Comments on Rosecode

Quote from dloser

Jan 08, 2016 - 14:55:40

Yes, Rosecode has become primarily maths oriented, not only by the number of maths challs, but also their level in comparison to the other challenges. People who like the other challenges can probably find the same or better elsewhere on a site where they feel more at home. If you want them to keep coming to your site for the occasional non-maths challenge, those challenges need to be pretty special. At least, that would be my explanation for people ignoring the site.

Your posts are perhaps not really inappropriate, but if the regulars you are targeting are interested, I'm sure they'll know by now that there are other challenges available. We already have a news section and IRC messages that notify people of new challenges. If sites also start to regularly post notifications in the forums, I can understand that some consider this spammy. Perhaps a more appropriate place would be a feed on the site itself for this purpose.


And now for something completely different: do the WeChall scores for Rosecode still include the extra points for rating stuff? As far as I can tell they do and to me that is a big no-no.

OK probably I will not repeat it again.
As for your question, to claim those extra points tou need to rate those problems you have solved and they included in the rating. As for myself, I have not solved all of the challenges but my WeChall score at 100% thanks to those extra points..
I have checked your profile at Rosecode and it seems like you have solved over 100 and you have not rated more than 10. So probably more than 200 points are there for you to claim.

I understand how the points for rating work. What I was saying is that I don't think those points should be included in the scoring. This is WeChall, not WeRate. Scoring should be an indication of the challenges you've done, not other irrelevant stuff like how many challenges you rated, how often you attempted a challenge or how many posts you made.

Quote from dloser

Jan 08, 2016 - 15:21:11

I understand how the points for rating work. What I was saying is that I don't think those points should be included in the scoring. This is WeChall, not WeRate. Scoring should be an indication of the challenges you've done, not other irrelevant stuff like how many challenges you rated, how often you attempted a challenge or how many posts you made.

Ah, OK. I have misunderstood you. Well, that was admin's decision and he explained why he did it in one of previous posts. In some way, it also reduce my motivation to solve the unsolved ones because I am already at 100%.

Quote from sinan

Jan 08, 2016 - 15:30:13

Quote from dloser

Jan 08, 2016 - 15:21:11

I understand how the points for rating work. What I was saying is that I don't think those points should be included in the scoring. This is WeChall, not WeRate. Scoring should be an indication of the challenges you've done, not other irrelevant stuff like how many challenges you rated, how often you attempted a challenge or how many posts you made.

Ah, OK. I have misunderstood you. Well, that was admin's decision and he explained why he did it in one of previous posts. In some way, it also reduce my motivation to solve the unsolved ones because I am already at 100%.

Well I really think this should be fixed and WeChall shouldn't take rating in consideration, it's silly. Maybe just use it on the onsite ranking and keep the rating points in a different column so it doesn't interfere with the actual scoring. That should be doable, right ?

Quote from Hertz

Jan 08, 2016 - 17:33:44

Well I really think this should be fixed and WeChall shouldn't take rating in consideration, it's silly. Maybe just use it on the onsite ranking and keep the rating points in a different column so it doesn't interfere with the actual scoring. That should be doable, right ?

I'm pretty sure this is how some other sites with "bonus" scores work (HackThis?).

Quote from Hertz

Jan 08, 2016 - 17:33:44

Well I really think this should be fixed and WeChall shouldn't take rating in consideration, it's silly. Maybe just use it on the onsite ranking and keep the rating points in a different column so it doesn't interfere with the actual scoring. That should be doable, right ?

I believe it works somewhat differently. If you sum up the points for each challenge you get a total say 1000 (100 problems with 10 points each). You can reach that max score either by solving every problem (no extras are necessarry). Or by solving 84 of 100 and claiming extra 2 points. 84*12=1008 which is then made equal to 1000.
It's like, say, you are given 5 problems and said pick any 4 and solve them to get the max score.
Apperantly there are some hard problems and it is difficult to find somebody who would solve all of the problems. You may be good at math and solve all the math problems but probably it would hard for you to solve exe cracking challenges or vice versa.

"...1008 which is then made equal to 1000."? That doesn't seem mathematically sound... :P

In any case, it doesn't really matter how it works. Nicest thing would probably be two columns, but unless you have a big database and a lot of WeChall score updates, it shouldn't matter much, I'd say. On HackThis!! it actually just sums the score for all the solved levels (amongst other things, like determining the rank).

Ratings do not have any effect on the max score a user can get. The max score a user can get is the sum of original pts of each problem. It was supposed to be a boosting tool for new users as they would be bogged down with relatively huge number of problems.
We can leave WeChall, if the site is not anymore considered a chall site as I do not observe any mutual benefit going on.

"...1008 which is then made equal to 1000."? That doesn't seem mathematically sound... , It is what we call clamping and is both mathematically and programming-wise sound, but idk it is whether sound in <b>chall-specific</b> terms .... <b></b>

We are not talking about the maximum score, though. A user's score is affected by the ratings (unless all challs are solved) and that is what some of us don't like to be reflected on WeChall's scoring.

I also don't think anyone is thinking about removing the site from WeChall.


Clamping is indeed a sound concept, but it doesn't make 1008 equal to 1000. Of course, you can make a system where they are equal, but you'll lose all kinds of nice properties. ;)

Ok. No ratings in wechall score (as it is what wechallers want)
@hertz, it was a one-liner

Note: wechall denied my attempt to update all users at once, so you can update manually.