Just get rid of the stinkin 2007 RQ's!!

Maybe get rid of all the RQ's and start on a clean slate. Everyone can submit new ones!!

I'll second the vote to just clear out the queue - if possible - and let us start fresh.

What if every random question were chosen (at random) from those that are at most a week or a month old? So if a question has been in the queue for too long... too bad!

I like lots of the suggestions posted so far... 50 seems like a good number of responses.... as sometimes a question will sit for 2 days hovering around 80-90 responses. Also, to start fresh! As for the length of time.... perhaps a submitted question should be zapped from the 'system' automatically if it is longer than one month old... BTW, are the questions actually chosen randomly?

No one at tanga even knows that the RQs exist. Whenever we complain, they are not ignoring us, they just have no idea what we are talking about. I'll bet the complaints go to the programmer TangaAL Z. Heimers.

It used to be that a new question would appear at puzzle time, no matter how many responses the previous one had. So why not....

If it gets the required number, it is removed/replaced. If it doesn't, it only stays up 24 hrs or until 7pm Pacific time.

What do you think?

I hope I can keep up...LOL

Everyone please answer them. Over 2,000+ more to go! *sigh*

I'll be the dissenting voice here. I think the bar of 10 votes is too low. I like the change that once a question is asked & answered that it would not show up again. One thing I like about the RQs (at least some of them) is the good discussion that sometimes happens when a RQ is up for a day (or most of a day). That can't happen if we're tearing through them every couple hours or so. Perhaps the 100 vote threshold was a bit too high, and maybe the 50 votes that was proposed would have been just fine. For me it's not fun to tear through all the RQs just for the sake of getting through them. That's not enjoyable. You can't even see a reasonable sample of folks answering them before the next one is up. It defeats the entire purpose of RQs. You might as well just take the RQs away completely as far as I'm concerned. If this is how they'll be handled, I won't miss them. Or get rid of the 1 point award for answering them. Then I can ignore them in peace.

I know I have some of my own RQs sitting somewhere - probably near the end of the queue. I'm sure plenty of other folks here are in the same boat. Sure we all want to get to "our" RQs, but what happens when we get there? Our RQs will be up for a few hours tops? Not fun, and not cool.

[10] I agree completely. In the meantime, I better go see how many I missed.

[10] [11] He did say that it was to get us through the old questions. Presumably once they're done we'd go back to the typical setup? If that's the only way to get rid of the 2007 questions I have no problem with it. If a 'current' question gets 'shorted' in the process the author could just submit it again once we get back to the regular schedule. I have a feeling that wouldn't present much of a 'redundancy problem' since people aren't likely to spend much time on the questions if we're burning through them at a 10 response clip.

[12] Yeah, I know. But it sure wasn't much fun to click through the 20-some that I hadn't answered. And I wasn't even reading the comments, which can be fun even if the question is old. I guess as long as they are watching well enough to pull the trigger at the right time...

The thing that gets me though is that the 2007 questions used to come in little blocks and then we'd go back to recent ones. What changed? How do we know that we will go through all the 2007 ones first? How do we know they won't start back up 6 months from now?

Didn't realize that the over 2000 old ones comment was serious. I'm changing to let's wipe 'em all out and start over. If you don't care enough about your question to resubmit it, it couldn't have been all that great in the first place.

I'm in (and have been) the wipe 'em out camp. Just wipe out the queue completely and we'll start over. I don't care if all of my submissions get wiped, I'll come up with better ones.

My 2¢

So, one way or another we're going to "wipe out" the queue. Either we process through 2000+ RQs in a month or two, or they just get wiped. Then what? We go back to the threshold being 100 votes or 1 day per RQ? Under the 100 vote threshold, we would go through 2 RQs per day at most. My point is even if we get caught up, what's to prevent a big backlog from being generated going forward? If RQ submissions outpace RQs being displayed, we'll always be running into that problem. So we should discuss solutions - do we favor capping RQ submissions (overall per day, or 1 new submission accepted for every RQ posted, or per account RQ submission limits), or moderating RQs to keep them at a "reasonable" level? (ie if there get too many in the queue, mods start throwing out the "less interesting" ones)

While "getting caught up" or "wiping the slate clean" is a worthy goal, I have seen no ideas that will prevent a huge backlog of RQ submissions from building up once again.

[16] I'm beginning to see you are really a glass half empty type, aren't you.

[17] Perhaps. What is that quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

Bring back the picathon! Oh, wait, wrong thread.

[16] bitwisenot said: We go back to the threshold being 100 votes or 1 day per RQ? Under the 100 vote threshold, we would go through 2 RQs per day at most. My point is even if we get caught up, what's to prevent a big backlog from being generated going forward? If RQ submissions outpace RQs being displayed, we'll always be running into that problem. So we should discuss solutions - do we favor capping RQ submissions (overall per day, or 1 new submission accepted for every RQ posted, or per account RQ submission limits), or moderating RQs to keep them at a "reasonable" level? (ie if there get too many in the queue, mods start throwing out the "less interesting" ones)

Here is a simple solution to your questions. After we are caught up, by whatever method, you can be sure that submissions will outpace RQs, as they always have. If you want to try "capping" the number of submissions you will need league approval as well as the RQ player's union. One submission per RQ displayed will result in the same server problems now happening with the Cryptos as users all rush, at the same time, to submit the next RQ. Perhaps we could have the right to post RQs won by lottery on Bottom Feeder. Now, as the questions build in the queue, you need a program that varies the number of responses required to retire a question based on the number of questions available. When there are 20 RQs waiting perhaps 50 responses is a good threshhold for change, but when there are 40 then maybe 40 responses required. When the queue reaches 100 questions then a bottom number of responses needs to be determined, and no new RQ will be accepted until the queue drops to 20 again. At this point the 20 or so, new RQ Mods will send emails or TGs to everyone telling them submissions are once again open. You can't have Mods deciding which RQs are interesting since most of them are computer types or engineers and they really don't understand most of the questions anyway. (unless the question is in code or numbers). This is just the basic premis of how to fix it. There are 100's of rules and subsets to the above to make it much clearer.

sy's plan sounds pretty good, but I have another suggestion. Why don't we have unfeatured RQ's on Saturday. Every Saturday, open the floodgates until the number reaches a predetermined level again. (This is really a variant of sy's idea.)

Maybe a combination of things suggested thus far?

Limit submissions to 1 RQ per person per week or 2 per month. From the 2007 questions it looks like a couple of people really helped clog up the pipeline.

Reduce the required votes to 80 or 90. That shouldn't limit discussion, should it? I'll come back to an interesting discussion even after a question has gone from 'live' to the archives list. And once I've voted I won't come back to something that doesn't interest me no matter how long it remains 'live'.

A question is timed out if it lingers too long without getting the specified number of votes. That's kind of tricky 'cause you'd have to take into account the time of day the question was up. Not quite fair to time out a question after 10 hours if it first came up at, say 1:00 am EST.

[21] PLEASE don't agree with me. It scares the hell out of me when anyone agrees with me.

[22] 1 RQ per person will insure that some idiots will get to post since the good questions will be few and far between. When you are timing out questions don't forget Daylight Savings Time and Leap Year. EST or PST won't matter if everything is set to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), but also remember Tanga is in AZ where they don't believe in DST. I remember driving into Arizona and seeing the sign, "Now entering Arizona, set your watch back 200 years."

You can time the RQ by the number of worthwhile comments it generates. Of course that means one of the 20 new Mods will have to determine what is worthwhile and that brings you back to my comments above about deciding which RQ is interesting. All in all this seems like an easily solved problem. Arnott should be in charge of the RQ Mods and make all of the final decisions along with his newest RQBoy.

[14] I am ALWAYS serious when I talk about the 2007 RQ's!!

I think the next RQ should be "should we clear the queue? Two possible answers.

[25] I can't stand the suspense.... What are the two answers?

[20] I don't think the "one submission per RQ posted" would necessarily run into the same problems that the cryptopix does, if the standard for a new RQ being posted is that a certain vote threshold is reached. The new RQ would not come up at a specific time everyday, and sure maybe a few folks would wait around as the RQ count got close to the threshold, but do you really think all that many people are going to spend chunks of their lives waiting on that? Certainly nowhere near as many as wait around at tanga-time to refresh the page to get the new featured puzzles. I mean, everyone knows when the unfeatured puzzles show up on Saturdays and there are hardly any problems then.

[23] "1 RQ per person will insure that some idiots will get to post since the good questions will be few and far between." And that's different from now how exactly?

Here's a suggestion: Don't limit submissions. Pick randomly from the pool of submissions which RQs are run (they are Random questions after all). At the end of a given period (week, month?) automatically delete all submissions that haven't run, and start over (keep a small number of RQs "queued" up so the new submisisons have a chance to refill the pool a bit while the previously selected RQs are run). Keep the threshold for new RQs at 100 or perhaps 50. If your question doesn't run within that given period, you can surmise that it has been deleted and you can re-submit for another shot at it.

Oh, and this system could theoretically be implemented immediately. At the end of this next week/month/whatever, whatever questions haven't run under whatever system we're using (10 vote threshold, etc), wipe out the whole queue (2000+ RQs) and start fresh.

I agree with [27]. It took how long for tanga to briefly acknowledge this issue & act by changing the threshold to 10? If we manage to get TangaJoe to do something, he's going to want a permanent fix, and it probably shouldn't be too complex (read: time consuming).

In theory, we could try to limit the threshold, or limit the number of submissions in some fashion, but I doubt this would work in the long run as a permanent solution (how do we even know what the proper threshold for an equilibrium is? what if the dynamics/popularity of tanga/RQs changes? etc). I don't think this is a good solution.

It's been suggested before (perhaps by bitwisenot then, too), and again here by bitwise: why not pick this months RQ's at random from last months submissions. At the end of the month, throw the ununsed RQs out. Upset that your RQ didn't get run? Keep submitting it each month until it gets run. The details could be tweaked, but I like this solution, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement (heh - I say that about a lot of seemingly easy software projects though, lol).

Well, whatever they decide to do... I just submitted the following question:

Back in Jan 2012 when they changed the RQ turn rate to 10 votes, how many questions, on average, did you have to answer to catch back up each time?

So pay attention to how far back you have to go each time, will ya? :P I'd hate for the results to be inaccurate...

Whatever the solution, I still like incorporating the idea of limiting the number of submissions an individual can make within a certain time period (two per week sounds like it might be a good number). I mean, why should my one carefully thought out question have to compete against 50 submissions from someone 'cramming the box' to gain more points to move from Tanga Virgin to Tanga Squirt? (um . . . did anyone in authority happen to look at how those first two Tanga level names actually look adjacent to one another lol?)

[30] "um . . . did anyone in authority happen to look at how those first two Tanga level names actually look adjacent to one another lol?"

Apparently you did. I mean, you did just refer to someone 'cramming the box' to move from Virgin to Squirt. Did you really have to put 'cramming the box' in quotes? Maybe I shouldn't ask. Sy probably didn't retort because you already took that about as far as it can go on public forums!

[31] Ha! Actually, I wrote 'cramming the box' before I noticed what the first two fruit levels were named and didn't even notice how the phrase fit in with that last observation until you just mentioned it. I used parentheses because the phrase seems like a metaphor for the actual electronic process. I choose the first two levels only because that's where the points between levels are smallest and might provide the most temptation for someone to generate additional points one at a time via the RQs. However, I am guilty of pointing out the names once I noticed them lol.

And you're right, I'm sure sy would have been all over this if I hadn't pointed it out first lol.

[30] Don't worry, it's just like Chicago politics: "Dead or alive, vote early and often."

I wrote and deleted several comments before I gave up trying to not get censored.

[30] I'll be quiet on this...............

I admit it....I came back here to see what sykottik wrote....disappointed.

I am very strongly against clearing the queue by simply deleting any unanswered RQs.

[29] I just had to go through 12 pages of questions to catch up.

[37] Well! I guess that settles it then!

[29] It is possible to go back in your own tanga point history and see how many RQs had to be caught up on average. Just figure one of the "1 point" awards is the bottom feeder (if you play the bottom feeder), and everything else should be RQs.

[39] That sounds almost as painful as the catching up process is, but yes, doable. :)

[41] Agree completely on the painfullness of both.

I've actually been enjoying all the RQs. Perhaps a bit faster than I would prefer, but the 1/day (or whatever we had before) felt too slow.

By the way, I think I'll apologize ahead of time for this: some evening months ago, I decided to submit dozens of really stupid RQs (I may have been drinking). The way things are going, they might actually see the light of day! Sorry about that.

[43] I don't. I've pretty much stopped answering them or caring. Maybe someday I'll catch up on them all. But then I never caught up on all the RQs that were available before I joined tanga, so who knows. I maintain that the changes to the RQs have rendered them completely pointless. I agree perhaps that 1/day was a bit too slow but what's going on now is completely ridiculous.

I still would rather see the complete elimination of RQs compared with what we have now. In fact, why don't we use the space on the daily fun page that currently is being occupied by the worthless RQs for the new (and enjoyable) Words in the Weeds.

[43] I remember one night you were drinking and I was really sick on here. Do you remember that Adam? *laugh*

[45] lol -- no. But I don't often drink, so perhaps it was the same night.

[44] For the record, I sort of hate it and love it at the same time (the RQ's flying by). I wouldn't complain if they were all deleted and we started fresh with the new Bitwitenot RQ System® in place.

[46] Read my comment [1]. I was the one that said to get rid of them first. Then read what sonjahi said [2].

Are you drinking again??

It must not be easy to flush out the ones that haven't been published, while preserving the ones that have already had votes on them. That's the only reason I can see for doing what we are doing...

At any rate, I'm so far behind now that I guess I'm going to have to skip some. I didn't answer any RQs over the weekend. Anytime I thought about it, I thought of all the ones I'd need to back up and answer so decided not to. Which just made the problem worse the next time I sat down.

Just thinking about how to get through all the RQs without deleting them (if that's preferable), while still enjoying the good ones for a little while longer --

What if along with each RQ, there is a quick (optional?) poll that asks something like "Was this a good/interesting RQ?". If a question accumulates, say, 10 "No" votes to this poll, we move on to the next RQ. So the good ones will last a while, while the worst will be gone in 10 votes.

This might be a pain to implement.. in which case it'd probably not be worth it. But it was just a thought.

Getting the questions to roll by faster was the original intent of this post. I had suggested 50 as a good number so that more questions would be answered and then a new question would come up. I think 10 is a good way to get the backlog of questions out of the queue. Once they are flushed perhaps we can go back to a number somewhere between 10 and 100?

[51] I appreciate the intention. The frustrating thing for me is that I want to answer all the questions. But right now, I have to go back to page 11 to get the oldest one I've missed. And, hey, there's one that I'd like to participate in the conversation! But everyone answered on Friday so virtually no one is ever going to see what I wrote.

I guess it's a price I'm willing to pay to get caught back up. My preference though, would have been to just delete all the unrun questions (except maybe the most recent 50 so it wouldn't be empty).

[52] You could start a discussion here to comment on the question. (Probably should reprint the question as well.) I've thought the same thing. I often comment on a question, and then wonder why I bother. Even if someone responds to my question, I won't be coming back to read it. (If a comment falls in an RQ does it make a sound?)

Could we at least see how many comments each RQ has next to each one on the RQ splash page? If we could see that then it'd be easier to carry on a conversation, at least a bit, maybe.

The RQ is up to 19 votes and isn't going on to a new one.

Edit...20 votes before it changed.

[55] Oh the horror! :p

[56] Smart A!! *laugh*

I seldom see the RQ. Not even sure where they are, but I have seen them. There was even a suggestion i add them to my web site. I'm not sure my clientele would appreciate RQs from 2007. It's just a thought.

[58] and some of the RQs use language that might make your clientele snicker

[7] While I appreciate your good intentions, I'm back to re-re-re-proposing wiping out the queue. It appears that since your change to 10 answers we may have gone thru about 500 RQs. If there are really thousands to go thru then we still won't be caught up for months.

[59] Clientele sounds dirty

Let's just start over and get back in the new age.