SH submission-cap update

Filed under: Strange Horizons
6 Comments

In case anyone's curious about how long the submission form has been open each day before reaching the daily submission limit, here's some data. But note that days 1 and 2 are rough approximations, because the form inadvertently closed too early both of those days and had to be reopened later by hand.

Day 1: 10 hours.

Day 2: 12 hours.

Day 3: 16 hours.

Day 4: 18 hours.

Day 5: 14 hours.

When we first floated the idea of having a submission cap to a few friends a while back, people were concerned that it would mean everyone would rush to submit moments after each reopening, so we'd be open for only a few minutes a day. That's a legitimate concern; if the cap were lower or volume were higher, I think it could happen.

But I'm pleased to see that it's turned out that we've mostly been open for at least 12 hours a day; I think that gives a sufficient window for people anywhere in the world to submit at a reasonable time of day.

I'm guessing that the cap will continue to limit submissions per day through the end of next week. But I'm also guessing that by the end of this week, we'll be regularly open for 18 hours a day or more.

One nice thing about the way all this is set up is that it's easily tweakable. We can adjust the cap if we need to, and if it turns out having a cap is a bad idea, we can easily remove it. We'll see how it goes. But so far, I've been pretty pleased with it.

6 Responses to “SH submission-cap update”

  1. irilyth

    If you’re worried about timezone issues, you could potentially reset the cap at different times on different days, e.g. run for a week where the cap reset at 12:00 Eastern rather than 00:00.

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    • Jed

      Yeah, I thought about that, and if we start having too-small windows of being open, I’ll definitely do something along those lines. Would be fairly easy to implement. But for now, I think a 12-hour window is enough.

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      • Jed

        Another stat of possible interest: In the week-plus since we reopened, nobody has yet submitted between about 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Eastern US time, which is 7 to 8 a.m. UK time and 9 to 10 p.m. Australian Eastern time. (And all other times in other time zones, of course, but the bulk of our submissions come from the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia.)

        So there’s an hour when we’re always open that’s a fairly reasonable submission time from most parts of the world, when nobody has submitted during a week of super-heavy submission volume. Which lends credence to my belief that the time zone thing isn’t a significant issue, at least not at current volume.

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  2. Sara Genge

    You do realize that this might give people from different time zones trouble when submitting. I’m not complaining: I’m the one with the unfair advantage (I wake up 6-8h before you do) but people farther west might wake up to find the window consistently closed…

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    • Jed

      Hi, Sara—yeah, that’s an issue worth considering. I discussed it in my entry and my earlier comment.

      [This comment edited later to increase politeness. Apologies for original semi-snarky tone.]

      To elaborate: We’re open at least 14 hours a day at this point; as far as I can tell, there’s no time zone where that doesn’t allow people a pretty substantial window to submit at a reasonable time of day.

      If we were open for a much shorter period, then it might be problem, but for now I don’t think it’s something we need to worry about.

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  3. Jed

    Update: I think day 6 was 17 hours. Day 7 was 17 hours. Day 8 was 22 hours; made it almost the full day without closing.

    So I suspect we’ll make it through a whole day sometime in the next couple days.

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