Hi all

I'm struggling to keep up with all the topics in the forum at the moment. They are all important but there are already 29 topics in the forum only just after 2 days into the competition. I can't speak for the rest but would it be possible to organise the topics by groups? Say for example, a group for any questions relating to the competition rules, one for the Claims data, one for the Members data, etc.

I think this would be really helpful moving forward especially for those who join the competition at a later stage. Should make it easier to look for relevant information.

Thanks - Eu Jin  

I think it is more important for the organizer of this competitin, to summarize all the questions and put them in the FAQ,or update the rules and data explnations. I've seen a lot of useful replies from jphoward in some topics, if you don't open the topic and look down, you never know. so it will be beneficial if they can summarize all the questions and answers.

In a previous life I was the founder of FastMail.FM, an email provider which had a customer forum with >200,000 messages! So I've got a lot of experience with forums - I know how important good design is, along with faqs, stickies, etc. Right now, we're spending a few days getting a feel for what kind of topics people are posting. Shortly, we'll starting organising them into forums. So far, I've come up with: Rules; External Data; The Data Sets; Algorithms; Other. Suggestions for other forums welcome! Note that if you're interested in following any user's posts, you can click their name, then view the recent posts of a user. You can also view all posts for a user, e.g.: http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/forums/default.aspx?g=search&postedby=jphoward

@Jeremy: I like the categories you have so far. To come up with ideas for other categories, the old Netflix Prize forums' categories might provide good ideas (see: http://www.netflixprize.com//community/ ). At a minimum, the number of posts each category shows how people actually used those forums. The most popular categories were "General Discussion", "I need help!" and "Learning or Otherwise", "Looking for Team Partners." So at a minimum, an "I need help" might be especially good for newcomers to data-mining contests. I also think a separate area for administrative announcements about the contest would be good; that way, those important messages don't get lost in the noise. And finally, "Reading & literature references" section might be a good (I seem to remember that in the IJCNN Social Network contest (on Kaggle) there were some key papers that some contestants wished they had known about ;)