Blog - Apologies to the Llama

6th January 2023

Last night on Mastodon, @llamasoft_ox had a good rant about stupid makers of puzzle games slapping Share buttons on them, and spamming the hell out of his feed.

Oops!!

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"A colourful cartoon of a llama, and a field full of large white boxes." by #DallE

Goat damn you Wordle for normalising "SHARE" buttons on puzzle apps.

I ought to explain why I dislike this so much.
I remember years ago some game, can't remember which one, encouraged players to tweet their progress when they reached certain points in the game. The tweets it generated were awful twee things and for a while twitter was awash with the damn things.
It was purely done so as to encourage people to promote the game in their own twit streams, basically polluting social media for the sake of some back door advertising.

Mastodon Link

He's right, of course. Over the past number of weeks, my mentions have become a myriad of white boxes!!

To be fair, Foldapuz Play ONLY shares a small piece of text, but since I added that white blocky overlay to hide the solution, all the players (myself included) have got into the habit of taking a screenshot of their time, and posting that along with the text.
Not really sure why or when that happened, but it is somewhat annoying to see all the boxes.

Last night I tried to help by adding a hashtag (#FoldPlay) that users can mute, to make things STFU, but over the course of the next day or so, I'm hoping to create some kind of "My Scores" URL that includes all the encrypted score data for that day's puzzles.
I lay awake for most of the night trying to figure out how best to compress all the scores into a simple URL, and I think I have a plan in mind.

Take the scores, add a myriad of encryption algorithms to them, and hopefully squish them down to a vaguely decent size.

Of course, I could also upload the scores to the server, and cache a scoreboard pic, but I'm thinking that linking directly to a pic would end up filling the timeline back up again, and that's something that I'd prefer to avoid.

I'll have to play it by ear, and see how well I can crunch that data down.

I'll try my best, Jeff!!

"The cartoon Llama is frustrated by all the white boxes taking over the land." by #DiffusionBee

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