Minor Updates to Wait Wait Stats Page

While listening to the last Thursday’s edition of Too Beautiful To Live, Luke Burbank made a snarky remark that he hasn’t won on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! for something like 35 shows. Even though that comment was not intended to be a factual statement, it did make a light bulb flicker in my head. The panelist statistics box includes the last time that he or she last won or was tied for first place and it would take a bit of time to go through the full appearances list to count the number of shows since the panelist has won or tied for first.

That afternoon, I started playing around with a couple of SQL queries to pull that information and filter out things like Best Of and repeat show appearances and got something that gave me a proper result. That night, I rolled out an update to the Stats Page with said information.

Updated Panelist Statistics Box
Updated Panelist Statistics Box

The updated panelist statistics box now adds “(X show(s) since last appearance)” after each of the dates listed for the last time that a panelist has won or tied for first.

The other updates to the Stats Page are all behind the scenes updates to make rendering of the Stats Page a bit more consistent on the version of Safari included with OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) and Google Chrome for iOS. I have also tweaked the schedule in which the graphs depicting each panelist’s point distribution to run each day early in the afternoon.