As you'll discover if you go to pandemic.metaculus.com, we've now set up a separate domain to host the proliferating set of COVID-19 questions, which will allow us to go to even finer-grained detail without completely taking over Metaculus.com, but also keeping the higher-attention questions on the latter. The currently-envisaged way this will work is:

• All metaculus.com users are also pandemic users, though you'll have to re-login using your existing credentials.

• Any question can be posted on just metaculus.com, or just pandemic.metaculus.com, or both.

  • Most non-pandemic questions should be on just metaculus, but there may be some of interest to the pandemic that can be cross-posted.

  • Pandemic questions that are highly detailed (e.g. a long list of "Infections by date X in locality Y") should go just on pandemic.

  • High-level/high-attention questions should be on both, particularly those about global numbers, longer timescales, etc.

• The question posted to both is the same question, with the same predictions, discussion, etc. That is, the overall domain acts as a filter as to what questions you see.

• Pandemic will have a finer-grained set of sub-categories for COVID questions; each domain has its own category/tag system.*

• Your points and level are distinct for each domain.* For each question that resolves, you'll get points on each domain to which it is cross-posted.

• Contests and leaderboards are also domain-specific, so the next COVID contest will probably go on pandemic.

For a while, all COVID questions will just co-exist between the two domains, while we discuss and decide the relation between the domains; at some point we'll start posting some COVID questions just to pandemic.

Very interested in feedback as to how to make this work best.

*=might be revisited.