typewriting

One of the most common requests for fastr has been to link the photos to their flickr pages. At first I thought this wouldn't work because then you could click on the link and see the tags, and you wouldn't have much reason to guess the tag. And it's already too easy to cheat. But several people pointed out that it could just add the links after the answer is shown, so this is what the game does now, satisfying both players' desire to have links and my desire to discourage cheating.

Speaking of cheating, there is now — I believe — only one way to cheat. I've fixed every other method known to me. (If you know of another, I'd like to hear it.) I'll go ahead and explain the one remaining in hopes that doing so will make it a less interesting challenge. Basically, the answer is always available in the source of page; it's just hidden until you guess it or the time runs out — then it's shown. It's pretty trivial to add JavaScript to the page, either through a bookmarklet or a greasemonkey script, which makes the answer visible at all times.

What you get out of this is a perfect score. The other methods of cheating, which I fixed today, would allow more than a perfect score. Because it's trivial and you don't get much for it, it's not interesting, and no one is impressed by those who do it, as they might have been when someone had a million points by another cheat.

But even that was pretty boring, and I never saw anyone cheat for more than one round. Basically someone would spend five minutes figuring out how to cheat, and then get bored and go back to playing the game. Luckily the game is more fun than the cheating, or I would have had more trouble with cheating before fixing it today.

So why am I not fixing the last cheat? Because doing so would slow down the game, and I don't think it's a worthwhile sacrifice. To make it impossible to cheat, I'd have to remove the answer from the source of the page. Then when you typed in a guess, it would send the guess back to the server, which would respond saying it was correct or not correct. It's that constant querying of the server that would slow everything down, probably enough to cause the server to die (again). So I have no intent to do that.

Now, back to links. There are also links allowed in player names now. This wasn't formally requested, but I saw people setting their player names to things like myblog.blogspot.com, so I figured I'd make their lives easier. This also gave me a new way to do tech support, by putting a link to my AIM address around "Questions?" as my player name. I answered three or four questions today, all of which were basically "how do I play this game?"

I'm somewhat afraid this will just devolve into a link farm. There is currently someone named "cheap domains" playing fastr. (The domains aren't actually cheap — I checked.) For now, though, low scoring players scroll off the page, so someone has to keep playing to keep their sales link visible. And hopefully while they're doing that, they aren't sending us all emails advertising their "cheap" domains.

If I decide the player names are becoming too full of advertising, I'll just remove the links. But I've seen a few people linking to their flickr pages or personal websites, and it's nice to get a better idea of who exactly I am defeating with my superior tag-guessing skills. (Not to mention my knowledge of all the tags I chose.) For now anyway, fastr is full of links.