I was probably getting over confident, @auxilia. It’s hard to balance attracting people to take part in the experiments and thoroughly checking people beforehand to make sure they are okay with the whole thing. I didn’t do much in the way of checks for Experiment #3 and it was fine. For #4, I did pretty minimal checks and it came back and bit me.
I was genuinely thrilled that we got four couples together for it but one of the couples had quite different ideas about what happens in experiments. Things got unpleasant for a while and then they left, barely halfway through. It reinforced why I absolutely must interview everyone thoroughly beforehand, make sure they have read about previous experiments and the details given on the experiment pages on this site.
The experiment wasn’t ruined as such, but it would have been better if the problem had been avoided.
My actual concern with the write up is that it takes hours of work to produce. If the report is going to make money for the community, it’s worth it (and I quite like transcribing and typesetting but I don’t have lots of free time) but Report #3 has only sold a couple of copies. I’ve been looking at reducing the price a little but if that doesn’t lead to increased sales, it just makes things worse.