Punched out

[bwt1213]

I played a game and got an unremarkable score of 490 or so. I saw "submitting" and then it showed a null page -- no high score, no best word, no points. Everything was zero. I was credited with a game played and zero points for that game, dropping my average for the month by about two points. I also saw the following message:
"Call to boolean" something. I thought I'd cut that so I could paste it here, but that didn't work, either. Something was seriously broken. I don't suppose you can back out the null game, but it would be nice.

[bwt1213]

One more thing to add: Every board shows up now with no statistics. None of them have been played, there is no high score shown, etc.

[pdiddp]

I noticed the same thing with all the games being new. Thought it was just a coincidence til I hit the third one in a row, then a fourth. I just checked my score and they are counting into my total, but yeah, something IS definitely broken!

[admin]

Sorry about that - I made a dumb mistake rolling out the new dictionary. Will post about it shortly.

[jbud1980]

bwt1213 : I recently played a board where I ended up with the best word, yet I failed to log-in. It didn't count for squat, and I felt so stupid. Haha, oh well...

[bwt1213]

bwt1213 : I recently played a board where I ended up with the best word, yet I failed to log-in. It didn't count for squat, and I felt so stupid. Haha, oh well...

Yeah, I've done that before, too. But I was signed in. I had been playing for a while and everything was normal until it very decidedly wasn't. And I was still signed in, because my zero game did count.

[Denali87]

Dear Admin,
Many of us on this site have given countless hours to achieve high score records and longest word records under the premise that our screenname would be immortalized on this site. I personally find motivation on each puzzle by trying to beat who I consider to be my rivals. For example, I know when I see that scheffek holds the high score that it is going to be very difficult to beat him unless I am solidly on my game which is usually first thing in the morning after my coffee. I know that if MegaWord holds the record I am merely playing to see if I can get a word or two that he missed, as well as learn new words to add to my arsenal. Seeing the names of my friends bwt1213, Arabesque, lalatan, RussDNails appear gives a sense of a community. So when I logged on this evening to see all that beautiful history wiped out it crushed me. Please restore these records!

My other question to you that I have been pondering for some time is, are these 5x5 boards truly a randomly generated smattering of letters or do you as the administrator find some big words to consciously embed and then add in some filler letters around them? I find more often than not that when I have the first 7 or 8 letters of a monster, the rest are always there. It's never like I'm just one letter off. The word is always there. There seems to be too many suffixes of "izations" "nesses" and "callies" and "phies" than what would be randomly generated. It would be helpful to me to know how these puzzles are created so I know how to play them more effectively.
Thank you!
Rahul

[jbud1980]

bwt1213 I guess it doesn't matter anyway as all my high scores (except one) were zeroed-out today. I just started playing a few months ago, so it's like starting from scratch, which stinks, but it is what it is.

[admin]

Please restore these records!

Most records (99.5% of them) have been restored as of this morning, I found a mostly uncorrupted copy of the records table from last week that I was able to clean up in order to restore this data.

My other question to you that I have been pondering for some time is, are these 5x5 boards truly a randomly generated smattering of letters...

It is roughly half and half - 50% of boards are generated completely at random (well, not exactly random, we use specific algorithms to ensure that we're not posting boards that have very, very few words in them), and the other 50% are seeded with one or more mid- to long-range words (12 letters or longer). Some people like to play just to look for very long words, others want to find as many words as possible per boards - this distribution allows enough possibilities for everyone to enjoy their preferred mode of game play.