Gogetem wrote:
No games seemed to have recorded after 5:30 PDT.
Excusing Gogetem's forgivable lapse regarding Standard v. Daylight time, he is substantially correct.
The 5:15 PST Immortal Words collected 103 sites this December 27th.. Two of them were sites in the Central Time Zone. The rest were on Mountain or Pacific or Hawaii. None were in the Eastern Time Zone. Then, as Gogetem says, the screen went dark.
At B-52, I played that afternoon. A 13.5, a 14.9, a 14.1, 1:30-3:00 PM, PST. There were no Final Top 20 Leaderboards for any of those quizzes, none at least at B-52.
I'd never seen this before. In the event that your site has gone off-line, you shall most likely receive a Final Top 20 in which the Leaderboard is presented, but vacant - it'll show no entries. But in this case the screen went dark for possibly three seconds, followed by the announcement of a new Countdown. There was no Final Top 20, and no final Leaderboard.
The Golden Horde intended to play at B-52 today. I notified WANYE, their geographer, that he might reconsider, and caught up with him and the rest of that disreputable bunch at Drkula's, where, I was informed, the problem had been localized, and didn't affect them. I arrived just in time to see them fail on the last two questions. Maybe they had been distracted by my glamorous good looks. They averaged about 6500 out of a possible 7000. When the Final Leaderboard appeared, BATU, who had collected 6600 points, should have shown at #3, the Horde collectively placing at #2.
Alas! Both at B-52 and at Drkula's, the Horde were off-line. Triumphs lost to history.
Now for the good news. As of the 10:45 PST Lunchtime this Friday, the Buzztime system seems to be uploading normally. I played a few games this afternoon, and all the players I hoped to see, and a few I didn't expect, all finished ahead of me.
The crash appears to me not to be an outside hack. Perhaps the dismissal of an unhappy employee (the security codes not swapped out), but even more likely a novice employee confronting a screen with ambiguous meaning, who was asked whether he wished to close a window which he thought he had already closed.
In agreement with everyone else who drops in here - I've never seen it before, and I hope never to see it again.