Category: website

Bugs

by Matthew

We’re one sixth of the way through already and the competition is going well but there are some bugs that I need to find time to work on and I have so little time at the moment! Here are the bugs I have identified that I need to work on though:

  • This will cease to be relevant from tomorrow onwards, but the scores of everyone on 0 should have gotten a slightly lighter shade of yellow every day for the first 5 days. They didn’t, they proceeded directly to white. This is down to the scoring system reversing and should have been forseen. I’ll probably fix it by next year!
  • The Team’s Championship is not comparing scores and positions to the day before correctly. This function worked last year and I haven’t changed anything around it that I know of so I’ll have to put my investigating hat on to see what I actually have changed that I forgot was part of the logic for this bit of the site. Hope to get the working correctly soon!
  • The stage where player’s positions flash and then turn white when they nearly cannot and actually cannot win needs to be updated or it won’t work correctly this year. I have a few days before it becomes relevant, thankfully.

Additonally, I need to code the previously mentioned widget that works out best scores under the current system and therefore gives players a comparable goal to work towards. Checking my diary, the earliest I’ll likely get to ANY of this is Sunday, and it may well be later!

Day -2 bumps

by Matthew

There are a few bugs and issues that I need to own up to due to a lack of adequate testing on my part. I’ll own up to them here but note that as yet I have yet to fix any of them.

Firstly it turns out the main email address – the one I say you need to send all queries to – hasn’t been monitored at all since the 2022 competition. I thought I had it set up to forward emails to my main address but it turns out I did not. Luckily I only had two emails in there and one of those was from this year. I will monitor this address properly going forward!

Next – on the main page for all players except the one that put their guess in first, the table suggests that everyone’s placing in the competition has dropped one from the previous day, even though there (a) isn’t a previous day because we haven’t started yet and (b) everyone is in joint first and so the implication is that you were in zeroth place yesterday. Super nonsensical. I’m aware of the bug and will have that tidied up as soon as I can!

Also, the scoring flip means I quickly bodged a change to the “number of points left to play for” box and clearly didn’t think the logic through enough because that box currently thinks there is 24 fewer points left than there actually is. I’ll engage brain correctly and try and get that sorted shortly!

There is also a bug where if you try to set your first guess this year to the same thing you happened to have as your final guess as last year, it’ll reject it as a duplicate guess. I note from the error logs that one player tried to set their guess and was rejected as such so I’m controversially going to manually add that guess to the database and get them going, and then I will work on fixing the bug. In the meantime, if you encounter it, please try guessing something else first and then guess again to set it to what you actually want!

Apologies for all of this, and good luck everyone!

Social Media issues

by Matthew

So making the game less engaging might be a factor that’s as yet unproven but one thing that is for sure is that the formerly used social media presences on Facebook and X are retired, for now at least. Every year the provider that take the game updates and post them to social media get more difficult to use and/or add costs. It is not worth my while to pay them so I don’t. This year the same thing happened again – X is now not working at all and Facebook would work for the first two weeks only. Tied to my lack of social media presence in general I find myself thinking it is easier to just pull the plug, and so I have for X at least. I am trying out one last free solution for Facebook, and fingers crossed it works!

This might kill the game even more. I have never worked out if engagement is linked to the social media posts and it might be difficult to get a real feel given the other big change this year, but I worry that essentially mandating players to visit the website every day will drive down active participation. It’s one more thing to remember to do, and who needs things? We’ll see.

If the new FB approach doesn’t work then it will be dead too, so I urge players to use an RSS aggregating website or app or tool and point it at https://acc.scriv.me.uk/feedme.xml to get updates however they wish to. That or bookmark the page and visit regularly. I’m thinking of ways to maybe make an opt-in mailing list but my preference is some kind of third party provider that can parse an RSS feed or even the website itself and so far I’ve turned up nothing. It needs to be automated as I don’t want to make work for myself as inevitably the more I have to do, the more likely I am to break the game accidentally.

PINs are planned for tomorrow or the next day. Stand by!

Some thoughts on the scoring

by Matthew

As announced in the last post, the scoring model for this year has flipped back to the one used in 2003 and 2004, namely 24 points on day 1 through to 1 point on Christmas Eve. The reasoning is simple – picking the correct item from a field of 24+ is harder than doing it from a field of 1. The game gets easier, provided you are attentive, as it progresses. It’s always seemed illogical to me that the easier shot gets rewarded more. Imagine basketball but outside the line was 2 and inside was 3. It’d be weird. Or hitting it over the boundary in cricket is 6 with a bounce or 4 without. The harder shot should be rewarded more.

The system flipped after only two years due to significant peer pressure following the 2004 game being wrapped up with several days to spare. Only two or three players (from memory, but I cannot remember who!) lobbied me but they did so hard and ultimately successfully. I’ve hated it ever since, but never had the gumption to change it back. It is part of the reason every time I make a change now I label it is “on trial” so that I can easily change it back with the reasoning that I wasn’t happy with the trial. Indeed, this change itself can be considered a trial and I’ll look at it again if need be.

The negative effect of the game being effectively dead days before the end isn’t insignificant though. In its own way the old system incentivised being an active player all the way to the end because that is when the big points are being paid. Someone could make sure they pay attention early, get 3 or 4 good guesses in and then forget about it and win. The old way you have to be there all the way to the end to win. This almost seems a slam dunk argument for keeping it how it was, but…

All the same points are on offer. You can effectively snooze the first 20 days the old way, then still come in and win. If low scoring days are a problem, then it doesn’t really matter which way round the scale goes, the problem exists somewhere. I have briefly considered but not felt inclined to adopt two alternatives which I’ll mention here:

  1. Making the scoring go 24-23-22-21-20-19-18-17-16-15-14-13-12-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-22-23-24. A hybrid of both systems. Would make the total points on offer add up to 468 and therefore regular winners scores of over 300 would occur, I reckon. Strikes me as gimmicky and so not thought about it for very long.
  2. Changing it so the winner is simply the person who gets the most correct guesses, with window value only being a tiebreaker. This appeals a fair bit actually but it is a radical departure from everything that’s gone before and I’d have to be EVEN BRAVER to implement this.

So I come back to what I’ve always felt. It is more logical to reward early guesses as they are harder to get right. The game might fizzle out early, it might not. The closer we get to Christmas the less time people have anyway so that might be for the best? Or I might be trying to justify it with made up reasons. The knock on effect might be less interest in the game as we go on, and there is another related issue here that I’ll discuss tomorrow.

I’ll leave you with this though. As the easy guesses are now weighted less, scores in general will decrease and player’s own PBs may become out of reach, so I’ll have to code in a widget that works out what the overall world record and the personal bests of each player are using this year’s scoring system so there is something more attainable to aim for. That might not be live for the start of play but bear with me! In the meantime, I have run the maths for every year bar 2005 (because I don’t have complete data for that year unfortunately!) to see how it would have gone if scored the other way. I haven’t resolved ties in this so in the few instances where there are ties for first the wrong player may be listed ahead, but you can have a look and see how you would have done, and how close it would have been. Theres a decent distribution or years where it would have been finished early and years where it wouldn’t. It’s linked and/or embedded below for your viewing pleasure!

acc alternative scoringDownload

Tomorrow I’ll be back to talk about the social media issues and how that may further decrease participant enthusiasm. I’m aware I might be accidentally accelerating the death of a game that is slowly dying anyway, and I’ll talk more on this tomorrow and maybe after.

2024 updates

by Matthew

This could be the last year of this game, I fear. The changes are small in nature but could have wide reaching implications for both how the game progresses and how active players are once the game gets going and points are starting to flow.

But first, here is the item list for this year’s calendar:

bauble
biscuits
candle
candy cane
chicken
chimney
christmas jumper
gifts
gingerbread man
house
marshmallows
reindeer
santa
santa hat
skier
sleigh
snowman
stocking
sunglasses
tinsel
toy car
tree
turkey
wellies
xmas pudding
yule log

26 items there, you’ll observe, and a few we’ve never seen before!

The big rule change is that I’ve finally flipped the scoring model back to how it used to be, how I have always wanted it to be, and how it logically should be. I’ll do another post discussing this in more detail but for now all you need to know is that if you guess correctly on day 1, you get 24 points. If you guess correctly on day 2, you score 23, and so on. Stay tuned for thoughts, history, and what I fear the implications could be.

The only other change is that the socials have been turned off this year. This is borne 90% out of the widget that did the posting demanding money to keep going (thus necessitating having to find a new one) and 10% out of the general anti-social media vibe I have going on these days. The latter may have contributed to the lack of motivation to find a new solution for the former. Again I will revisit this point in a future post and elaborate on both the realities and the possible implications going forward.

PINs will be sent out in a few days, until then: get strategising, I guess!

Immediate Outage

by Matthew

I was about 10 emails in last night when I refreshed out of curiosity to see if anyone had guessed yet. They had, and it had not gone well.

Well, it had gone well from the guessing side, with Neil B’s guess having successfully made it into the database and everything, but the rest of the site was broken. An error message on screen suggested something wrong with the widget that calculated streaks of correct guesses was to blame, and so I went and disabled that in the hope that I could get the page loading quickly and then return to fixing the underlying code problem later. All this did was remove the on-screen error message – the page still wasn’t loading. After scratching my head a bit I went hunting down the error logs that the server keeps and eventually, but not immediately, I found the source of the problem as a result. Also mid-competition last year I coded a new thing that showed how many points a team had scored in the previous day, and it was falling over when it couldn’t find a previous day to compare things to (in essence). In fact, that’s what both this and the now disabled “streak calculator” were getting hung up on.

So I added a bit of code that said “don’t do this on day 0” to both those things. Thinking about it I might need to widen the scope of that to day 1 as well – we’ll see if it falls over again after the first window is open. I’m almost sure it will! I really should test things better…

Anyway, at least until then, it’s all up and working now. Guess away!

2023 is ready to go!

by Matthew

I have spent the day, on and off, getting things ready for this year and I’m about to begin the lovely manual process of emailing out 44 sets of login details. It shouldn’t take too long!

Normally I post on here with the items list a bit in advance, but this year I did this directly on Facebook and “X” instead. If you missed it – they’re all in the dropdown list on the main page anyway. I was excited to see one of the windows contained an advent calendar itself this year – that seemed pretty cool!

Talking of social media though, with “X” evolving away from free third party applet stuff and (from memory) FB integration being rather less reliable last year, we’ll have to see how we get on with regards to keeping you updated in a non-check-the-website way. Whatsapp seems universally popular but I can’t see a tool to take an RSS feed and post things automatically to a new-fangled “channel” yet. I’ll gladly take suggestions and will try to find time to look into that and other methods myself too. I urge all players to check the website at least once a day in the meantime.

Good luck everyone!

What and when and how often, revisited

by Matthew

Five years and one day ago I put up a table on the stats page to show how often and when, on average, items are found in the advent calendars that have been used for the competition. It was rudimentary and I always planned to upgrade it, and I’ve started a few times but always come unstuck in forming the database query that would drive it.

Until today, when I started from scratch, ran into the same problem again, googled it, found that I was on paper doing it right, looked up the syntax for the bit of the query that was clearly not working and tried something didn’t look like it would work but somehow did. So much, if not all, of this website was coded by trial and error!

Anyway, now the table shows not just how often each item has occurred, but how often on each individual day. On top I’ve layered mean and mode because I know how to calculate those. The table is not in the final form I envisaged – for that I’ll either use a scalable font size or a colour gradient on the numbers so higher ones stand out more, but that is for another day.

I also need to scan through the database and rationalise the names I’ve used for items, as, for example, Christmas Pudding appears twice as it must have an errant space or something similar to create a variety of spellings for the same item. I’ll try to get to that tomorrow!

Mild embarrassment

by Matthew

It’s fun to note that for a year I decreed that I want to try and have a bumper field, we are looking at having our lowest field since 2007 – admittedly I haven’t gone as gung-ho on promotion as I could have, because I’ve never really felt comfortable with the idea of it. Quality, not quantity, anyway!

Related to this I’ve fixed an element of the website that wasn’t working exactly as designed – the query that pulled the data from the database for the “number of new/returning players” bit of the stats page only actually worked if there was a new player registered for a given year – there are no new players this year so the table/graph didn’t recognise the existence of 2022. I have fixed this and all is now displaying as desired!

Tomorrow, if I have time, I might see if I can do my intended redesign of the “Item Stats” data on the same page – if not it will hopefully happen soon. The table as it stands is pretty naff!

Good luck to our 31 players, and it’s not too late to join yet if you haven’t!

The 20th Challenge

by Matthew

It’s nuts to think that this year, if I bring it back, will be the 20th running of this weird little pre-Christmas competition.

I’m definitely bringing it back, by the way!

For some it’s a thing that they enter just out of a strange sense of loyalty, for others it’s full on part of their festive tradition, and there’s no doubt the full spectrum in-between. We’ve had 125 different people play it over the years. Only two players have played in every edition, and there’s a whole load of people for whom once was enough. It’d be nice if we could mark the milestone by having as many players return as possible, but, well. It’s tricky.

The easiest way to try and get a crazy huge field of people would be to email everyone who has ever played and invite them back, explain my thinking, etc etc, but I am very keen to not do this. Worried about bombarding people with emails about a thing they most likely don’t care about, it has always been my policy to email player details only to those people who actively played (that is, registered a guess) the previous year. There’s no mailing list, as such, but if you can’t be bothered with it just ignore the email one year and you won’t hear from the challenge again, unless you pro-actively email in yourself.

I cannot bring myself to change that, so this blog post is going to have to be the way. I’ll lazily tweet and FB this post a few times in the next four weeks up to starting day. Pass it on, if you know someone who has previously played but DIDN’T LAST YEAR give them a gentle poke so it’s not me who’s bothering them.

In summary:

This year is the 20th running of the Advent Calendar Challenge, and to mark this crazy occasion I’m looking to welcome as many returning players (and indeed new ones) as possible. If you have played in the past but didn’t play last year, get in touch and I’ll get you entered for this year. Thanks all, and I look forward to hearing from you!

If you haven’t played before, and I know you, also get in touch. New players traditionally do very well for some reason, so this could be your best shot at winning! 🙂

Let’s see how unsuccessful this campaign is…

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