About Brainstorming

Brainstorming was created in around second half of 2017. A history and explanation of BS written in Chinese is in http://telegra.ph/BS-next-12-18 . For foreigners who might be wondering what it is, this article is to recap it in English plus some new points.

When evaluating the location of portal candidates in Mainland China, more effort is needed due to the offset of the road-map and annotations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China) and lack of Google street-views. This means most of the case, the two OPR map components do not help. Besides, we cannot easily tell where there are schools, hospital, or restricted areas without checking extra maps such as Baidu Map and Tencent Map (Appendix I).

In the very beginning, since OPR opens, we reviewers discuss our opinion about the rules and shared how we rate in Telegram. We frequently shared correct positions that we had found out and pointed out candidates that has to be rejected, because these are not easy to check for many people. Concerning the searchability of messages, repeated posting, and flooding of screenshots, BS is created to let us share and discuss with candidates information recorded while doing reviews (Appendix II, III).

BS always encourages users to follow  official instructions and to review conscientiously for the sake of creating a better game environment (portal network). It has been designed to be open and independent of factions from day one. People can share the information they have found or other comments to the candidates. All reviews and comments are publicly shared on OPR Wall ( http://kitten-114.getforge.io/bs.html ) which are also under everyone’s monitoring. Some unplanned benefits are - hints on when a submission is being reviewed, getting feedbacks for a submission.

#MoreThanAGame, social is the most important feature of the game. OPR with BS turns out to be a social environment instead of lonely works. Verifying the existence of the object, checking out its historical value, rating its importance and appearance are satisfying, that is why we would like to share our insights to others. We hope everyone could enjoy the reviewing process and do not be like monkeys doing tedious tasks for bananas.

Thanks for reading. We hope you have got more information about the nature of BS. The fairness, morality, and utility of BS are left for everyone to judge.

Appendix I - A case study of reviewing a candidate in Mainland China

http://kitten-114.getforge.io/watermeter.html#d9rv5jzehs (see all reviews: a link to the detail and reviews of the portal candidate)

http://maps.google.com/?q=@26.272465,117.634263 (Roadmap is shifted/offset by a large distance; hardly any street-views are available. Satellite is good but may not help in most cases)

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=26.272465&mlon=117.634263&zoom=16 (lack of details)

http://kitten-114.getforge.io/index.html#26.272465,117.634263,0 (with Baidu and Tencent street-views)

Appendix II - fixing location

http://kitten-114.getforge.io/watermeter.html#fqars4vsp8

Roadmap are offset to satellite image in Mainland China. The map used in submission may not be Google, but Gaode(高德) or others depending on phone system and this could cause a problem when adjusting the pin position because it could also be offset.  In this case of portal review, one pointed out that the location is offset. The following reviews have also made the move and finally we can see the live portal is at the correct position.

Appendix III - facilitating discussion

http://kitten-114.getforge.io/watermeter.html#zxolczhizk,#st1soilwya,#auctmwth5u

People are discussing and debating whether emoji in title should be rated 1-star and whether a stone lion should be marked as a duplicate of its counterpart in a pair.

Appendix IV - hinting

Often, finding clues for the candidate location requires looking up a couple of maps because those info and images are not be sufficient. For some technique reasons such as low-end device, on mobile, or limitation on network data, reviewers in China are having difficult check all maps. If one can share where a label or a street-view could be found, that can hint other reviewers to reach to the info.