15 Days Before and After

Scott Hardie | November 7, 2020
People are asking me about today's Celebrity Goo Game News item: "When a player-created goo is scheduled in advance for a specific day, the site now automatically withholds all goos created by that player for the 14 days before it publishes, helping me to avoid any timing conflicts."

It's really a minor change that should have no effect on players, so I tried to minimize it by keeping it to one sentence. But this tactic may have simply made it more confusing and demanded more attention. Sorry about that. :-)

The idea is this:

The game rules require a 2-week gap between goos created by the same player. In the process that runs every night at midnight that semi-randomly selects a new goo from the queue and publishes it, there was already code in place to prevent selection of a goo by a player within two weeks of their last goo. So if a Chris Lemler goo was published on November 15, the site already wouldn't pick another of Chris's goos on November 16-29.

It's really rare, but sometimes I schedule a player-created goo for a particular day in advance. Until now, that meant that I had to carefully manage other goos by that player in the queue, to ensure that one of them wouldn't publish in the two weeks prior to this date, creating a rule conflict. Now the site does this automatically for me, which means less work and less risk of error. So in the same example, if I scheduled a Chris Lemler goo for November 15 in advance, the site now wouldn't pick another of Chris's goos on November 1-14 either.

This doesn't happen often, and if I've been doing my job right all along, then no one should be able to tell any difference anyway. But players have asked me to mention every change to the site in the various News pages, so here's including it in the interest of thoroughness.

Scott Hardie | November 7, 2020
And just to be even clearer, this scheduling-a-goo-for-a-specific-day thing is infrequent: It's something that I do to my own goos a few times each season and to player-created goos almost never. Here are a few reasons why I might schedule a goo to publish on a particular day:

- It's inspired by an upcoming holiday. There's one coming up on Veterans Day next week, for instance.
- It's inspired by a celebrity's upcoming birthday, so I run it on that day.
- It's inspired by the upcoming anniversary of a historical event, so I run it on that day.
- It's very newsworthy and I want to get it up as fast as possible, so I schedule it for tomorrow when I make it.
- It's part of a theme and I need to make sure that the seven goos run across seven consecutive days in order.

None of these reasons affect player-created goos (with rare exceptions), so don't worry: I have no intention of scheduling one of your goos for a particular day all by myself and messing up the order in which your goos naturally publish on their own. I don't want to do anything that might tip the scales in the competition, even slightly and indirectly.