site needs work

[wildwords]

I can't play here anymore. The lag is getting to me. There are too many programming errors to make me happy to become a member. It seems like most of the work was done on putting in advertising, not making a game work properly. Why the heck did you think it a fine idea to have not one, but TWO annoying ads? And make them animated? Egads it's horrendous.

I don't like the way that when there is a lag in the word input, I put in three or four words before I figure out what's going on! In the meantime, the parser throws out the enter key so I'm stuck now with some huge multi-word entry that of course won't work. This is completely unacceptable. No other web site pulls this stunt. There has to be a way to handle the data stream better than this.

I also don't like it that when a word is rejected, you don't print the word again somewhere on the screen. This would help me not lose my "place" so to speak. I type so fast I'm three words ahead so it would be nice to know where I misspelled.

I also don't like the word lists. There are way, way, too many three and four letter words that are not legal on scrabble, word racer, etc. I've been to a lot of these sites, you can tell by how fast I rose in the ranks so to speak, and believe me, you have a big problem with your word list. You need to cull it down quite a bit. I am a very fast typist but the cat cats bat cats fat fats stuff gets boring. If you allow even more three letter words that are NOT legal words it gets even more boring. I want to find bigger and more unusual words. That's what makes these games interesting. Also, there are quite a few common words that are not there, "saute" and "entree" come to mind. And lots of others. These words are accepted every where else. It's annoying. But then I find out you accept "gater" which is NOT accepted anywhere else. I've trained myself to type "retag" when I see this but it annoyed me when I found out you are taking the darn thing. There's dozens of more examples.

Anyway, I hope some of my ideas help you rework the website. There are many fine aspects to your site, and despite an extremely antiquated degree in CS, I know I couldn't program the darn thing myself. Too busy wasting time playing!

[admin]

Thanks for the comments. We're still a fairly new site so there's definitely much room for improvement, and I appreciate any and all advice. I'll try to address a few of your points:

1. Re: advertisements, unfortunately this site requires a *lot* of server resources to keep it going, and this is the only way I can recoup some of the fees involved in constantly maintaining and upgrading the hosting to cover our bandwidth and memory needs. We do provide a "Remove advertisements" option which allows users to pay a small fee in order to play without ads.

2. Re: lag, this is a persistent issue and one which I'm working to improve. The simple fact is that this site has become far more popular, far more quickly, than I'd anticipated. Obviously some of the methods I used to build the program aren't scaling well during periods of high traffic. I do have some ideas on how to improve the user interface and reaction time and hope to implement them over the summer.

3. Re: printing invalid words, that's a good suggestion and I'll have to think of a way to implement something along these lines.

4. Re: word lists. We do use a dictionary which is quite different from those you're used to in other games (usually SOWPODS or other Scrabble-related lists). Some like playing the different wordlist, which contains many words not "valid" in Scrabble, while others don't. I've not yet decided whether or not to transfer entirely over to a more standardized wordlist or to keep things as they are.