Freebie Week (Goo)

Scott Hardie | November 1, 2009
Programmers love events like daylight savings time, leap years, and other special occasions that screw with our carefully timed scripts. If you missed it, a daylight savings time glitch exposed the answers for an entire week's worth of goos this morning, to anybody who was looking at the Recent Goos page. I considered leaving those goos expired, but that's not fair to the many players who activated them in towers without submitting a guess yet. I considered canceling them, but that's not fair to the players who already solved them and deserve credit. The fairest thing to do is to share the answers with everyone, so that's my decision. Look for a link at the top of the page that gives away the answers, although you should feel free to solve the goos for fun and then double-check against the answer before you guess.

The hardest question was what to do with the incorrect guesses already made for those goos. My first instincts told me to leave them incorrect, since those players guessed quickly and didn't wait to think it over like the other players. But this isn't our usual scoring system; some players suffered major setbacks (one lost a tower of 9) while other players who would suffer the same fate won't because of this glitch. That doesn't seem fair to me. I have reluctantly decided to scratch those incorrect guesses from the record, and let those players guess again with the answers exposed. This way, everybody gets a freebie, and everybody has equal standing.

As to the glitch, you can guess how annoyed I am. I've been using these same scripts for years without incident, so what happened? I've heard that the server recently had a new version of PHP installed, so my guess is that it handles daylight savings time differently, and my scripts still expected it to work the old way. I think I've figured out what exactly happened and how I can avoid it next spring, but that doesn't help us today.