Feature request: anti-laziness features for testsolvers
Proposal:
- Prevent giving up on a testsolve early.
- Prevent testsolving multiple problems at once.
We have an issue with people who just want to look at the problems but don't actually want to put in the effort to testsolve them which is ruining the feedback system.
Maybe preventing quitting testsolves is a bit draconian since i guess sometimes the problem sucks or the author fucked up the answer.
I just think there should be some mechanism preventing people from just like recklessly creating and terminating testsolving sessions (e.g. rate limit).
just to reiterate the proposal from Discord:
Let everyone pick a role upfront: casual or serious
For casual testers:
- Access to all problems and solutions, no locks or timers
- Their job is finding and upvoting the best problems. They'll narrow the longlist down to a shortlist of 20-25 problems. It's fine if they just browse and pick what grabs their interest
- We're not looking for strict contest conditions - their solve times will be unofficial
The "official" solves come from serious testers, who provide real data on problem difficulties.
- If they focus on the shortlist of 20-25 problems, we could get higher per-problem coverage, even with fewer serious testsolvers
- Problems like * get way more testsolvers than average, thanks to the upvote count. People want to work on high-quality problems.
- They can work in parallel with casual testers. No need to wait for a formal shortlist, just testsolve as new favorites emerge
I like this suggestion. I propose the names "casual" and "hardcore". And in the acknowledgments we'd split those by role (hardcore is a lot more work, so I'd like to give extra shout-out to people who are willing to do it).
I think we can also allow hardcore => casual after people are satiated from testsolving and want to cruise through the rest of the list to see what else they did.
So maybe for acknowledgments, we'd include a special shout-out to everyone who solved at least N problems / M bulbs correctly before switching to casual, and then include everyone in the general testsolver list.