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As you'll discover if you go to pandemic.metaculus.com, we've now set up a separate domain to host the proliferating set of COVID-19 questions, which will allow us to go to even finer-grained detail without completely taking over Metaculus.com, but also keeping the higher-attention questions on the latter. The currently-envisaged way this will work is:
All metaculus.com users are also pandemic users, though you'll have to re-login using your existing credentials.
Any question can be posted on just metaculus.com, or just pandemic.metaculus.com, or both.
Most non-pandemic questions should be on just metaculus, but there may be some of interest to the pandemic that can be cross-posted.
Pandemic questions that are highly detailed (e.g. a long list of "Infections by date X in locality Y") should go just on pandemic.
High-level/high-attention questions should be on both, particularly those about global numbers, longer timescales, etc.
The question posted to both is the same question, with the same predictions, discussion, etc. That is, the overall domain acts as a filter as to what questions you see.
Pandemic will have a finer-grained set of sub-categories for COVID questions; each domain has its own category/tag system.*
Your points and level are distinct for each domain.* For each question that resolves, you'll get points on each domain to which it is cross-posted.
Contests and leaderboards are also domain-specific, so the next COVID contest will probably go on pandemic.
For a while, all COVID questions will just co-exist between the two domains, while we discuss and decide the relation between the domains; at some point we'll start posting some COVID questions just to pandemic.
Very interested in feedback as to how to make this work best.
*=might be revisited.
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