On this page, Knew The News publishes brief notifications about additions or modifications to the website, including functionality as well as rules and conditions.
Knew The News officially launched its FIFA World Cup special page offering questions covering all matches of the upcoming Brazil world cup, and many more.
Any player making predictions on any of the question automatically takes part in the competition: Top three players will win a $10,- Amazon voucher and a Knew The News mug each!
The search box located in the header part of the page now offers a autosuggest functionality, which means that one the user has begun typing his search term, the site will already display all matching open questions currently available.
The search page itself now allows to specify the state of the questions to search for.
A new section was introduced which provides a quick overview on current news topics, seperated by topic. Each news entry allows to quickly create new questions based on the story using the improved question creation wizard.
During the last months, Knew The News was rebuild to offer improved user experience, better accessibility and easier gameplay.
Redesign was made to further improve scalabilty also on small devices, and offers a more modern look
Find the new question creation dialog, restructured and well designed.
As soon as any action occurs on the site, a popup will notice the user about it.
Trader's names are now displayed along with the options list on a question details page.
Inactive account will be taxed on their cash after a period of one month.
Improvements in user experience.
Find the page you are listed on using the find me link which gets you right were you are on the list.
The Knew The News database and framework for the site supports running complete seperated prediction games.
An all-time highest net worth leaderboard now displays the highest value a player ever achieved while playing Knew The News.
When enabled, options on questions are automatically ordered by their relevance.
The website was completely revised and a new mobile and touch device optimized layout introduced.
Whenever a user adds the url to a youtube video, the video will automatically be embedded in the display of the posted text. If a link to a question or a user profile is posted, it will be converted in the output to simply show the title of the question, or the user name accordingly, with underlying link.
Instead of completely eleborate all aspects of a question, including possible outcomes and likelihoods, users may now simply ask a question and submit it to be finished by one of the super users on the site.
Knew The News launches its first Special page with a special widget: A map of the United States with each state represented using colors dependent on current predictions. The page offers a brought variety of questions surrounding the race, its candidates and related topics.
Knew The News changed its wording. Although the game still is correctly described as "prediction market", from now on, we'll simply name it "questions". Since, that's simply what it is.
A number of sub categories have been added to the Sports category: Boxing, Cricket, Golf and Cycling.
The question creation wizard has been enhanced with the ability to fetch background information about a news topic by simply providing an url to an article on a news site. The wizard automatically reads the keywords from the given page, a summary and an image - if provided by the website.
Instead of the colored bubble, the users avatar is shown along with his name throughout the site.
Knew The News introduces the sponsoring of questions by promotors of the site. On a promoted question, a prize is raffled among the players whos first, unsold prediction was made on the winning outcome.
Question options may have own images associated which are used to generate a more pleasant graphical user interface experience.
Like and dislike is being introduced on comments.
Expert mode users may bet against options. Players are able to predict that a certain outcome may not occur in their opinion, without the need to buy stakes on each of the other options. To accomplish this, the stake size is provided using a negative value (although the stake is substracted from the users account of course).
Question visits are being counted and the total number of visits on a certain question is displayed.
To follow developments on a specific question, a user may now subscribe to questions of interest. The user will be periodically informed about what happens to questions to which he subscribed.
To achieve better news sources related to questions, from now on keywords for news retrieval me be chosen directly.
The position lists now have paging functionality enabled, allowing the display of large numbers of positions. Additionally, sent invites are shown in an extra area, with the ability to resend not opened invitations.
In addition to the overall tag cloud displayed on the home page of Knew The News, every category listing now shows its own tag cloud, including any tags associated with questions within the category.
Search queries may now be performed in a "any of these words", "all of these words" or "exact phrase" form to make it easier to find desired questions.
During twelve months since go-live of the news prediction site Knew The News, the website reached a fully functional, reliable state - based on players' efforts.
To eleminate side effect from the system change which prevents option values to drop below 1%, this restriction is lifted for any option which has been deactivated from predicting.
Competitions are emerging to Knew The News providing an additional dimension of competing in news prediction. First test run is ready to launch and more will follow. Stay tuned!
On the profile page the user may configure notifications to be send by email or to be added to their profile, or to be omitted all together.
On each question details page, the "compete" section displays the player's performance in relation to the performance of the player's friends. The section shows the amount of money the player invested and what this investment is worth on an yet unsettled question. On settled questions the section shows the final performance of each player.
Knew The News offers users of the widely spread and popular blog publication appliction WordPress the oportunity to easily integrate content from Knew The News in their blog posts and articles using the Knew The News Associate Markets Plugin. Integrated dialogs allow the user to select and embed question widgets from Knew The News, and even allow the user to create Knew The News questions - from within their WordPress blog administration.
After a "pattern" in betting was discovered which allowed riskless high profits, the community discussed changes to Knew The News which could prevent people from making gains simply by betting a specific sequence of predictions. These changes were discussed and voted for, and eventually have taken effect now.
In addition to the former MVP concept (which are now to be referred to as Category Editors), the Super User is introduced to Knew The News. Read more on this on the Team page.
Discuss on Knew The News: The Knew The News Forums.
Users are awarded badges on their profile page to indicate exceptional achievements on the Knew The News leaderboards. Each month, the first three members on Communication, Predicting, Question Creation and Overall are awarded a Gold, Silver or Bronce badge.
When hovering over the name of a member at any location of the site, a context info box will popup which displays some basic information about the user, and, more usefull, allow the player to directly send a friendship invite, and messages - without the need to switch to the members profile page.
Knew The News has changed the calculation of earnings on predictions, as announced earlier.
On the frontpage, a newly introduced widget shows various activity on Knew The News as it happens, live.
During June, the question creator on Knew The News which questions attract the most activity and earns the best ratings (by other players) will be rewarded a special prize: The unique Knew The News mug.
Knew The News will change the calculation of earnings on predictions. Currently, the earnings are calculated based on the value of an option after the stake was bought. This will be changed to be based on the value of the option at the moment before the stake is bought. This way, the user will become the amount of money in return which the value of the option promises him to get.
For those familiar with the game, these extended functionality will be made available again, whenever the user explicitly activates the "expert mode". Calculation of stakes will be according the described change for stake sizes of 100$ and lower. For any amount exceeding 100$ the new method will be applied to the first 100$, everything above 100$ will be calculated in the current manner.
If you wish to comment, or to discuss these changes, feel free to add your opinion on the Knew The News Forums, or to contact Knew The News directly.
The leaderboards have been slightly rearranged and some new ones are introduced to show more detailed the fields of community activity of the users.
No new functionality, but a redesign of the user profile page an the leaderboard pages are introduced.
For the most effective player during the month of may, a special prize is rewarded: An unique Knew The News mug.
An optional rich text editor allows formatting in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (wysiwyg) way on question creation and about-me info on the users' profile.
To make question creation easier for the unexperienced, the process of question creation is now assisted by a wizard which guides the question creator through all necessary steps.
In order to prevent the settlement difficulties due to the switch to and from daylight saving time, Knew The News date/time calculation library has been rewritten.
The site now depends on settings concerning the timezone of the user, instead of a simple offset value.
To express your appreciation towards the question creators, players may rate any question regarding their value to the site. Any rating is per se a positive rating, down votings are not possible. Rating is possible by giving a star score: The scale:
The rating score for the questions of a member also influence his community points ranking. View the best rated questions and have a look at the community points leaderboard here .
The second redesign phase bring you new functionality: From now on, the user is able to rearrange, the context boxes on the right side of the page, bring them into order by drag and drop, and even hide those which he doesn't like.
Knew The News makes major changes to its layout and design. In this first
step, the page width is increased, offering more space to display information.
Additionally, new colors are introduced and a completely new designed header and
footer integrated into the site. More changes are to come.
Many thanks to 
gotmick for making design proposals
and working out the prototypes.
Users may now manage their own lists of favorite questions on their
profile. To add or remove a question from the list, the icons
and
have been introduced on the social media bar of the question details page.
The default leaderboard has been replaced to reflect the users community activities rather than their wealth. The users are rewarded points for different actions on the site, such as commenting, creating questions, making predictions and friending other users. This is the exact calculation of the points:
| Points | Action | |
| 1 | per comment | |
| + | 2 | per flag |
| + | 1 | per 10 distinct users predicting on any of the questions |
| + | 1 | per 50 predictions made |
| + | 2 | per friend |
| + | 1 | per rating score |
| =============================================== | ||
| = | total | community points |
To keep up to date with the community discussions on various topics, the newly introduced comments list can be of some help. Here, you will find any comments posted by users: Comments.
Knew The News recognizes the achievements of active players by awarding
them the Most Valuable Player status. To become MVP, the player does not have to
be one of the top players on the leaderboard. MVP have some additional abilities,
like settling questions. Furtermore, MVP may be contacted directly by private
message, even if they are not friended. In return, MVP may contact any other
player without friending them. The MVP status is indicated by the MVP icon
at the users name.
Users may send private messages to other users they have friended on Knew The News. The recipient will be notified about an incoming message by e-mail, sent by Knew The News. Both sender and recipient will not disclose their e-mail addresses by sending or recieving messages since the messages are only available within Knew The News.
Due to the beta status of Knew The News, calculation of question movements is still somewhat experimental. To reflect new findings, the algoritms for calculation of position prices has now being changed. This might result in unexpected changes in prices, but whatever the site shows: The settlement price is always based on the buying percentage, and so, winnings are always fixed.
On The Wall, Knew The News members can publish any message they like, express their opinion, or simply say "hello".
Knew The News introduces some icons to mark the state of a question: Newly published, suspending soon, hot topics, and in-play.
Throughout February, Knew The News will reward specific action on the site with virtual cash.
Recommendation of Knew The News.
Sharing questions on Facebook.
Question creation.
From now on, Knew The News rewards any successfull recommendation to the site with an additional 50 virtual bucks.
A hint box has been added to the frontpage and shows some valuable information about gameplay and other topics surrounding Knew The News.
Today a customer survey has been started, asking any user for some brief feedback on the site. Some details can be read here: Knew The News Blog: User Survey
Knew The News now officially has it's own brand:
Do you like it?
While making predictions on Knew The News, a stream entry on the user's Facebook Wall can be automatically published.
"Tags" have become more important for the site. To reflect this, the URL to display
all questions with a specific tag has been unified:
For example, to display all question tagged with "Barack Obama", simply use this URL:
http://www.knewthenews.com/Tag/Barack+Obama
The question lists for some important tags now have a special layout, which might be
extended and enriched by some more tag related information.
On any question page, a list of other questions is displayed. It contains questions on which users made predictions who also made a prediction on the currently displayed question.
Once every 24 hours, a user which is on the site will be awarded a bonus of 25.00 KtN$ on his account.
Associated with the user name, the net worth will be visualized by a little
badge. These badges are currently defined, with their corresponding lower net worth boundary:
1M+
500K+
250K+
100K+
50K+
25K+
10K+
5K+
2.5K+
1K+
Searching for questions based on a term has been enabled. The search is limited to analyse the title and the background description of the question, but covers any state and offers the ability to sort the results.
Based on the tags associated with a question, related news is included on the question details page. The news are retreived from news.google.com, ordered by date.
From now on, in-running questions can be marked with a special batch, highlighting that making predictions on the outcome is possible even when the event is already open.
For questions related to Knew The News, the newly created category should be used. See Questions in the Knew The News category.
As you might have noticed, the frontpage was slightly redesigned, to make important information better accessibly. More importantly, the Tour section has been extended with some additional background information. Have a look!
Additionally to the all time net worth leaderboard, a new leaderboard type has been introduced reflecting the change in net worth a user achieves within a certain time frame. To start with, the "Weekly Gain" is made available which shows the gain achievements in the currently running week.
Use the new "challenge friends" functionality to invite Knew The News
friends to predict on specific questions you find interesting.
Click on the "Challenge friends"-icon
(
)
on the question details page.
Question information can now easily be integrated into any other
website or blog page. Following the instructions on the
Widgets description page, it's a simple copy/paste
action to get the nessecary code. Watch out for the "Get Widget"
(
)
icon on the question details page.
Starting today, any relevant innovation to the Knew The News website will be announced within this block.
