Hmm, Flower Garden compromised?

nt599

Hello - it looks like player cyf has somehow hacked the program for Flower Garden, Game of the Day, from two days ago. See the attached screen shot from the Leader Board. This person managed to appear four times on the high scores list, with three identical scores in increasingly faster times at places 7-10, although the 'Show a players first score, not their fastest' box was definitely ticked. They also placed first with a score of 52. All cunningly achieved at the identical time of 7.20am on 22nd August! This player doesn't appear on other days on the current Leader Board in Flower Garden or any other game. Or at least not using that name. Maybe they got quickly bored with whatever they were up to?

david

The Leader Board, confusingly, doesn't honor the "first score, not fastest" setting. Jim and I have debated this, and in the end we settled on having a single view of the leader board, vs. different versions of it. That explains why the person is on there 4 times. Even with that checked they'd show up twice, as that setting only applies to games with the same score.

As to why the dates are the same: the date shown is the date the server received the game from the web browser. If the web browser can't send the games to the server for whatever reason (the server is down, the web browser loses its internet connection, etc.), then the games queue up waiting till they can be sent (in the menu bar on the right is a little card icon if games are queued). Sometime later the browser will retry to send the games and they'll all go out in quick succession. This appears to have been what happened in this case. There's an internal date that the browser gives (it's stored in the game data but not shown anywhere), and those dates line up in a way that makes sense (minutes apart from each other).

And they aren't a new player—they've got many hours of games logged. They mostly play Freecell which is why you might not have seen them before.

homedoggy

WOW...haven't seen tap dancing like that since Fred Astaire...lol
Thanks david

nt599

Thanks David, I'm glad to see that there are such logical explanations for everything I was perplexed about. I had never noticed (clearly!) that there was a difference between the Leader Board and the High Scores so didn't think of checking to see if the lists were the same. Many thanks for taking the trouble to reply. Highest regards to you and Jim, as always I will make sure my subscription payments are up-to-date.