore is an attempt to add game mechanics for entertainment value. However, the score does shoot up faster on the low end than most systems so tweaking to make the initial stuff about half the speed it is now is not unreasonable.

In games, the raw score would be your experience points. In a game, people track what gets the most XP and use this to game the system to get XP faster. Part of why SmartScore is a closed system is to prevent people from being able to game it. Opening up the viewing of the raw score would give people a way to test what gets the largest bumps in score, which then defeats that part of the system's protections.

Also, they have the sub scores and other counters as other ways yo track your progress. Questions answered, unique people helped, and medals are all very good ways to see you progress without any need to get a raw score.

Answer 6

the inbox is not designed to be easily used to ask and receive answers to questions.

Answer 7

Even a short message can be hard for some of us to recall. Working memory issues are a pain in the anatomy. That is why seeing both the message and reply are useful. My personal solution is to copy the text of the message, paste it in a word processor, and type up my reply with spell checking, etc. Then again, I do that for lots of things... because I need a spell checker more than most. (Decode my avatar if you wonder why.)

Answer 8

It works just fine for me

Answer 9

Well that seems strange that you're creating an option to send messages and it is purposefully hard to use to encourage use of other (more relevant) aspects of the site. Do you develop/design for the site @amistre64? There could be some kind of compromise where either there is no mailing option and you could tag a person so they could address your reply, or somehow fuse the mailing and replying options so that they are one in the same (one is public and the other is private).

Answer 10

@e.mccormick Those are some legitimate points about the SmartScore! Maybe the curve should be adjusted, but I guess its fun to see your score rise so rapidly at first. Gives the impression that 60s and 70s are not too far off. Oh wait... *looks at his own score* T-T

Answer 11

@Opcode you bring up some great points, but all those are temporary 'hacks' that not all users will easily apply or have access to. One can make the site more efficient in terms of processing and also cut back on the the site's own server bandwidth with some clever programming. I do not have any explicit solutions, as I am not a very experienced programmer, but I believe such a solution is possible.

Answer 12

(1) I do not use the instant messaging tabs on the bottom all that frequently, but if I did, I would only like to see the Biology tab, and not the other subjects that I recently visited. Is it currently possible to manually turn these off or limit only a number of them? (edit, wow... I could already do this in the drop done menu... AND the little yin yang symbol... brilliant)

(2) Not everyone can look through the plethora of questions related to their field that are unanswered, could there be a way to search keywords to best find the question that one can answer? i.e. Im a neuroscientist (surprise) and those are the questions I feel most comfortable answering. Could I search for 'cortex', 'axon', 'hodgkin-huxley', or 'neuropathy' just to name a few. (this is less efficiency and more usability)

(3) The professionalism, friendliness, and drive to learn of users on OpenStudy is REALLY impressive. Trolling is low compared to most social sites and people get along well, but often times it is obvious that some are not here to learn or contribute, but rather make snarky comments and add inconsistent or even incorrect answers. To a large part, moderation and mature responses handle this well, but some people consistently come up on the radar that are just not helping or doing any good (likely detracting). Is this something that should be left as is or possibly have a 'warning' system. Just an idea, not really convinced of it myself

(edit: (4) maybe it would be a good idea to edit your posts? I've noticed I've made mistakes before and copied/deleted/pasted back the correct version. It might be a good idea to track change (maybe different colored text).)

What do you think? Let me know if I'm really off base or if these are impractical options. Thank you!

Answer 13

Also, you only see the last 4 months of smart score....