Finding where to build
How do you rate how much a problem hurts?
Why it works this way
A problem nobody wrote about is marked "not checked", not given a low score.
Silence online is not proof that a problem is small. Some trades just do not post. So a problem we could not read about stays unrated, at the end of the list, and the way to settle it is to ask someone who has it.
What we gave up: a tidy list where every card has a score. Some cards stay unrated until you talk to a person.
What it is
A rated problem carries two readings. The first is how much it hurts the people who have it: three bars and the words "hurts a lot", "hurts" or "hurts a little". The second is whether anything already fixes it: "unsolved", "half solved" or "already solved". Together they set the order of the list, with the biggest opening first. Here, more pain is good news, because it is a bigger opening.
A rating is our read, and the card says what it rests on: "Our read, from 1 quote on this card", or "No one quoted yet".
How to use it
- Hover the chip on a card, or tap it on a phone.
- Read the first line: how much it hurts, and what that rests on.
- Read the second line: whether anything already fixes it, and what people say about the tools they have.
- Open N sources on the page. It opens "Sources we read", a list of public pages we read for the board.
- Treat the top of the list as the best place to start talking to people, not as a verdict.
"Already solved" does not mean dead. It means you would need a reason for people to move off what they use now, which is the hardest kind of card, and not a closed one.
What it will never do
- Give a problem a low score because nobody wrote about it.
- Treat a rating as proof that anyone will pay. It is what people wrote, not what they did.
If something looks off
- The chip says "not checked" and has no bars. We found nothing to read. When that happens across the board, the hover panel says "Nothing online about these yet" and that this does not mean the problems are not real.
- A card says "No one quoted yet". The rating is still our read, and you should treat it with more care.
- A rating does not match what you know of the trade. It reflects what people wrote in public, which skews to the loudest voices. A trade that does not post online reads quieter than it is.
- A rating changed after you came back. Boards made before early October may word the line differently.
- The N sources button is missing. No pages were saved for the board, so the hover panel leaves out its "Read from N public pages" line instead of showing zero.