Update regarding past quizzes, forgiveness and rankings

Past Quizzes

First some great news: you can now view past quizzes up to 90 days in the past (up from 14). In an upcoming release of the PL/SQL Challenge, I intend to completely revamp this aspect of the website and give you much more flexiblity. For now, however, you can at least go waaaaaay back.

Forgiveness Update

I published a forgiveness policy several weeks ago, which is documented on the Rules page of the PL/SQL Challenge website. I have been working on applying that policy over the last week. Why is it taking so long? Because I want to make sure the impact of the forgiveness policy is appropriate. For example, the forgiveness policy should reduce the impact of missing quizzes, but the correction I make for missing a quiz should not allow you to leap far ahead of people who did play the quiz. I almost done with my tweaks and should have the policy applied by end of the week.

This will include a "provisional" adjustment in scores for "lowest ranked" days. I will re-run this adjustment at the end of the quarter before I select the playoff participants, but this will give you an idea of how that last adjustment will affect rankings.

Believe me, I am not trying to make things overly complicated. They are just turning out that way, for a variety of reason.

Questions on Ranking Data

In addition, players have reported some seeming aberrations in the rankings data (no one is credited with 100% playing of quizzes for this quarter; some ranking data is missing).I am working on figuring all of this out, but my time is severely constrained and I have to prioritize what gets my attention. So it may take a little while.

Warm regards,
Steven