Hello from the Future!

Scott Hardie | January 18, 2012
You may have noticed that the times stated throughout the site are a few minutes off. Funeratic adjusts itself automatically to use eastern standard time (GMT-5), but otherwise depends on the server clock to tell it the time down to the minute. Our kind host has been working to adjust the server clock, but so far his efforts aren't working, and it seems like it's going to be a while before this is fixed.

I've been asked why I don't just adjust how the site uses time. Some of the changes would be easy, like scheduling processes to run a few minutes later than when they're really supposed to. But huge sections of the site use the day, ignorant of the time, to calculate something, for example whether a guess was made on the first day of a tournament goo or a later day. Rewriting these to use time instead of day would be a significant undertaking, and it wouldn't really work very well. I know that because the site used to work that way: Once upon a time, it jumped around between servers so often that I just created an "offset" value, the number of seconds off from reality the server clock was, and tried to feed every time computation through that offset value. But there were so many variations on how time is used and so many potential places to apply the offset that it became a mess; I'd forget it completely in some places, and apply it twice or thrice to the same time value in other places because of the same variable passing through multiple scripts. I don't want to go back to that mess; I have better things to spend my limited time on.

For now, let's try to put up with the inaccurate time. I've created a Dashboard option (at the very bottom) that will display the current server time if you want to be aware of it. If you're trying to get in your goo guess before midnight, or to play a pirate battle before it expires, make sure that you do so according to that time. When the server clock eventually gets corrected, things will go back to normal. Thanks for your patience with this.