Estimated play time votes on IFDB are now publicly attributed to you

General IF Community Resources
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When we first launched the new estimated play time feature on IFDB, each player’s votes for a time were private and anonymous. But we have improvements planned that won’t work well with anonymity, so we’ve decided to change our approach and to publicly attribute time votes to the player who posts them, just like reviews and ratings.

Here’s how the transition will work.

  • All 373 existing time votes are temporarily marked “Anonymous.”
  • All new time votes will link to the user who posted them, like this:

    8h30m — Dan Fabulich

  • We’ll email all 34 users who have submitted time votes, asking their permission to link their votes to their user name. (The email will include a list of your existing time votes.)
  • If you decide that you’re not comfortable linking your time votes to your user name, we’ll delete your time votes from IFDB. (You’ll still have your private copy in email, so you can always repost them at any time, but, if you do, the time votes will be publicly attributable to you.)
  • After 30 days, on or around December 19, we’ll delete any time votes from users who haven’t granted us permission to link them publicly.
  • After December 19, all existing time votes will be publicly attributed to the user who posted them.

If you have questions, please reach out to us at ifdbadmin@ifdb.org.

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Would it help to tell you ahead of time that we are ok with making our votes public, so you don’t have to send the email, or should we just wait for the email regardless so you can keep track of it that way?

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Did we ever reach clarity regarding the whole hints/walkthrough thing? I don’t recall a decision. I’m only wondering because votes are being made public

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This is actually a part of that!

Our current theory is that we’ll allow users to comment on their time votes, allowing people to say “Used a lot of hints” or “Used a walkthrough extensively” or “No hints, completionist, 100% achievements.”

But we didn’t want to create a way for users to post anonymous comments on the page, so we’re now setting the votes to be publicly attributed, so the comment will be publicly attributed along with it.

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ah, that sounds pretty good then! thanks.

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Good foresight there. Sincerely.

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I’ve sent all the emails now!

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Why not allow people to choose whether or not their time is anonymous, and if they choose to give an anonymous time then disallow comments?

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We considered that, but it adds complication to the feature to make people decide whether to anonymize their time vote or not.

We don’t want users to have to think about this, and we don’t want to have to worry about it as developers, either.

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Agree on publicity: Albeit I doubt that I will contribuite (for record, I dont’ have an ifdB account…) I have disclosed that I’m rather completionist, so I think if a playtime of mine needs a divisor…

on a tangent point, there’s the special case of IFs having multiple path of different lenght, plus the unique, I think, case of The Portrait, which has a “shortcut to the ending” feature, and the “variable playtime by design”; I’m unsure on how these can be tackled in estimated play time…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio

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For a game with more than one path, players could pick one path to enter the time for, and then give more information in the note about other times. (The note field isn’t available right now, but it probably will be soon.)

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“How long did you spend engaging with this work?” is still a well-defined question for every piece of IF, and a free-text comment field allows people to explain themselves if they did something unusually that made the playtime longer or shorter than typical.

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