I'll keep an eye on this thread to see what you guys are coming up with. the "watch" idea is cool--we'll discuss whether/how we could implement that in the future. As for political science, I'll have to think about that. A straight-up politics section could be a little tangential to our sci-tech theme, but maybe we can find a tech spin.

Now you know how I feel.

Hi, guys. Just here to remind everyone to play nice. It is really disheartening to hear so many complaints and impolite comments/speculations about the PopSci.com staff. We're not robots, we're people--so stop flaming us, a'ight? Now let me give you another update that might make you happier/make you shut your yaps for at least a second or two. :) These forums are admittedly not nearly as good as the old ones that were hosted on VBulletin, but we've been waiting for an updated forum module that's coming up in Drupal. Since Drupal is an open-source project, I can't give an exact date for when these will be available, but it will be soon. Somewhere around a month from now, I'm thinking. The new module (from what I'm told--I'm not a developer, so I can't tell yet) will have the same functionalities as the old PPX forums, plus a few things we were missing, like private messaging. More info coming up in a few days, when we figure out the schedule for rolling out other PPX enhancements.

Hi, all. Thanks for your comments--we really do appreciate the feedback. Just so you know, behind Oz's curtain, we are an extremely small staff and we are trying our best. PPX is a huge beast to manage on its own, not to mention cranking out lots of stories each day. AND, as you all have seen, there are still a few bugs that we're working out of the new site since the relaunch a few weeks ago. Let me address a few of the concerns that you've brought up in the thread above. 1) Payouts: We determine whether each stock should pay out or delist at $0 based on the payout statement. We've had a few situations where unforeseen events resulted in a judgement call about whether the stock should be paid out or not. In those cases, we pull together a committee of Popular Science editors, discuss the situation, and try to arrive at a decision that best reflects the spirit in which the proposition was written. We welcome input from the PPX community on new propositions and we would LOVE to have you write some of your own, so if you've got ideas, please submit 'em. 2) Tickers: There is currently a bug affecting the PPX charts that should be appearing on each page. The bug caused the whole site to go down at one point, so we are rigorously testing the code before reinstating this feature. Hopefully we'll have that back up and working next week. 3) Market accuracy: We are currently working on a couple of new site features (these weren't ready in time for the unveiling of the redesigned site) which should improve the accuracy of the market and also make trading more fun. First, we're going to give users the option of creating trading leagues, so you can compete with your friends, coworkers, classmates, whatever. This should increase liquidity in the market and make it more fun for people to play, since they'll be able to see themselves at the top of their own leaderboard, if not the site-wide leaderboard. Second, we're going to create a leaderboard that tracks the number of stocks in each portfolio that have been predicted accurately. Folks with a high volume of stocks will do well here, but we're also hoping to encourage players to trade for accuracy rather than just waveriding. 4) STS122: Our tech team is sorting through the issue of refunds. You will get your fake money back, don't worry. We're hoping to have this issue resolved by the end of the week. 5) Admins: As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we're quite short-staffed. Yog was fantastic, but she is working on other stuff for the magazine, so I don't think she'll be back on as your regular go-to person. We're looking for solutions to this problem and in the meantime, we're all hopping on the forums when we can. If you have a dire, pressing issue (seriously--please treat this email as you would want your email to be treated) and you don't feel you're getting the attention you deserve, email us at webmaster@popsci.com. The whole PopSci.com staff sees these emails, and we will respond quickly (unless you're being a jerk). Hope this was helpful. Thanks for sticking with us through our growing pains.