Still Running More Smoothly Than Healthcare.Gov

Scott Hardie | November 15, 2013
Funeratic is having serious technical problems: It was offline for 12 hours today (roughly 11am-11pm est), and it is barely able to stay online now that it's back. There is no one simple explanation for this; there are several causes and they're all complex. In order to keep the site running at all, I've had to disable most of the images, and most of the automated background processes that keep things running on schedule.

The automated process that publishes new goos at midnight is one of the things disabled, but the goo game is in a state of crisis anyway: The 12-hour disruption wreaked havoc in the tournament, keeping several players from activating the goo at all and forcing two other players to record guesses a half-day late. I have no choice but to strike Thursday's goo from the tournament and make it a bonus goo; keeping it would not be fair to the players prevented from guessing. That sucks for the players who DID solve the goo, one of whom pulled off a very impressive solve time, but it has to be that way. I'm very sorry for this; there's no good solution that I see or I'd take it.

To be clear: There will be no goo on Friday. The tournament will resume asap.

Due to the complexity of the problem, I'm afraid I will have no ability to solve this until Saturday or maybe Sunday. Doing so has consequences: This weekend was going to be my last chance to finish creating the new goo format before the winter season began on December 1. That probably means that we'll have to play yet another season in the old format, and try again to switch in March. (I could run a few weeks of bonus goos to make time, but doing this would actually create more work and more chaos; it's better to delay.) The silver lining is that I'll have more time to polish the new format and maybe even show it off to interested parties in advance to get feedback and make refinements; I don't know yet what that might look like but I'll be in touch.

Pirate Paradise is in trouble too: I'm behind on making new feats and out of time to run a fall event, and with this change to our schedule, I may not be able to run a winter event either. The goo game comes first, but Pirate Paradise remains important and I look forward to getting back to it as soon as possible.

First things first: My weekend will be devoted to getting the site fully operational again, so that we can play the rest of this goo tournament with no more problems, and go back to enjoying the site as normal. As always, I thank you for your patience.

Scott Hardie | November 17, 2013
Since last night, Funeratic has been back online on a new server, and so far the site has been stable if noticeably slower. I'm glad that the crisis appears to be behind us. The goo tournament should resume normally at midnight tonight, in the same state it was in at the end of the night on Wednesday.

For the time being, Pirate Paradise will be much slower to acknowledge that you have accomplished another feat, taking perhaps a day where it used to take 5-10 minutes. I will revise this code soon to get us back to a reasonable timeframe.

If you notice any other problem with the site (whether apparently related to this weekend's server change or not), please bring it to my attention. Thank you!

Samir Mehta | November 21, 2013
[hidden by request]

Samir Mehta | November 21, 2013
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | November 23, 2013
Thanks! I never fail to be surprised at how badly I anticipate players' ability to solve certain goos: I seem to make some far too easy and far too hard. This tournament has been pretty fair, at least as far as the goos themselves are concerned, and that's a relief. I did think that this week's Internet goo would be easier (maybe the person's work is not as well known as I thought), and that this week's Television goo would be harder -- not super difficult, but not consistently solved in 1 minute or less either. The only good thing in the tournament to come out of last week's "operational difficulties" (I like that phrase) is that I had to eliminate one entire goo from the schedule, so I chose the weakest one and adjusted the dates of the others to fill in the gap. Maybe this will raise the average quality.

So far into my vacation, so good. I'm not getting online much but it seems like the tournament is proceeding smoothly anyway. We should have a winner on Monday, and four bonus goos to fill out the rest of the week. Good luck, Justin and Steve! The "Current Scores" page should automatically name the winner between you as soon as you both guess, but the rest of the site won't mention it until I'm home, and I won't be able to send a prize until next weekend.