Board Changes: 1-2 May 2003
(for change is the only constant)

Another change to the points system: Now 1 point is awarded for each already-spoiled topic a user creates on the board, up to the 5th topic each calendar day. If you post more than 5 pre-spoiled topics on any given calendar day (by board time) these additional topics do not accrue points. The 24-hour rule for an unspoiled topic is still in effect. At the bottom of the Main Topics page in the Hall of Incorruptibles, you will see two important board statistics: the Mean Time to Spoil (MTS) and the Mean Time Unspoiled (MTU). These allow us to see at a glance where we currently stand in terms of topic turnover. The MTU (today, about 2 days 20 hours) is the average time that topics, both currently spoiled or unspoiled, on the board (non-announcements) have remained unspoiled. This is the primary indicator of turnaround. If this time gets longer and longer, we know we have many topics that have lain around for a long time that are still unspoiled. The MTS (today, about 10 hours 20 minutes) is the average time that a now-spoiled topic on the board remained unspoiled. If long-incorrupt topics are spoiled, this increases the MTS time; if pre-spoiled topics are added, this lowers the MTS time. Note that currently MTS time is much less than the MTU time, but this need not be so - in fact it's possible for the MTS to be greater than the MTU. If the MTS approaches the MTU, this is a sign that topics are being spoiled evenly throughout the entire list, both old and new. Also, the longer a topic goes unspoiled beyond the MTS time, the more likely it is to be pushed back in the list and only be spoiled as the result of a BM challenge or a Featured Topic placement. These statistics, like the number of posts or users, are being continuously tracked by the Broken Memories board script (rapidly approaching 6,000 lines of elegant C++ code) so advanced statistical reports can be generated for my own edification and bizarre amusement. The number of topics that a user has started which reach the List of Incorruptibles is now a statistic shown on the User Info pages. Since there's only been one member so far (Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood) only one user (B. Weed) has a non-zero number here. There are a couple of topics on the brink of qualifying, though, so keep your eyes open here.... This number is also used in awarding Sun of Purity medals (the second-highest medal on the site). Further, 10 points are awarded to the topic creator when the topic reaches the List of Incorruptibles. (If the topic is knocked off the list and reascends later into the rank of Incorruptibles, no second award is given.) It is now possible to filter topics in the Hall of Incorruptibles by their spoiler status (spoiled/unspoiled) as well as by their genre. Again, this can be useful if you're looking for a topic to spoil. Announcements in the Hall of Broken Memories are treated extra-specially now: they do not show spoilers in their index listing, or allow List of Incorruptible voting, or track the time "unspoiled". "Spoilers" posted to such topics do not earn points or count as spoilers in user statistics. To make voting more useful, you can now sort topics by "weighted vote". This discounts topics that have few votes and favors topics with many votes (so a topic with a 2.80 average vote with 10 votes is much better than a 3.00 average vote with only 2 votes.) Please note that the way we weight this currently only depreciates topics with few votes. It does not make topics with few votes tend to an "average" weighted rating, it makes them look bad. Thus a topic with a couple of 1 votes and no others has a very, very low weighted rating indeed. This is done in the expectation that people will be searching for topics that are voted the highest, not the lowest (we are sorting in descending order, after all.) It also keeps consistent with the fact that topics with zero votes are given, effectively, a zero rating and plummet to the bottom of the list sorted by average vote. If experience shows me that this is not the way the feature is being used, I will introduce a more traditional weighting scheme.