[Gabel-guys] experiment waiting room

Andy and I have come up with an issue that I thought would be good to have
some feedback on.  We've been discussing how we want to implement the 'waiting
room' functionality.  Right now we're leaning towards the following
interaction model:

1. User hits the web page listing available games.  Web page checks KNS to see
which services are available and dynamically generates hyperlinks encoded with
the specific host and port information for that particular server.  

2. User clicks on a specific hyperlink, that takes them to the applet,
automatically connecting them to that experiment server.  

3. Here's where we need some clarification or at least a "yes keep doing
that".  We decided to 'throttle' connections at the experiment server end, not
the KNS end.  This means that people will be making connections to the
experiment server regardless of whether or not an experiment is already in
progress, etc.  What we plan to do here is the following:
    a. If there is no experiment session is in progress, or all current
    experiment sessions are already full, a new experiment session is started.
    We're going to have to worry about dealing with a maximum allowable limit
    to this, of course, but we're leaving that for later since it's not
    immediately needed.

    b. If there is an experiment session in progress and it is not full, the
    user gets queued up for that particular experiment session and begins
    playing in that experiment session in the next round.  I was wary of this
    idea when Andy first mentioned it because I had some artificial notion
    that an experiment was a logical set of rounds, and the participants for a
    given experiment should remain static throughout this set to keep it
    cohesive.  Since experiments will be randomized anyhow, we're leaning
    towards the per-round implementation, so a user connects to the forager
    server and gets slapped into the next round of forager.  

DING: Here's where we need confirmation/clarification.  Do participants join
on a per-round basis or on a per experiment session basis?  Will this change
for other experiments? Also, how long do we keep running these rounds?  Do we
let someone play forager for 37 hours?  Do you need to interpret their data
differently?

This is a pretty trivial question, but it's kind of a stumbling block right
now.

Thoughts?