devjoe - Network

My team finally finished the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt and here's my writeup of the parts I saw:...

My team finally finished the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt and here's my writeup of the parts I saw: https://devjoe.appspot.com/hunt25/index.html

Sorry this took so long. But it's very long. My writeup about constructing, test-solving, and running the 2024 #mitmysteryhunt is now...

Sorry this took so long. But it's very long. My writeup about constructing, test-solving, and running the 2024 #mitmysteryhunt is now available.
https://devjoe.appspot.com/hunt24/

6. Ads that display in landscape. You are loading an ad in a game that only does portrait mode. Either supply the ad in that format or...

6. Ads that display in landscape. You are loading an ad in a game that only does portrait mode. Either supply the ad in that format or display it in some other app instead.
5. Landscape ads that ask me to rotate the screen. You're an ad! You don't get to dictate that sort of thing! (And again, you're in a portrait-mode-only app.)
4. Any video ad that does not display an X or a timer, or displays a timer of 10 seconds or more. Nope. I've just spent in most cases no more than 15 seconds coming up with ONE move. You do not get more than 5 seconds for an ad.
3. Any ad that displays a fake X that does not actually close the ad, or a timer that is not immediately replaced with the X once it expires.
2. Any ad that uses a fake browser window as part of its design, trying to convince me I'm on some web site where I'm really not. This also goes for the one that fakes the facebook app.
1. Any ad that hijacks the drag-from-bottom action available when apps go full screen to access the Android close and app-switch buttons to pop up another window, or displays fake ones in fullscreen mode to try to trick me. This is outright malware behavior and gets killed with extreme prejudice, using the "hold the power button 3 seconds" technique to access the real buttons and close the app.

(2/2)

I found this list I sent to #zynga #wordswithfriends support a few months before I quit playing the game entirely as a new years resolution...

I found this list I sent to #zynga #wordswithfriends support a few months before I quit playing the game entirely as a new years resolution a few years ago. Maybe somebody here can tell me if it's gotten any better, or somehow has gotten worse than this.

I quit because the ads had gotten too bad, a combination of too frequent (after every move in games against humans, every two moves in games against bots), too intrusive, too long, and too malware-like. Some of the ad activity I saw SHOULD have gotten the game blocked from Google Play. I play other games with ads, but nothing anywhere near this bad.

10. Interactive ads that pretend to be a demo of the game they are advertising. (In the cases I actually checked out, not once did the game resemble the demo.)
9. The ad doesn't load. WWF has a feature that if the ad doesn't load in 15-20 seconds, they display one of the static ads for a game feature instead. That's good, but it's too long; it should be 5 seconds, since that's the point at which I've personally identified a slow ad server.
8. The ad loads and then displays a second spinner to load additional content. Nope, sorry. If you can't display the ad as a single image or video file, it's more than you should be doing in an ad. This includes the one that, inexplicably, uses Pacman chomping his way across the screen in place of a spinner. (It's never for a game.) Why haven't the copyright police killed that ad company?
7. The same ad displayed after 3 or more consecutive moves.

(1/2)

It took me a week to write up my experience at #mitmysteryhunt 2023 here:https://devjoe.appspot.com/mitmh2023.html

It took me a week to write up my experience at #mitmysteryhunt 2023 here:
https://devjoe.appspot.com/mitmh2023.html