Eli has some good suggestions on how to look at lab submissions in
https://getsatisfaction.com/eternagam…
In reading it I thought that adding an extra (sortable) field to the lab results page that allowed for users selecting submissions for consideration could prove useful in helping to narrow the field of many submissions down to 8 votes. It would have to behave like the MyVotes field so that each user saw only their own selections, but unlike the MyVotes field would not be limited to a maximum of 8.
Alternatively, rather than a boolean selected/unselected value, it could be a (decimal) MyRank(?) field that would allow the users to establish an arbitrary ranking (0|1) (1…10) (0…100). Having a decimal ranking rather than boolean might help users to express minor preferences between options to shake out the final 8 votes.
If there is a desire to make the scale uniform so that EteRNA designers can look at and compare players rankings, then probably picking one standard decimal range (like 0.0…100.0) would work.
[Update: in talking with Eli in chat, this could potentially become a scriptable field someday so that players could write their own ranking scripts, much like Strategy Market scripts, that rank submissions.]
Outline from chat conversation:
jandersonlee: Thought it could help wade through all those submissions!
Eli Fisker: So do you sort of mean, instead of me now having two windows open, could put in my filter directly on page
jandersonlee: @Eli: yes. filter directly in one window
jandersonlee: don’t need to copy/paste as much
Eli Fisker: Oh, that is an awesome idea, JL
jandersonlee: maybe even script filtering later?
Eli Fisker: As now I have to keep the ranking in one page to deduce the different ranges I want to use and manually write them into the other window
Eli Fisker: It still beats looking through all the designs, but what you suggest is even better
Additional thought. We already have player scripts for stabilizing a design, scripts for solving puzzles and a lab designing bot. When players can write ranking scripts for the voting process too, as JL suggest, I see one more step in creating more amazing lab designing robots.
I like this idea and would like to, possibly, expand on it.
I believe having a ‘select’ box for each design so that the user can ‘include’ or ‘exclude’ any number of designs would allow a user to compare 2 or more designs by any criterion they wish. Typically this type of functionality has a ‘Select All/Unselect All’ capability in addition to the ‘include’ or ‘exclude’.
Perhaps combining jandersonlee/Eli’s MyRank with this could accomplish both. Although, if I understand it correctly, this would limit the number of designs one could include/exclude to 10, but I believe that would be enough to prove useful. It may not be feasible to include the ‘Select All/Unselect All’ capability if this approach is taken (a clumsy method that might work is to have ‘Select All’ enter “1.0” for example in all designs and ‘Unselect All’ to clear all entries).
An example would be that if a user put entries in 3 out of 15 designs, and selected ‘include’ button for MyRank, only those 3 would show. Conversely selecting ‘exclude’ button for MyRank, would show only the other 12 designs.
I believe this would be useful for reviewing lab results as well, not just in voting on labs.