What the heck

[dannyb]

I just played two games and when the timer went off I was credited with no words, no points. The tally sheet was all zeros. No word list nothing. Anyone else have this happen?

[admin]

Hi Danny -

Is this still happening for you? We performed a database update about 30 minutes ago which may have caused a hiccup like this, but if it is still happening please let me know which game size and game board (current or v 1.0) you are using, as well as your operating system and browser. Thanks!

UPDATE: I found the problem, I think - it was related only to 4x4 games not being properly initialized with the new dictionary database. It should now be fixed, but please let me know if any games started after 7:51 am Eastern time are not working properly.

[Bellamorte]

I've had the same problem. It says the game was started too long ago to be tallied. Even though it was literally just the amount of time it took to simply start and play.

[TCB]

Still not working when I'm logged on as TCB. However, when I log out and play a game, then it tallies correctly. My current time is 7:55 eastern time US. I play 4x4, current board, using chrome browser, Windows 10.

[admin]

Hi TCB -

Can you let me know if it is still not working for you in 4x4 now? And if it is still broken in 4x4, does it work when you try a 5x5 board?

[Naboka]

4x4 seems to be working for me.

Unfortunately.

Got distracted by a wifely need, thought I closed the board and came back to see it played out with just a few words recorded.

[dannyb]

4x4 is now working for me. Thanks for the info.

[crazykate]

I'm chiming in with a different "what the heck" experience... A board that has been played 1 time, but has 3 different record holders.

[dannyb]

That is something. I can't wait to hear how that could happen.

[lalatan]

I can't even begin to fathom how a dictionary upgrade would affect record totals but it did. Yesterday morning my total 5x5 longest word records was 43 less than the end of the day before the upgrade.
Then yesterday my best words total dropped by 20 from the morning to the end of day.

No use playing the game when your total winds up being negative after adding new records all day so time to take a break until the problem is resolved...

[bwt1213]

I can't even begin to fathom how a dictionary upgrade would affect record totals but it did. Yesterday morning my total 5x5 longest word records was 43 less than the end of the day before the upgrade.
Then yesterday my best words total dropped by 20 from the morning to the end of day.

No use playing the game when your total winds up being negative after adding new records all day so time to take a break until the problem is resolved...

The new words added to the dictionary mean that boards containing those new words might result in a new best/longest word for that board. When someone plays it, your previous record is surpassed. This will continue until the boards are removed from active play and recycled. Sitting out just means your totals will drop faster. On the other hand, the words you find that include the words newly-added to the dictionary will prove just as difficult for someone else to beat as they ever were.

For example, I've been playing here for a really long time and I can't remember the last time I ever surpassed one of your records. It may be that I never have.

[Spike1007]

With new words being accepted, of course it's possible to lose records, but that's a lot for one day. I suspect that the record elves are back in some form.

[lalatan]

After I posted, I recalled Stephen said something about losing some records last time there was an upgrade because they weren't archived. (I looked back on my stats and found that I lost 179 records after a server migration in 2019. I played a lot more games back then. Yesterday I played 8.) Stephen said he didn't archive this time either. So I'll see what he has to say about it. I could be wrong. Although there is now a plethora of long word players, I doubt if they'd find 20 new words to take out 20 of my records in a day but I suppose I could be seriously underestimating them. Other people have posted how they've beaten my records so I imagine you have too, bwt.

Actually, Spike, the elves showed up again a few months after I posted they retired. As before their hijinks are confined to longest word records; the best word records are always as they should be. Stephen said there is a huge amount of number crunching going on with everyone's stats, which I can appreciate would be the case. Nevertheless I wonder why best word records are never affected. But I just left it at that. As in life there are many things beyond my understanding and control. The man has crafted a challenging, interesting and very robust website to play Boggle and I'm grateful for that.

[bwt1213]

One other thing I noticed because of the new dictionaries: the word counts for the puzzles are up. I like to look at the rare and ultra-rare word counts, then the common and wide counts before starting a board (and then I look to see who played it before and what the records are). I saw a board today where the rare + ultra-rare counts exceeded 500 and the common + wide counts were well over 400, so the board had nearly 1000 words on it. I had never seen that before.

[admin]

I'm chiming in with a different "what the heck" experience... A board that has been played 1 time, but has 3 different record holders.

This is - obviously - a bug, and I'm to blame. It takes about a solid week of data processing to reformulate all of our game board library with the new dictionary, and I did all that processing on my home system to keep the heavy load off the live server. This means a copy of the database was made, then processed for a week, while new data was being saved/generated on the live database. I knew this would be the case, and created a script to copy over all live data from the server database to the fully processed database right before we went live. All record data and played words datacopied over, but the data point for # of games played did not successfully carry over. So if a game had 0 solves on the 13th, but was subsequently solved 4 times by 4 different players during that week of data processing, those 4 records would have been saved, but it would still be in the database as having 0 solves - then you came in and solved it, bumping it up to 1 solve but it now had at least 5 actual solves worth of played words and records saved.

As it stands, the # of solves data point isn't super important so I don't think this is a major issue - and it should resolve itself over the next several days through the course of natural game play. Sorry for any confusion!