Author: benwood

Thanks to all who contributed to the fund drive this year, and prior years, too. I wouldn’t have put so much work into maintaining and moving the site without faith in our community who have consistently supported the site for many years.

Let me know of any of your friends who missed the transition to ShuffleRack. I’m aware of Zeffly, who I’ve tried to assist, but no others so far. The forward for the old site should expire any day now, if not already.

I have not been informed of any issues since a few weeks ago when I cleared up the last bits I knew about. All it all, it went pretty darn well. It took a lot of of my spare time for quite a while, but I’ve recovered partly thanks to a couple hiking adventures in the mountains near Tucson and Tubac, Arizona, and just have my regular job wearing me out now 🙂

I received a few queries about a small change I made in the 2-player games using the “OWL” latest lexicon. This is the one used in North American club and tournament play, and the National Scrabble Association changed the official end of game scoring about ten years ago and I finally made the site score in the same way on both ChezMoi and Gladiators. For ordinary 2-player games using OWL, the player who goes out receives 2x the sum of opponent’s remaining tile scores. This only applies to 2-player games (which is all that’s played in clubs and tournaments). If no one goes out, then both players have an adjustment at end in which their own remaining tile score sum is deducted from their own score (as it was before, too).

To summarize the lexicons in use:

SOWPODS: CSW24.

OWL: 2023 word list update

OSPD: 2023 word list update

French: a few years old, I have not figured out how to update it for a while now. I think this is from about 2015.

Word reference I use is Zyzzyva, which I update every now and then.

SO, lots of little things fixed since the weekend:

Chime works on both sites (it’s an option via “settings” you can enable — just leave your browser on your play panel and after a minute or two, if somebody has played and it’s your turn in one of your games, your chosen chime will alert you! This can be in place of e-mail if you can do that).

Game Notes is back on Gladiators (another option — you can leave notes for yourself, which can be handy near the end of a game especially).

Round Robin Score tables fixed for some RR on Gladiators. Elves might need to fix a game or two, but it might have fixed itself as your game continued — just two plays needed to self-repair the score table.

SOWPODS upgraded to CSW24 on both sites. An alert member noticed a couple words missing, and I realized that I’d updated the old Chez and Glad, but being in the middle of creating the new Shufflerack, forgot to update what I already had HERE.

A few people Passed or Exchanged in some manner that I don’t think worked. Nobody reported this, but I saw some game files getting put in the wrong place on the server. Sorry, whatever it was! But it’s fixed now.

Yet to do:

1) Review the OSPD and OWL end-of-game scoring for 3- and 4- player games. I’ll probably change this to what it was before, but I want to work through the numbers to be sure. If I change this, just accept that the current tourney did some funny stuff. We aren’t going to go back and try to change those (on Gladiators).

But for two-player games, the scoring will remain different than before, but equivalent. Here’s an example where one player went out and the other player had the “M” letter. Before, the out player got a bonus of +3 and the other player stuck with the M had a penalty of -3.

Now the out player gets double the remaining tiles of the other player. So out player gets +6, and no penalty for the other player. This is how tournament and club play is scored in the United States and Canada (i.e. OSPD and OWL).

[Wed Mar 19 00:31] stuckPlayer — mite [18] = 18 (total = 318)
[Wed Mar 19 00:55] outPlayer— tabs [6] + ti [2] + floes [8] = 16 (total = 309)
[Wed Mar 19 00:55] outPlayer— END [6] = 6 (total = 315)

That’s the 6 points for the letter M (the only remaining tile in ‘stuckPlayer’ rack, times two!

Scoring is unchanged for SOWPODS, French, and Target tourney of any time.

and another thing to fix:

2) a glitch in the requested tourney panel that the tournament elves see.

Quick news blurb before I head out for much of the day.

Issues brought up so far:

Gladiators:

1. missing ‘notes’ — not sure where that went but that will be fixed

2. Some (many) score tables might not be updating. That might be trickier… note that elves can fix that at the end, but of course I will fix that. Might be confusing for a while

Chez:

1. chime doesn’t work (for those who use it)

Both sites:

I changed scoring for OSPD and OWL (the North American lexicons) at end of game (except for “Targets” tournaments). Scoring in club and tourney play in North American doubles the value of unplayed tiles of the one who did not go out and adds to player who did go out. That does not change the ‘spread.’ I will review how this works for 3- and 4- person games, I think that alters that outcome. If true, and I think it is, I will revert that soon to the way it was before. 2-player games, however, will use ‘official scoring’ for OSPD and OWL games henceforth.

And lastly if you missed this in prior messages, the Forum proved too ugly a beast to move over, and the deadline to get the move going was rapidly approaching, so I jettisoned it. I’ll think about how communication can work in future, but there is always that help address you can see from the help pages. It lacks member-to-member however, so I’ll think about that a bit later. It’s most common use was alerting us to player absences, which we can do by e-mail, but also asking other members if they had heard from a member. That’s the number one ability I’d like to have still.

I just took Chez and Glad offline (so to speak). I put a notice up when you try to get the play panel or if you try to play a word informing of the transition in progress.

I will edit this post here and there with progress updates. I have a 17-step plan to get us over there and check a few things.

Current time is 10:00 Pacific Daylight Time (Seattle/Vancouver B.C./Los Angeles), 17:00 GMT.

10:25: creating snapshots of user files, games, etc.

11:00: snapshots completed, uploaded to new site. I think a few people slipped through the cracks and were able to make some plays. They’ll all have to be done over again on the new site. I just kicked all the games aside to block that. New site will be much easier to set into maintenance mode.

11:15: testing the ‘new’ Chez

11:25: played a few words on ‘Chez’ also testing on ‘Glad,’ only the ‘elves’ can log on for the moment…

12:30: redirects are set up, and a few people have already started to play on the new site. A couple issues were detected with managing tourneys. Otherwise, so far, sounds don’t seem to be working (if you use that optional ‘chime’), and the superscript ‘note’ option on Glad isn’t working. But those are trivial bits I will fix later.

2:45: just the few minor issues so far, ordinary play seems to be going very well.

7:30: Fixed a couple tourney script glitches, overall things went really smoothly.

Be sure to make yourself a new bookmark at your Chez or Glad PlayPanel, to make it easy to return. If you have one already, like in your browser toolbar, just right-click it, select ‘Edit’ (most browsers give this choice) and change the domain name part from ch3zmoi.com to chez.shufflerack.com and you will have your updated bookmark.

Also note that if you comment on this blog, your comment will not appear until I approve it (I approve them all, but weed out spam!). Sometimes I won’t get to it for hours, but I will!

I have my checklist and plan to start the transition about 10 o’clock AM Pacific Daylight time this Saturday morning, 15th of March. That will be 1 PM on the east coast of the US, about 5-7 PM in the UK or France, 4-6 AM Sunday (AU or NZ). Not sure about variations due to DST fall back (or spring forward). The US already did that…

I did get “some” e-mail to work on the new site. There is a strict limit per day, so I will try enabling new game and game over notifications and not the every-play notifications. If you are a daily player and don’t need e-mail, please turn it off via your settings.

I expect to open up the new site by 2 PM Pacific Daylight Time, and will install the ‘forwarder’ on the old site to take you there. It will be easy!

There might be an issue or two that arises the first few days as different, difficult to test features get run for the first time in their new form. Press the “Help” button and click the link, “Whom to contact when” and you’ll see a help e-mail address there to use to send any feedback. If it’s the tourney side (‘Glad’), let us know who you are and what tourney you are in and what you tried to do, and what happened. Similar feedback for an issue on ‘Chez’ to help me understand anything weird that happened on the Chez side.

Overall, I expect things to go pretty smoothly, and will iron out any issues soon enough.

Lastly, for the computer challenged... don’t worry, you’ll see. I’ll get each and every one of you to the new site!

During the weekend of 15-16 March (my time zone, Pacific Daylight), I plan to perform the site migration from the old sites to the new site.

Transition will take up to 4 hours. I did a rehearsal update recently so have most of my checklist ready.

Inviting new members will be disabled soon, until the transition is complete and e-mail is functional.

The OLD site will be up until the end of April, but it’s only purpose will be to serve as a forwarder to the new site.

The new site has two ‘subwebs’ — one for ChezMoi and the other for Gladiators. Both will live on in the same form and naming as now; just the domain names will change.

I’ll post an update post next weekend before I start the transition and update it as progress is made.

I’ve been a really busy beaver for quite some time now preparing the site for a move to a new home. Very early testing has begun with me and the ‘elves’ and a few more will join soon. It’s been quite an undertaking.

I will turn off the Invite in about a week, and will turn it on once the move is over and I have e-mail working in some capacity, as that is part of the invite mechanism.

Currently, no e-mail reminders. I really want e-mail for password reminders, mainly, when somebody requests it. I haven’t decided if e-mail reminders are really worthwhile. I know a lot of people use them; surely they don’t need them, right? It’s led to us being banned from some prominent domains like gmail.com because there are so many similar looking messages going out.

Anyhoo… I don’t want people flooding to the new site yet, you are all blocked anyway, for the moment. I’ll announce the new site ON the old site (so it doesn’t get vacuumed up here by robots and AI engines).

At some point within a few weeks, I’ll suspend the old site with a ‘stay tuned’ message, move all the dynamic data to the new site, change the ‘stay tuned’ to a page with the new link, plus the password retrieval in case you don’t remember your PW.

Lastly, to make sure the e-mail reminder works if YOU need it, update your Settings on both Chez and Glad (if you have accounts on both), and make sure your e-mail address is VALID (no typos; and ONLY ONE e-mail address!). Anything other than your single valid e-mail address simply will simply not work!

Virtually everything about the new ‘sites’ will be the same as now. I changed the backgrounds for both chez and glad, and they will both run on the same single domain now. But otherwise, it’s largely the same look and feel we all love for it’s simplicity, or loath for it’s simplicity but play there anyway!

OK, after much reflection and looking at my work and travel schedule, I have yet another new plan. I will push the transition window to around late October. This will allow me to be available during the entire three week integration window, and it will also allow me to experiment with a dummy server running the target OS (Ubuntu Linux) and hopefully ensure that there are no scripting surprises when we set up the new server. So… changeover is likely to be early to mid November.

After contacting hosting company about our OS upgrade, we have a new plan. Hopefully it will be ‘invisible’ to users. They will set up a new server, I’ll move our chez and gladiators files over there, and then Angie and I will work through any issues until the site works properly.

Once our testing indicates that all is working, I will put up another notice here for a day or two, and then pull the plug on the old server (more literally, turn off it’s web interface). I’ll then copy over the up-to-date game and user files, then instruct our hosting company to turn off the old server and then move the DNS reference to the new server (meaning your browser can find it automagically after at least an hour has passed).

During the transition phase, the site will be unavailable for a few hours.

I’ll see if I can get them to set up a new server by this weekend, and within a couple weeks, hopefully we’ll be done and then finalize the transition. The last thing I’ll do is deactivate the web interface on the current server (to freeze everyone’s games), then move the current game and user files to the new server, and then ask them to take the final steps.