Running a Hunt

Hunter 2 offers an array of tools to help monitor the progress of teams during the hunt in order to check for issues and render assistance if required.

This guide assumes you are an admin (that is, your Django user is staff and you are on a team whose role is “Admin” or “Author”) and have navigated to the admin site by clicking the button or going directly to the /admin/ URL.

Create/Edit

The Create/Edit link takes you to the Django admin, which is introduced in the [Getting Started](Creating your First Hunt) guide. Most objects that feature in the hunt can be edited here, though it should be rare you need to do anything outside the Event, Episode, Puzzle and Announcement sections.

Announcements

Of these objects, the getting started tutorial covers the first three, but there may be times when you need to send an announcement to everyone taking part, or everyone on a particular puzzle - to announce a winner, link a stream or point out an error.

Choose the type of announcement (which affects the style) and a title. Optionally you can choose a puzzle, in which case the announcement will only appear on that puzzle. The title and message will be displayed at the top of the page. HTML may be used in the title and message body, but be aware they are going to be wrapped in a <h2> and a <p> tag respectively.

Progress

The Progress Page

The Progress Page gives you an overview of the progress of the whole hunt. Each team’s progress on each puzzle is visible here, though there are filters to help cut this down.

Interpretation

Open the “Filters & Help” section at the top and have a look at the key on the right-hand side. Each combination of team and puzzle will have an icon resembling one in the key. While the team is working on the puzzle, the red pie-chart will fill up as they spend time on the puzzle and fade out if they stop guessing. When a team solves a puzzle, the icon changes to indicate this. Hovering the mouse over an icon gives some more information.

Usage

The Progress Page: Filters and Help

The aim of the Progress Page, beyond letting admins see how things are going, is to make it possible to select a segment of the teams working on the hunt to prioritise for help. You might want to focus on everyone who has solved fewer than four puzzles, everyone who hasn’t made a guess between one and two hours ago, or everyone who’s got between two and five puzzles open who has no hints scheduled on their open puzzles and who haven’t guessed more than 100 times.

The list is sorted in order to try and place teams which need more help at the top, therefore teams who have solved more puzzles are ordered later, and teams who have more unsolved, open puzzles are ordered earlier. Within this ordering you can also set filters: some experimentation may be necessary to find a filter which works for you, but a good starting point is to filter to:

1. at least one open puzzle,

2. no scheduled hints,

3. at most a few hours since the latest guess,

4. at least a few minutes since the latest guess.

You can start at the top of the list and enable more until the list has a manageable length. The idea would then be to investigate each team’s situation and use whatever means you wish to help them: finding them in real life and talking to them, messaging them outside of hunter2, looking at their guesses and adding unlocks for things they’ve already entered, or adding timed hints which everyone will see.

To facilitate this, clicking the team’s name will take you to their Team Page, covered in the next section.

Teams

This is simply a list of teams and their members to allow you to search them. Clicking a team name takes you to the admin page for that team.

Below a list of the team’s members is a list of expandable cards containing detailed information about the team’s progress on their unfinished puzzles. Most important is a list of which unlocks and hints they can see, enabling you to judge approximately how far through the puzzle they have got without asking them.

Below is a list of solved puzzles together with the team’s finish time and guesses taken.

Guesses

The Guesses Page

This page is a live stream of all guesses submitted by teams. As an organiser you can monitor the stream of guesses to watch for progress within puzzles, spot issues as they come up such as a variant spelling of an answer not being marked correct, and quickly perform some common tasks.

The columns are pretty self-explanatory, but note that rows are highlighted different colours if the guess granted the team an unlock, or was correct.

Linked names (of episodes, puzzles, users or teams) within the list create or update a filter based on the linked thing. In addition the mini links next to the puzzle name allow you to Edit the puzzle or View it on the player site, and those next to the guess allow you to add an Aanswer or Unlock pre-filled-out with the text of the guess.

Stats

One of the graphs on the Stats page

This page presents a number of graphs, giving organisers some more ways of getting an overview of the hunt. The first two are self-explanatory.

Progress (scatter)

This renders a point for each team at the time when they solve a particular puzzle.

Progress (line)

As above, but connects the team’s points with a line. This only makes sense for linear episodes.

Time stuck (per team and puzzle)

For each puzzle, renders a point for each team which has opened but not sovled that puzzle corresponding to how long ago they opened it.