Submitting an estimated play time for a game on IFDB…
(A user’s list of played games could be either public or private, depending on the user’s settings.)
Follow up question: If the game should not be automatically added to the “played” list, then what should we do instead if people try to submit times for games that are not on the “played” list? (At the moment, it doesn’t allow the time to be submitted until you check the “played” box yourself.)
Nothing. It doesn’t make sense to me to allow the community to enter data on a public database while at the same time not trusting the accuracy of such data.
It is worth considering the assumption that although there may be some outliers that enter random data for all kinds of reasons, on average, play times will be a reasonable reflection of reality with a relatively high interval of confidence because most of the community is genuinely interested in data being accurate. I would even remove the restriction you mention because it is consistent to do so with the trust model for a community-driven site.
Some people said they wanted the “played” box automatically checked when they write a review–I think the reasoning at least in one case was that people don’t always remember to check it themselves–but maybe people feel differently about this feature?
Probably not. I find nothing wrong with allowing anyone to turn that feature on, if they find it useful (it can easily be). I thought the question was whether to impose that feature on all users by default, which is what I find unattractive. No issue at all if this is a configurable option.
I said yes to both, but I can see why there might be a difference—a review publicly connects you to a game whether or not you’ve marked it as played, whereas play times are currently anonymous, so you could theoretically enter a play time for a game you didn’t want anyone to know you had played. But I’m not sure how commonly such situations actually come up.
Yes, and even in that case, it would be possible to have it not connect you publicly to the game if you mark your “played list” private. 
(Just for clarity’s sake, marking one’s “played” list private or public is a feature that already exists.)
I was figuring that if we were going to mark “I’ve played it” automatically, we’d say so (maybe in the tips section?), so that people would know ahead of time.
Thanks for the feedback so far!
Yeah, I was thinking of the case where someone in general wants their played games list to be public but plays some specific games that they wouldn’t want to publicly acknowledge playing (like AIF, perhaps)—but again, I don’t know if this is an actual concern for many people or not, I’m just guessing.
All of these things are self-policed, so I don’t think there’s a lot of danger either way. However, because I like to minimize my clicks, I’d prefer that the site handle it automatically instead of requiring that I click the checkbox myself.
People who want things to remain private can unclick the box afterwards, right? I don’t think that hurts anything. Even if it did, there will be no playlist audit to verify who has played what in any case. Ultimately, the community has to be honest for these things to work.
I encountered this for the first time when I played and wrote a review for Eat Me a few days ago and had the situation where I tried entering a time for the game and it rejected the time unless I checked the other box.
This was mildly annoying, I guess, but I didn’t mind having the reminder to check the “I’ve played it” box since it’s easy to forget to do that.
So I think my personal preference would be receiving it as a reminder (the site is like, I notice you’re entering a time without saying you’ve played that, don’t forget to check that box) without being physically prevented from submitting the time. People might want to interact with the features in a different order than the site assumes they will.