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!
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.
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!
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!
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! 🙂
This year I made it so that when you guess, it no longer reloads the same page but a specific page that simply says whether or not your update was successful and then offers a link back to the homepage so that a player can then see their guess in the table (as I assumed they’d want to), but I’m still getting the behaviour where a player is saying yes to reposting their form data and as a result the same guess is being entered multiple times in quick succession. A good design will stop this happening and I thought the bodge job that I’d done would be enough – after all, why would you want to refresh the page that only says your guess change was successful!? Anyway another rethink is required; I’ll have to do something clever like throw out an error if you are trying to change your guess to what it already is…
I haven’t had the time to dedicate to tweaking the website as much as I’d want but I’m well on the way to eliminating the ‘table-headers-at-the-bottom’ lunacy that was a direct result of imitating the design of the F1 digital graphics that I have mentioned previously. Hopefully that process is one I will complete in the next few days and then I’ll be able to move on to a better version of the which-items-have-appeared-on-what-days table that I’ve been planning for a while. I started this last week and found that it’s not as simple as I thought it would be so I’m scratching my head a bit, but with a bit of time I should be able to figure it out!
A player has entered this year with not their real name and this is as good a moment as any to remind players that if they want something similar then they can get in touch and their display name will be amended accordingly. I’m reluctant to give free choice (I know enough people that will choose either something rude or something akin to Boaty McBoatface to rule that option out) but I’m sure between us we can find something agreeable. It’s actually got me thinking about whether the default of full name is actually needed – if, for example, the all time top three were listed as Simon R, Mark C and Antony B I don’t think the competition would lose anything. I’m going to ponder this one and report back, and thoughts are welcome as ever!
A couple of players have pointed out on social media that there are twenty-five items to choose from and they are correct! This means that at least one day has more than one item behind its window, and I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I state this.
I got the Facebook and Twitter links working again and reverted them back to the “post everything” mode that they existed in when they were first created. In the interim the rate limiting of the third party services that I used meant that I had they had been restricted to only updates about window opening and points scoring, and after a couple of days it became clear to me that that had been a good thing so I have deliberately limited it myself now. Please continue to subscribe on Twitter and Facebook to get the important updates placed directly into your feeds (where their algorithms think best)!
Not long left to get your first guesses in on time, and remember a late start carries a penalty so don’t be late! Good luck everyone 🙂
We are a couple of weeks away from the competition getting underway for its 19th incarnation so I’ve logged on and started to make the preparations as necessary. This starts with the mundane (e.g. renaming the Facebook and Twitter pages from 2020 to 2021) and progresses to mild code changes with plenty of stuff inbetween.
Logging on here to write this post caused lots of problems with my browser trying to redirect to a secure (https) connection that didn’t exist and whilst this might (or might not) be my local settings being a bit aggressive, if it’s happening to me, it’ll probably happen to others too. I didn’t want this so have acquired a certificate and it’s associated padlock and so the browser errors won’t now happen – but I’ll have to test the website still works fully before the launch so add that to the list of jobs to do in the next 10 or so days!
That’s just one of a few fiddly jobs that will culminate with me taking a couple of hours to manually email out everyone’s login details for this year, so whilst I’m getting on with these tasks over the coming days here is a peak at the items that are found in this year’s calendar, in alphabetical order of course. Get strategising now!
angel bauble candy cane cracker deer doll elf gift holly igloo lantern mince pie moon penguin pudding santa skis snowflake snowman spinning top star stocking teddy tree wreath
Around now I have normally sent all the players their details for this year and am starting to see guesses trickle in but this year real life has prevented me from doing this so far. I will definitely have them out by the end of the day tomorrow though so if you played last year expect to hear from me by then! If you didn’t play last year and want to, get in touch now!
As a small preview, here are the items the calendar threw out this year, in alphabetical order. Those so inclined can start planning their strategies now!
5 days to go angel bauble bell cracker donkey elf gift gingerbread man holly penguin pudding reindeer robin santa sleigh snowflake snowman star stocking teddy tree wreath
I’ll be in touch very soon. Looking forward to this year!
We are now three-quarters of the way through this year’s Advent Calendar Challenge – yet again we have Santa appearing for the first time before day 24. A quick glance reveals that 2014 was the last time Santa made it’s first appearance on Christmas Eve. The downside is no-one scored today, but that was kinda predictable! I didn’t make the calendar so it’s obviously out of my control!
A quick note on the matters raised in the previous post. On dummy/red-herring answers, I will think about this before the 2020 challenge further, maybe with some thinking-out-loud analysis: watch this space! On the other matter, on whether to hide guesses after day 18 or not, I have a compromise. The compromise was partially inspired when I was asked by a competitor privately if I would hide guesses or not. I replied I intended to leave things as they were (i.e. hidden after window 18) and that I would make the announcement in this blog post today. The competitor pointed out that I had just given them a possible advantage in that they could now take a copy of everyone’s guesses, knowing what was about to come. It got me thinking – whilst it’s a slight advantage only because everyone could take such a copy at any time, there’s a half-way approach between the two I asked you to choose between in the last post, and it is that approach that I have settled on.
So from now on*, guesses made after the opening of window 18 will be hidden. Guesses made before that point will not be. Trial basis, and we’ll see how it goes.
Six days left. Good luck everyone!
-* it’s not been implemented properly – the official rules pdf is pending update, and the censorship still applies on individual profile pages. Those will be fixed tomorrow!
So the good news is I think it’s all back working. It’s hard I can’t be bothered to test fully without simulating a whole competition – I ask for everyone’s patience and to report anything weird to me so it be fixed immediately! The items in the drop-down list on the guess form ARE the items that appear in the year’s calendar, so you may start strategising now! Guesses will open in a few days, unless you want to go ahead and guess your new PIN 🙂
The various website systems being broken wasn’t a problem that wouldn’t have occurred back in the first running of competition – sixteen years ago (another one of those “wow, I feel old” moments) in 2003. The story is told on the 2003 page and goes something like this – I had a Boohbah Advent Calendar, bought for me by me, as I remember¹. I cannot think how that escalated into a competition to guess the pictures but evidently it did – I do however remember how it was run. The thirteen players comprised me, my eight closest neighbours at uni, a girlâ„¢, two of my family and randomly, a friends mum².
And it was a very manual process that year – those that lived in my block at uni could just tell me, and I would otherwise take guesses by phone and by email. I would manually update the website each day and them inform each player if they had scored. I would request guesses rather than leave them in place. I would update everyone on how it was going rather than just leave the onus on the players. I couldn’t last and it was the only year which operated this way. By 2004 the code that still largely (albeit tweaked) runs the website today was written, and I haven’t looked back since.
I was going to write about how the 2003 running panned out, but I’ll leave that for another time. The fact that the code remains largely that I wrote 15 years ago frustrates me a bit, but as I have previously written here – motivating myself to rewrite the code out-of-season is a bit of a push when it comes to motivating, and once it is the season I am using the site so feel less inclined to play with it. The solution is developing a new site alongside with a copy of all the data, obviously. I’ll try.
The site look remains that of my website at the time – which is essentially aping the F1 Digital service’s onscreen graphics (the service existed from 1996-2002 in various countries around the world, but only 2002 in the UK. These graphics existed towards the end of its life). Blues and yellows and greys – in fact here are a few screen grabs I’ve cobbled together from YouTube. Look familiar?
Screengrabs from F1 Digital in 2002 – lovingly known at the time as “Bernievision”
I’m slowly letting go of these but I want to let them go completely. I envisage a more Christmassy coloured site, but more importantly than the colour scheme I want to get away from the things it’s locking in. The “messages from competition control” for example. I am 100% convinced that I could show data items currently shown here in a better way, for example. I also want to overhaul the stats pages a bit and not having a “graphics template” to work to will, I hope, allow me greater freedoms.
Maybe next year then? We’ll see…
¹ I didn’t even know what a Boohbah was then, and frankly couldn’t explain very well if you asked me now! But that wasn’t important… ² A theme that went on to be repeated in future years, though for some reason they never seem to last!
