REPRISE; UNFAIR SCORING LOOPHOLE EXPLOITED devprev 0603

Started by Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park Lv 1

20200603-c7d68d68de-win_x86-devprev

First off, I am disappointed by the lack of proper testing and thinking this whole process through. How can it be that we now have a broken devprev that allows people to cheat in foldit (0527) which creates solutions that will be compatible with the latest 'official fix' 0603 which will allow us to UPLOAD the scores of those CHEATING clients ?

I have just done this successfully for puzzle 1845 and I can see that others have done a similar job without reporting that this is possible…

So here we go:

  1. Save your best solution from main and share with yourself.
  2. load your shared main solution into the 0527 devprev which many of you most likely kept handy.
  3. wiggle that so you have a stellar scoring fake solution
  4. save that solution locally (as its score will not be uploaded)
  5. start your latest devprev 0603 client and load the solution you just created with the 0527.
  6. do a shake or whatever, it will upoad the score to the server.

Now we have a level playing field again, or should we have gone for the SCIENCE afterall ?

beta_helix Staff Lv 1

Sorry for the delayed reply due to the weekend, but thank you for explicitly pointing this out, BP!

I assure you that we are taking steps to avoid this type of issue in the future (this is a problem that we have not encountered in the 12 years of Foldit… and you know that we've run into many different problems!).

We have been going through the best ways to resolve this, as sadly your suggestion will not work in this particular case, but we believe we have found a solution that will be posted soon.

Short of putting Foldit on hold until we implement the fix, we hope that players will utilize the "Share with Scientist" feature to ensure that we continue to receive scientifically-valid solutions.

Thank you for your patience.