“How we fix what we have done so far…” (7 comments)
2 July 2009
Hi folks! We’ve been really busy testing and improving the site… Sorry to keep you waiting.
Our blog is supposed to be called “how we do what we doâ€. I guess we will retain this title, despite the fact that this post could be called “how we fix what we have done so farâ€â€¦
Yes, your intuition is correct – we have faced hell lot of difficulties while trying to launch the site. But we believe that this is how all success stories begin. After all – only the ones, who don’t try, don’t make mistakes. Let’s start from the beginning.
One of the biggest struggles was to implement all the payment systems and make money go the right direction. The process also included a great deal with bureaucratic formalities and took a substantial part of our precious time - an aspect you should definitely take into account when entering internet-based business. In the middle of the project we actually came up with an idea to make payment systems ourselves :)
To be serious, we still have a couple of payment systems to add - fun shouldn’t end that soon. Actually only 20% of them are implemented so far, currently another four are being added (netteller, clickandbuy, paysafecard and mobilly), while the rest of them are waiting for their turn.
The next part of this story is technical errors. Intuitively I feel that most of the madmen, who have tried or who have succeeded at implementing web-projects, are familiar with this term. Those who are not familiar – you just can’t imagine how many problems one misplaced dash can cause. Sleepless nights and unsatisfied site testers. I asked my tech colleague Alex for his brief feedback, so here it is quoted (to be honest, I don’t understand much of it myself :)
“
Yeah, we rock! Everything seemed to be finished, except for some minor backend bugs, well, who cares - those can be tuned a bit later. Everything installed on prod server and ready for launch. Except for one thing – SSL certificate. And here we got stucked. The website just didn’t want to redirect from http to https or from www to https://www…
Ok, finally the right solution was found – just those lines for the HT file –
# 80 > 443
#RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} “^80$”
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule (.*) “https://www.quizboom.com/$1” [R,L]
# !www > www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !www.quizboom.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.quizboom.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Now we can use all possible combinations like www.quizboom.com, www.quizboom.dk, http://www.quizboom.be, etc…
Another topic - Firefox + https + GET requests = NIGHTMARE. Did you know that Firefox generates two identical get requests? That would be just nothing for a typical website, but for our game it was a total nightmare, because players may not refresh the page. Unfortunately Firefox was doing that for them :) Well that was what we figured out and had to rebuild whole game code to use only post requests. One night spent on eliminating this.
If you want more, I can write you a 20 page report but I’m afraid - most blog users will get bored from this stuff :) Keep on rollin’!
„
And then the quiz questions came. All the team did the best to select the most interesting, exciting, appropriate questions and make every quiz player smile. What is difficult here? There are very many definitions for “interestingâ€, “exciting†and “appropriateâ€â€¦hopefully, we are on the right lines and the work on this continues.
The good news is that all the obstacles are prevented (ok - most of them) and now we can empty the first glass of champagne (we’ll have our DrinkBoom.com event this Friday night :). It is only the second day since the official launch, and we already have exceeded the aim set in the previous post – instead of 100 games per day, there are more than 200 games played on the second day. Yes, we are working by the sweat of our brows to achieve the next targets. To be precise – on the 5th there should be at least 500 games played…
We will really appreciate your help – please report errors found, feel free to suggest or criticise, share anything that comes into your mind – we do take into account! See you very soon!
P.S. A small tip: we recommend to make small bets while getting to know the game – you should get the feeling of how the distribution works (btw it’s the most optimal distribution found after about 350 simulations – thanks to @Risk!) Increase bets as your results improve.
Comments
nice job guys and good luck in the future
2 July 2009
tiiri profesionaals izpildiijums un paldies ka dalaties ar probleemaam. juutamies tuvi ;)
2 July 2009
es ari esmu patikami parsteigta par so vortalinu. ja ta turpinasiet, domaju ka talu tiksiet. veiksmes jusu komandai!
3 July 2009
very interesting english questions, good quality
5 July 2009
ar kÄdu prieku sÄku spÄ“li, tad ar tÄdu paÅ¡u saÅ¡utumu gribÄs beigt. vai arÄ« paskaidrojiet lÅ«dzu.
noteiktumos rakstÄ«ts, ka pirmie 20% spÄ“lÄ“tÄju sadala 45% no visÄm likmÄ“m kopÄ, vai ne? pirmajÄ dienÄ, kad piereÄ£istrÄ“jos, liekas, ka tas strÄdÄja (pirms trim ÄetrÄm dienÄm). pÄ“dÄ“jÄs divas dienas reÄli plusos ir tikai pirmÄs 50-60 vietas, lai gan izspÄ“lÄ“tas tiek gandrÄ«z tÅ«kstoÅ¡ spÄ“les? pirmie 20% sanÄk ir kÄdas 200 spÄ“les. es arÄ« rÄ“Ä·inu, ka pirmie 20% spÄ“lÄ“tÄju nevar bÅ«t mÄ«nusos? (jo sadala savÄ starpÄ vairÄk likmju nekÄ ir ielikuÅ¡i). izlabojiet, ja kļūdos.
ak, jÄ, skaipÄ JÅ«s nevar atrast, nÄkas komentÄ“t Å¡eit un publiski. starp citu, pÄrbaudiet, kura ir garÄkÄ upe pasaulÄ“ - amazone vai nÄ«la? :)
5 July 2009
Hi Gatis,
Thank you for comment, that’s really good point! I’ll reply in english so that majority can understand. If you would like to, just ask and I’ll send you translation.
First, about the distribution and how it works. We have allready understood that this topic needs more detailed information, so we are working on a video presentation where we will grapahically and audiovisually explain details of the distribution. To be short - distribution that is described in terms and conditions, represents ideal model of the game in case where all bets would be of equal size. But as you know, everyone can choose his bet from 5 to 1000 chips and, the bigger the bet, the higher your payout. We calculate average bet and then tweak all payouts by comparing your individual bet to the average bet. It means that in case first places have won with low bets, more lower place players will receive higher payouts. And vice versa. Therefore we recommend to start the game with low bets to get to know it and then move to higher bets to increase your win amount.
And what’s also important, we are still tweaking the coeficients to arrive to the perfect model. These days we will try 35/60/5 in our demo environment and if it shows better results, will move it to the live server.
Skype. On weekends I’d suggest to email us at support@quizboom.com :)
Game questions. We do doublecheck accuracy and correctness of the game questions to ensure their quality. As I understood, you have found out that the title of the longest river has changed after recent scientifical discovery. Thank you for telling us, please email us at support@quizboom.com indicating what was your bet in that game (and also, date and approximate time of the play) and we will return you double amount of your bet.
Thanks again for your feedback and we’ll be happy to hear more!
Alex
5 July 2009
Yeah, nice - spent at the site whole night! The blog is also really cool- thanks for being honest!
7 July 2009