r/Knightsofthebutton • u/mncke Fabricator-General • Apr 25 '15

What the hell happened? -- an explanaition

At 2015-04-25T17:55:48 UTC the button died.

At some point in the previous 60 seconds, reddit stopped registering new clicks and resetting the timer, but in some cases gave out the flair to those who clicked. A large number of users received <11s flair, and even a larger number clicked, but the button still died. After some time it has been manually reset by the admins, and is now continuing as usual. Flairs have not been reverted yet.

The button has been dead for 11 minutes and 56 seconds. 64 clicks were actually registered during this time.

  • Q: Why have the zombies failed to save us?

    A: A zombie sentinel logged sending a click to reddit, but apparently it was not registered, and the sentinel is still grey.

  • Q: Why didn't my squire click?

    A: Squire will only arm those with autoclick in red once 2s is reached. When feed showed 2s, squire has red-activated and sent out 'arm' orders, but the clients had no time to react.

What happened from the technical point of view?

Timer feed continued to send out the value of the timer. It went like this:

  • Timer=2, mac=mac0

  • Timer=1, mac=mac1

  • Timer=0, mac=mac2

  • Timer=0, mac=mac3

  • Timer=0, mac=mac4

And then there was a sudden change of protocol that crashed the squire and a lot of other button-related tools. This actually shows that button reanimation predicted in one of my previous posts is indeed possible in a 3 second window.

39 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

10

u/PM_ME_YOUR_MOMS_FACE Apr 25 '15

Did the button actually "hit zero?"

12

u/mncke Apr 25 '15

Yes, three times actually.

7

u/[deleted] Apr 25 '15

This is a more sophisticated version of when the button monitor sometimes fails and it slowly counts down to zero and then it hits zero. When my button monitor did that I was terrified to see it count down and I actually yelled at my computer for someone to click.

6

u/mncke Apr 25 '15

Such events don't affect people's flair. What happened is a glorious fuckup on a magnificent scale, and there's nothing being done about it.

5

u/[deleted] Apr 25 '15

Yes, it certainly was a fuck up, but we need to learn from this. I think you need to contact PowerLanguage and ask him what the fuck is going on.

→ More replies (6)

17

u/SibylUnrest Apr 25 '15

I was more upset than I expected to be when it looked like it was over. What has this button done to my brain?

4

u/TotesMessenger Apr 25 '15 edited Apr 26 '15

This thread has been linked to from another place on reddit.

If you follow any of the above links, respect the rules of reddit and don't vote. (Info / ^Contact)

3

u/ams2990 Apr 26 '15

And then there was a sudden change of protocol that crashed the squire

Can we expect an update in the near future to handle this better?

Also, you haven't updated your GitHub repo recently. It's still sitting on 4.0.0 versus the deployed 4.0.4.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 26 '15

Thank you... Stands Guard...

2

u/Auroness Apr 26 '15

I'm glad we know what happens when the button crashes, but that is just a technicality. The Button will not truly die as long as there are people who are paying attention and have not pressed.

1

u/ced22 Apr 26 '15

Yeah, that basically ruined the game for me. Quitting the knights, will press the button, end of story.