typewriting

Some bright fastr players have pointed out (by exploiting) two bugs that allowed impossible scores. One involved sending a non-number as the score (which I fixed by only accepting numbers as scores). The other involved sending a negative score (which I fixed by not allowing negative scores). Both were simple enough to fix, just problems I hadn't considered previously.

I know at least one, and possibly both, were discovered by a player named "cheatrs nevr prospr," which I must say is a clever (clevr?) name. While I would appreciate more if people mentioned these bugs to me directly, it's still nice that someone is going to the trouble to poke around the edges of the game where I never thought to.

I've been telling everyone who asked about the timing on fastr that each photo set lasted 35 seconds, and there was no way to get more than 90 points in a round because only 9 (parts of) 35 second sets can fit in one 5 minute round. But I did more testing tonight, and it turned out photo sets weren't 35 seconds at all. In fact, there was no consistent length to a photo set, which meant those who refreshed their browsers more often could get more photo sets, and higher scores.

I've fixed this now, so photo sets are actually 35 seconds, and no matter how often you refresh within that 35 seconds, you'll still get the same photo set. And because you can only submit a score for each photo set once, I believe the maximum score is now 90 points. Of course, I believed that before, and it turned out I was wrong, so let me know if you see a score higher than 90.

The problem was that I was using two different clocks, one of which wasn't keeping consistent time. Now I'm only keeping time on one clock, so the timing is more stable now. In addition to varying scores, this should also solve the issue of photo sets randomly repeating.

I'll try to update the Spanish and French versions tomorrow. If you notice any problems with fastr, please let me know.