A rundown of some arbitrary decisions that I have had to make in the last day or two…

• To graph, or not to graph…? — I’ll be honest, I’m obsessed with the Elo graphs I managed to cobble together. They’re so pretty! Someday I’ll even change the default colors… Anyway, right now a graph only shows up for people who have played in at least five tournaments. We just felt that a choppy plot of three line segments didn’t add much to what you can easily see scrolling through a small number of tables. However, if you’ve played in fewer than five tournaments but still want to see what your rating looks like in graphical form, you can just look at your head-to-head against anyone; the two-person graph always displays. (For example, that link shows you Adam vs. (my favorite player) Reid Duke. Adam’s got some catching up to do.)
• Do you really care who’s ranked 700th?? — Probably the thing we’ve been soul-searching about the most the past few days is how comprehensive a leaderboard to display. We toyed with having it go down to #250, but it looked clunky. As a compromise for now, we kept the leaderboard at just the top 30, but on individual pages anyone whose rating is at least 1700 will display a rank. Why 1700? Arbitrary, like I said. Right now there are a little more than a thousand players at 1700 or above. Beyond that, does a ranking actually mean anything? Personally I think that the percentile table (on the stats page) gives the right amount of information for those of us who don’t happen to be among the elite. But if there’s demand for a more comprehensive leaderboard of some kind, we’ll come back to it in the future.

I guess that’s it for now. I’m also struggling with the ideal number of characters for the autocomplete on the search forms to begin making suggestions at, but that’s not an incredibly exciting discussion. Meanwhile Adam continues to spend a crazy amount of time hunting down typos in the GP data. We’re getting close to being in good enough shape to start showing the site off. ^_^