More Website News

Leaderboards have been altered a bit; they now track percentages and also show the user's rank even if they're not in the top 10. 

The tutorial page has been changed a bit, although it could still be improved.

We added some predictions but we need more.  This is one of the most important things right now.

The ad has been completed and posted.  We don't have anywhere near the number of users we'd need to get proper data, though.  Maybe we should try advertising to Caltech?

HTTPS works as well as Automatic Admin Functions!

Thanks to enabling communication on port 443 (SSL) on our virtual server, HTTPS now works! Facebook users using secure browsing should now be able to view our app! That's one major obstacle solved!

We now have a new logo, which we'll use for our Facebook ad campaign. Our livesite has been updated with our changes.

Some administrator functions used to return bids when a prediction closes and endow money each day have become automated.

Now on to Week 5:

• More questions
• Tutorial
• Advertisement
• Storing/Collecting data for analysis
• Secondary prediction table: (meta info including links, link to an image/icon, last value)
• Perhaps a table to track prediction values over time
• Better Prediction interface
• Improvements to leader tables and user info

New server and https

We set up the new server thanks to Steven Low and George Lee; it works.  You can now play the live version of our game at apps.facebook.com/foresight_game. Unfortunately, we still do not have HTTPS working. The certificate appears to be setup well in Apache, but for some reason, the site won't load with https. Those using Facebook's secure browsing will just have to wait.

We also implemented the feature to remove bids. You get your reserved money back upon doing so. Upon the close of a prediction, users ought to get their money back for any unresolved bids; this has yet to be done.

There were also graphical and user interface changes on the test site that haven't been uploaded on the live site.

We're still working on the tutorial.

Buying, Selling, and the New Server

With php-back end and game logic, we have implemented the ability to buy and sell shares of predictions, along with the associated transferal of money.  You can also remove bids.  May need to do some debugging.  Very close to being able to decide predictions; all that's missing is the transfer of money.

Were given a new server thanks to George Lee and Steven Low; spent some time setting up http, ssh, php, and postgres.  Still trying to work out how to link it to the sites and stuff.  Will eventually be at 4sight.wil.caltech.edu .  Trying to figure out how to setup a database with the same name as our old one and no password required.

Bid Progress, Website Layout Changes, and Presentation!

Moving into the 3rd week, we have partially implemented bid resolution. One can post bids within their budget and they are immediately resolved with other standing bids. However, we do not actually complete any "monetary" transactions, so nobody gains or loses any shares of a prediction. There has been a holdup, but we believe we are very close to completing this. Because we have a list of currently unresolved bids, we can estimate the market price of a prediction based on the lowest Sell price and highest Buy price.

Thanks to lots of CSS styling, our site looks a lot better than before. You should check it out! http://ugcs.caltech.edu/~alexf/test.php

Finally, we are presenting our current progress and goals today to get feedback and other people's insights into our ambitious project.

Short-term Goals for Weeks 3-4:

1. Complete transactions so that users can actually own/shortsell shares of a prediction.
2. Administrator Functions to decide a prediction and award money.
3. Administrator Functions to grant money every day to all users.
4. Tutorial / Description of How to Play the Game.
5. More UI!
6. Security (and HTTPS?)
7. Create the real Facebook app with a sandbox on the side so that we can make changes w/o disrupting users.
8. Advertise our site on Facebook and get people to play it!
9. Think of fun questions to pose to the public.
10. Make some sort of friend invite system with the Facebook API
11. Allow people to submit links/comments about predictions. Alternatively, we can post information regarding them so that it is easier for our players to predict with more certainty.

More Website Stuff

Moving to the Home page from another tab is now noticeably faster than re-loading it; the website now only needs to load everything the first time you visit.  In addition, we added a new table to keep track of users' friendlists and only need to record those once.  There are a few more tables in the database for keeping track of some things, but they haven't been filled with stuff yet.

Also fixed a few minor errors.

Layout Changes and Future Goals

We decided that it would be better to split our single big page into a bunch of smaller pages in order to reduce future server load. Don't worry though, since our tabbed layout has stayed the same.

In the future, we will want to just have 4 main pages.

•  A Homepage listing some popular predictions
• The list of predictions and their current probabilities
• User's status (what prediction shares they own and what they are bidding on)
• Help (how to play, how to get more information)

When you access a single prediction, you will be given information about the prediction such as when the market closes, and what prices it is being traded for. You can then post a bid; if the bid can be fulfilled, it will be immediately transacted.

This last step needs to be done. We also want our site to look nice.

We also have issues with HTTPS still, which we are trying to resolve.

Where to put Leaderboards and how we're gathering data will be done later. Perhaps another database table could store the latter.

Since we're close to going live, we will want a playground/test area so that we can continue to make improvements without impacting our live site.