The History of Funeratic (New)
Here are the ten items added on Funeratic's latest anniversary.
Buccaneers
October 4, 2009: Ahoy, mateys! Starting with the legendary Francis Drake, Celebrity Goo Game observes "Pirates Week" with a septet of notorious raiders of the seven seas, as well as a new category for goos, Piracy. It's all part of a tradition of pirate-themed content across the site, everything from the characters in the World Game being abducted by pirate captain Cassandra, to the heroes of Gothic Earth making a risky bet with the ghost of Gasparilla, that eventually culminates in the launch of an entirely new game on the site that turns players into pirate captains with crews of their own.
Pie
May 28, 2011: With Rock Block disappearing soon to make way for a new game, Scott launches the tournament to end all tournaments (literally): "American Pie," based on Don McLean's epic tribute to the saddest day in rock history. Players must proceed through 31 separate trials inspired by the lyrics of the song, mastering six new play rules, defeating a suped-up version of Devil, and revisiting elements of past tournaments. After months of gradual progress and several reversals of the lead position, Justin Woods pulls off victory in October and becomes the first player to win multiple tournaments. Steve West also earns praise for timing his moves so carefully as to make it almost impossible to advance beyond him, even though Justin manages the feat. If Rock Block has to end, this fun competition and walk down memory lane makes for a fine send-off.
Local
October 30, 2015: Thanks to the technical assistance of IT expert and Funeratic member Jeff Coopes, Scott finally has a home computer running Ubuntu (Linux), which makes it far easier to do Funeratic development. For one thing, Scott can easily run PHP and MySQL and Apache on the machine, so he can run a local copy of Funeratic on his computer that mirrors the live site (complete with an automatic nightly refresh of data and files from the live site), making it far easier to test new features before they get published; Scott no longer has to disable access to certain pages of the site so that he can work on them, and he can try out more ambitious new features like generating gooed images on the server. Scott also sets up version control software to keep track of his changes, making it even easier: Not only can he restore any previous version of the site code to figure out where a bug was introduced, but he can segment projects off into branches of code, doing a project months ahead of time and letting it sit in a branch until the time comes to reintegrate it and publish it. Every section of Funeratic sees changes large and small thanks to this major system improvement.
Found
July 23, 2016: With the site's membership continuing its slow decline, Scott proceeds with an ambitious multi-step plan to make Funeratic more appealing to search engines, improving everything from images to page addresses to HTML markup to indexing to linking, and asks members to help by linking to Funeratic from as many different places online as they can. The effort does improve traffic but does not (at first) lead to new memberships. A few former members are attracted back, however: Elaine Beckland, Jesse King, and Stan Iwanchuk all return to guess celebrity goos, and Elaine becomes a daily participant in Rock Block as well. Efforts to improve site traffic and participation continue on an ongoing basis.
Trumped
November 9, 2016: Although the volume of comments is a far cry from Tragic Comedy's heyday in 2004, the surprise victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election is still a landmark event for Tragic Comedy: A shock to some members, a relief to others, and a turning point for site participation. Liberal members spend weeks before and after inauguration debating how terrible they think Trump and his policies are, and the normally friendly Tragic Comedy feels like a bitter, unhappy place for weeks. Other members stop discussing politics whatsoever, either turned off by the negativity or just unwilling to voice their support for Trump in the midst of such liberal hostility. Over the coming months, Tragic Comedy gradually begins to feel light-hearted and welcoming again on other matters, but its political discussions in the Trump era remain tense for much longer.
Sockets
January 22, 2017: With browsers like Google Chrome adding more restrictions for websites that collect passwords over plain HTTP, Scott decides to give Funeratic an upgrade to the more secure HTTPS, ensuring a direct connection between the server and each end user. Funeratic is just a small gaming website, but its users deserve to have their data protected, especially as usage increasingly happens over public wi-fi networks. The change adds occasional slowness when loading a page on Funeratic, as an extra step must be made each time to validate the SSL certificate, but the change is the right thing to do by users and by the site, giving it a small boost in search-engine traffic at the same time.
Rank
April 23, 2017: Mistakes compound: When Scott fixes a bug in Rock Block concerts that has been processing the same code multiple times whenever Chris Lemler finishes a concert, he makes a small adjustment to the number of new artist ranks that Chris's opponents have earned, since a few players benefitted from defeating Chris "multiple times" in the same concert. This proves controversial, since a few players are now deprived of ranks that they had every expectation of being able to spend, so Scott corrects it by giving every player the same adjustment that the most adversely-affected player deserved, granting everyone a +6 bonus. But one fix that Scott put in place, code that auto-adjusts the ranks if they become incorrect again, does not help the matter, as players keep noticing slight fluctuations whenever the numbers auto-correct themselves. Scott is forced to make yet another change in how new artist ranks are calculated and recorded. What should have been a simple fix turns into weeks of corrections, but players come out of it richer, with extra artists in their labels.
Flock
July 31, 2017: Rock Block's previous tournament, a live videoconference-based competition taking place in a single afternoon in 2016, had been a lot of fun, but Scott struggles to find a time to do it again, barely able to secure a date in his own schedule let alone try to coordinate with all active players. He finally gives up and runs a simple tournament (based once again on a double-round-robin format, this time taking its name from the Rivingtons hit "The Bird's the Word"), letting it play out slowly over eight weeks instead of one afternoon. The competition is popular, inspiring Erik Bates to return to the game and for players to exchange friendly banter during concerts and in Tragic Comedy. The short tournament is such a success that Scott commits to running them much more often in the future, aiming to get close to the original plan for Rock Block to have a new short tournament every season.
Badges
September 3, 2017: Once again, it's time for Celebrity Goo Game to adopt a new scoring system to refresh itself, after years of lucky cats and pagodas. Scott appreciates how differently some players approach the game, and devises a system that will reward players for experimenting with different styles: Players earn badges (colorful icons) for accomplishments such as solving a consecutive streak and solving many goos on the same day and being first to solve a goo and so on, with the player who accumulates the most badges by the end of the season becoming the winner. Players approach the new system with gusto, devising stretegies to maximize their badge collections, but it soon becomes clear that the system is flawed, being static and uninteresting. A year later, the game switches back to the previous system, the Japanese pagoda and lucky cats model.
