Hi All -
There was an issue reported back in September about many unredeemed points that had accrued last summer and weren’t getting redeemed. In mid to late December these unredeemed movies were temporarily removed from our unredeemed movie accounts. Ieva has been working hard to resolve this issue and has had success. For those who were active catchers last summer, you are being rewarded with a windfall of Redemption Points today. Hip, Hip Hooray!!!
Happy Catching,
Guy
Many of us have been experiencing an overall slowdown for the past several days. It appears we have gotten to the end of the current data set. (Hooray!!!) We have seen these types of problems in the past when the data gets low in the dataset. Tonight I am getting no buttons being loaded. This was also a symptom of data running low. I have notified the Stallcatchers team.
Thanks,
Guy (@gcalkins )
Hi Guy and All,
We actually published some changes live yesterday (linked to the way we’re handling vessel movies in the inner core of the game), and we think this might have caused the issues that you and some other catchers reported…
We are now reverting the changes, and will bring them back as soon as we find and fix the problem. It shouldn’t affect gameplay in any way, and the reported issues should go away - but please do let us know if they persist!
Many thanks,
Egle
Well, things were humming along reasonably well until about 10:25 EST this morning when they really bogged down again. Then at 10:45, I got a few of those ‘failed to load’ warnings. Then things seemed to go, more or less, back to normal.
I assume some testing was going on?
Mike
Just for the record, after languishing at (at best) half-speed the last couple days, at 09:00 ET this morning, some adjustment was made which effected a partial improvement. The time from marking a stall or hitting “Flowing” until the “Next” button appears was reduced back to normal, which is most welcome. The load times for most non-calibration movies, however, are still leaving plenty of thumb-twiddling time.
I wasn’t able to play yesterday and did not witness the improvement indicated by Mike. However, today it appears to be back to the languishing at half speed mode. (They made some internal changes and are aware of the speed issue. The team is working to get it repaired and back to normal. Patience is requested.)
Also for the record, I have been experiencing another issue periodically where the movie seems to “autoplay” and then the Flowing and Stalled buttons never appear. Sometimes if I hit the refresh button it will load correctly. Currently, I am on a movie that simply won’t give me any buttons. I will need to log-out in order to get it to refresh.
Thanks,
Guy
Thank you, thank you, thank you Mike and Guy. I thought I was the only one have this kind of trouble. Have had it off and on for the last 1-2 weeks. Like I have said before, I am not that computer savy so I figured it was with my computer or my modem. (yes, I have drove hubby bonkers trying to get it fixed!)
Patience isn’t a problem for me. Just knowing I am not losing the last few marbles I have over this has helped a bunch.
Thanks fellas,
Carol
Hey fellow catchers.
I’d like to know if anyone has been having tech issues where the movies don’t always auto play after the first pass.
uncheck the auto-play box What I’ve I needed to do, is , uncheck the auto-play box (upper right), and then recheck it to restart the movie. At the end of the movie, I need to do it again.
It’s not all movies, but enough for me to report it.i
I also want to thank the eyes on alz crew for putting in the red indicating markers on the progress line (with the green ball) for where other catchers have marked where they see a stall. I can see where they’ve marked, and see where I missed a stall.
Thanks, my fellow stall catchers.
Hi Chairstar,
Is this like when the movies get “stuck” and won’t let me look at them again? I can do 1 pass, then stuck and won’t let me go back and slide the bar. I have had many like that over the last few days. Also, because I can’t look at them again, I have gotten quite a few wrong. I will look for that auto-play thing in the upper right corner. Maybe that will fix my problem. Thanks for your input, it really helps.( Well me at least.)
Happy catching,
Carol
Hi All,
Thank you all for your providing all this feedback - it’s very useful to us! Extra thanks to @gcalkins for working with us to resolve this over email.
Our developer @ieva has been putting all resources to resolving this during the last few days, and hopefully today is the day 
(and if the current fix won’t solve all the problems that you have been experiencing lately - please let us know, we will go through them one by one!)
We will keep you posted, and thanks much again for your patience!
Egle
Carol,
I think we are talking the same thing.
I have had to go to the ‘auto play’ check box, (upper right hand side), uncheck it, and re-check it, every time that the green ball gets stuck at the end of a pass.
It’s at least it’s a relief to hear I M not the only one that has this problem now.
Hope the admins will ferret this one out.
Thanks Carol,
John D. Krull
Woohoo! Back up to speed. @ieva has successfully repaired the upload mechanism which is giving us improved upload speed for new movies (actually being loaded in the background).
However, I am now experiencing a glitch with calibration movies that I have previously viewed and now receiving a Warning Message: “You have already annotated this movie. Please continue to next movie.”
I have notified the team. Hopefully, it can be fixed relatively quickly.
The glitch mentioned above seems to be isolated to using the Microsoft Edge browser. If you are experiencing this issue with calibration movies, try using another browser such as Firefox or Chrome. Meanwhile, the team will try to resolve the issue for Edge.
If you are experiencing any other issues, please don’t hesitate to share them here.
Are we at the end of another batch of movies? I have been getting the error messages for a few days now. It has really taken a bite out of my overall score. Out of the 200-300 movies that I did tonight, I would have to say that at least 25-30% of them were errors/warnings. Thank you for letting the team know. As for a different browser, I wouldn’t begin to know how to do that.
Happy catching,
Carol
P.S. Great job on the interview!
Hi Carol -
Yes, we are near the end of the current data set, but that is not the cause of the problem (warnings) you are seeing. There is nothing you can do at the moment from your end. Hopefully, they will be able to find a fix to the issue with the Microsoft Edge browser.
Carol, Guy’s recommendation of another browser does work. I’ve been using Firefox the last few days to avoid those error messages and get the points for the calibration movies - at least the ones I don’t flub. I use the Edge browser for everything else, except one other application that works best on Chrome. Chrome comes courtesy of Google, while Firefox is open source software as I recall.
No matter, if you would like to try another browser, it’s pretty easy. If I can do it, I’m sure you can.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the info on how to try another browser. I have been going thru Google to get to my catcher page, and I just found out I have Chrome on my PC. So I will try that tomorrow night. As for tonight…UGH! after 200 movies I only had 76,000 or 77,000 points, so I gave up. How long did you play to rack up your 229,000? Also, I am taking a tip from you and NOT redeeming my points every night, hence the big point score last night.
Well, tomorrow is another day and I hope I have better luck.
Thanks again fellas for all your help.
Carol
Carol, I would have quit sooner, but Guy & I were sort of entertaining each other. You’ll note he matched my score.
The only reason we scored higher than you was that we got credit for answering the calibration movies, whereas you did not. You were getting those annoying error messages instead.
It appears we are at the end of this current data set - which is why I was ready to bail out sooner. I was getting the same two non-calibration movies over & over again. I assume you, Guy, Mike L. & Tom experienced the same repetition - if not, please let me know. My guess - we should see see some fresh meat (new movies), maybe as early as tomorrow.
Mike C.
Hi All!
Thank you @gcalkins & @caprarom for all the useful tips!
We are all at a conference right now, but @ieva will continue to work on the Edge browser issue depending on her availability these coming days, and we hope to resolve it soon. Hopefully, for the moment catchers will switch to alternative browsers - I included a note and a link to the instructions that @caprarom posted above on Stall Catchers as well (thank you for those!!).
On a topic of a new dataset - we are not receiving new data for a little while still, and the current dataset is not “finished”, at least not exactly. 
We now have a different system of managing the movies within Stall Catchers, so that each catcher is first shown the movies that don’t have enough annotations, and ones that they haven’t seen before. So some of you who are annotating at a greater speed will have annotated most or all movies of the current dataset at least once, but some of you might not (and most of the users who are less active will not have seen them all). This also ensures that the experience in the game doesn’t change even if you have seen all movies.
So in a sense, @caprarom, you might have “finished” the dataset, because you have seen all movies. In that case, you will start seeing the same movies a second time. It is important to mention though, that those annotations are also very useful to us, but in a different way. First of all, we are using them to improve our crowd methods and understand how individual user answers might change when they have already annotated the same movies, and whether there’s value in allowing them to do it to improve crowd answers in general. In this way, we will also use this data in the new validation research we are doing that we are sending back to the biomedical research lab. So it is definitely useful to us, but we won’t get offended if you have to drop off and come back when we have more data available! 
We’re going to update you all when we do.
And even more importantly, this should be temporary! 
I.e. even if some of you (who annotate the most!) are repeating movies in this dataset, it shouldn’t happen in the future. We are completing a process that will enable a steady flow of new data from the lab!
In addition, @caprarom , you really should not see the “same” movies over and over again - we’re looking into this! One possibility might be that a small subset of movies had less annotations than others, and you kept getting movies from that subset to help “complete” it sooner, in a sense.
Anyway - how this clarifies things, and thanks again !!!
