Expose "who is working where on what" in a central location

[str4d]

The Herring feature where mousing over the "active" half of the "Activity" column would show names of people currently working on a problem, was super useful to me! I would like it to be easier to find this information, to make it easier when remote-solving to figure out what puzzles are being worked on. We can get this by scrolling down the puzzle list, but e.g. if I've earlier collapsed several in-progress sections to focus on one round, I have to make multiple steps to get back the full view.

[Zahariel]

I'm surprised you found this feature because I didn't really publicize it! I think I tossed it off in one sentence in the tech doc.

I think in general we need to do more to collapse the concepts of "working on a puzzle". We currently have four concepts, each exposed in different ways:

• People currently subscribed to the discord channel: this is reported in hb!who as "watching"
• People currently in the discord voice chat: this is reported in hb!who as "in voice chat"
• The channel_count field in puzzle: this is reported as the light number in the Herring UI. In general the bot tries to make sure this matches "people currently subscribed" whenever it has reason to think about it (but it doesn't currently store who it's talking about, just a number)
• People who have typed something in text chat in the last two hours: this is reported as the dark number in the Herring UI, and with the mouseover as you discovered.

I think at a minimum the recent-text-chat set and the voice-chat set should be merged into a single "active" value. I tried to figure out how to make the discord bot trap "people entering voice chat" so it could treat them as equivalent to people typing something; but I didn't try very hard, because I realized you'd probably want to treat people as still active if they're in voice chat continuously for 2 hours, even if they haven't typed anything, so it has a different model anyway. And there should be some representation of "people playing in spreadsheets recently" as well, which is now "maybe" possible if people use the same email in Herring as they do to get to the spreadsheet. But I don't understand how the spreadsheet activity detection works.