Please pardon our dust!

Dear Catchers,

Stall Catchers has been misbehaving more than usual lately, so I wanted to personally thank you for your patience and ongoing feedback as we sort out these issues. We are very sensitive to the fact that you are volunteering your precious time on Stall Catchers to help accelerate Alzheimer’s research and we take seriously our obligation to make best use of your time and effort for this purpose. For this reason, we have diverted all available resources to resolving these issues as quickly as possible. Indeed, I am digging into the software code myself!

I also wanted to briefly explain why this is happening and what else we are doing about it. We recently rolled out a new “behind-the-scenes” update to Stall Catchers. Previously, the vessel movies were loaded into Stall Catchers as a stack of separate images. To reduce loading time and loading errors we recently converted all of these image stacks into video files. The good news is that this has significantly reduced the loading time for vessel movies (have you noticed a difference?). However, doing so also meant that we had to reprogram Stall Catchers to be able to work with those video files. Unfortunately, this resulted in several issues that we didn’t happen to “catch” in our testing, such as the error message that “you have already answered this movie”, which is not accurate.

While it is very difficult to completely avoid issues when updating software, we think we can do better. So to reduce the likelihood of similar future situations we are making internal improvements to our quality assurance process, which includes more thorough testing of any changes we make, before we go live with them.

Thank you again for sticking with us through this rough patch. Stall Catchers would not exist without you.

My best,
@pietro

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