Undone

Aaron Shurtleff | September 10

On my phone still. Soon.

Aaron Shurtleff | September 10

Don't know if it helps, but I managed to click one of the bands before the page hid them from me, and the checked band stayed, while unchecked bands went away. I unchecked it, and it immediately disappeared. Weird.

Scott Hardie | September 11

Yeah, it's something in the exchange of data between the server and your phone. The challenge-accept form redraws itself every time you check a box to make sure that your remaining options will add up to the challenger's sum. (It's hard to see this early in the game, but it will be clearer when you have many artists.) The form also draws itself upon initial load of the page using the same process. Both steps involve contacting the server with Javascript to tell it what you've checked already, and the server sending back the valid options. Something is getting lost in the data transmission from the server back to your phone, so the page thinks there are zero valid options (what you've checked always stays checked), so the options vanish.

I have the debugging data and I just haven't had time yet to dig into it, but I'm getting closer. Ultimately, I can turn off the form-redraw code just for you on your phone, so that the options are always there and never disappear, but first I'd prefer to try to dig through that data and try to get to the bottom of this for real. Thanks for your patience and the info. :-)

Scott Hardie | September 11

Hmmm... I could also rewrite this process so that the calculation is done entirely in the browser, without the need to contact the server. I built the logic server-side on the challenge form because I didn't want to expose data like who owns what artists and what other themes are lurking out there, in case somebody dug through the page source looking for secrets. But the smaller challenge-accept form doesn't have any such need for secrecy: The only two values constraining you would be the sum of the challenger's five artists, and what artists belong to this concert's theme if there is one, and there's no harm in exposing those.

I will first try working with the debugging data that I've received to see if I can fix the code as it is now, because that's the least amount of work. If that fails, I'll disable the redraw code on your phone, and set about rewriting the logic to happen in-browser instead of on-server. One way or another, we'll solve this. I love it when a plan comes together.

Aaron Shurtleff | September 11

Crap. Well played.

Aaron Shurtleff | September 12

Take your dirty artist!! :P

Scott Hardie | September 12

I'm more interested in having pulled off "Win a concert every day for a week." Booyah.