Whenever there is a network disruption, also causing chat disconnects for which feedback 985890 exists, the in-game display of scores and most importantly the uploading of scores to the server is interrupted. One may have a best scoring client without connection to the server. If the game ends in that state, that best scoring client's score is not recognized. Also, all intermediary model states are not sent to the server in that case, harming the science part.
So, not only should a client detect it is not connected anymore, it should actively try to repair that connection, you could make that chat reconnect from feedback 985890 optional then.
I just experienced this on 584. As I just found out now, after hours of processing, it disconnected while in handfoling phase. In my client all scores of others are wrong, on the server I have 0 points, whereas in reality I'm over 11700 points in the client. Nothing updates.
Had this puzzle ended I would have had no points.
upping priority.
This also means that none of the interim solutions were sent to the server and science data got lost.
As this can go unnoticed for quite some time, and many clients could suffer from this, the project suffers because of lost data. Upping priority to 1.
Most likely the network disruption is caused by a time-out in network traffic or the inability to access the DNS server.
I had the same problem a few times in the last few weeks. The first time I noticed it only because I ran two tracks of the same puzzle and the clients' scoreboards were different.
Win7 64bit - DevPrev - I didn't use ingame chat, only IRC - 2-4 clients running
I'll give this a bump because it was not fixed in the latest devprev client. Having a button to reconnect is not good enough, nor is having to click the indicator light. The client should detect by itself and without user intervention that it is not connected anymore. I have clients running unattended for days at times.
One way to do this is to expect a heartbeat for every so-many results sent to the server.
No heartbeat = also no chat.
This could be a simple small datapacket from the server to the client saying 'thsnk you, got it'.
Knock on wood, I'm having the best internet I've had since first starting Foldit over 18 months ago, at least 3 days without interruption and still using free wifi, however I am most painfully aware of this problem. Highly recommend BP's or similar fix to affect active and non-active clients. Internal chat has often not been necessary or even desired in some cases due to lack of BW, etc. Non-active clients are, however, of prime concern, as they are where the work gets done assuming one runs multiple clients and I believe most of us do.
The client does check periodically if it can connect to the Foldit servers to send scores. If it can't then the network indicator will turn red. Clicking the indicator will only recheck if you don't want to wait for the automatic check to happen again.
If at some point your network comes back, it will again try and send scores.
Are you seeing this not happen? When your network goes down and then it comes back are you still seeing scores not being sent? Is it showing green but your scores are not being sent?
How periodically is periodically ? I rebooted my router and watched how long it would take for the client to respond. After a minute or so it detected the outage, but then I waited for several minutes for the client to detect the presence again and it did not until I clicked the indicator light.
Also, the chat that gets interrupted will not automatically reconnect. I found only after trying to post this morning that I was disconnected, so I missed all comments that were posted overnight.
