As World of Solitaire has continued to grow over these past few months, stress on the server has also been increasing. Some of you may have noticed small glitches where the delay to log in may be very long, or the site, in general, will take some time to the first load. Also, statistics have been slower to generate. Global Statistics were once calculated life, then they were calculated every 3 hours, and just recently it has been changed to once a day updates. It should come as good news to everyone that a new, faster server is on the way. I hope that within a few days I'll have World of Solitaire moved over to the new server which should solve most of the issues I described above. In addition, if you've seen the Leaderboard, there are some scores that seem ... well ... not quite possible.
Thanks to user e-mails and further investigation it does appear that some scores are simply impossible to be legit, such as solving Klondike in under 52 moves. Along with the new server will also come a clean-up in any erroneous statistics. This means the leader board will change and you may find yourself ranked higher than before. Thank you all for playing World of Solitaire. I really hope that you are having a good time playing. Wow. It's already been over a month since my last update to this blog. It seems like just yesterday. Since the last blog update, World of Solitaire has been doing great. I've added three new games, Clock, Sultan, and just today, Flower Garden. More amazingly is that the game continues to grow in popularity. Since the last update, the number of hands dealt on the site has DOUBLED from 3 million to over 6 million today. The 6 millionth hand was a game of Golf dealt with user Skeletor54 on December 13th, 2007 at 5:19 PM. I'm really happy that so many people are enjoying the site, it's turned out so well. It's far surpassed any expectations I had when I first started developing it several months ago. I want to thank all the players that play, without your feedback (both in e-mails and blog comments), bug reports, and comments the site wouldn't be where it is today. So THANK YOU. Until next update ... enjoy playing! UPDATE: I fixed a bug that caused games like Pyramid not to work. I accidentally introduced the bug last night with the new game. Sorry about that. When I first started World of Solitaire, I had no idea it would be so popular. 40 days after launching the site, 1 million hands had already been dealt with. 34 days after that another million hands had been dealt. Today I announce that on November 3, 2007, at 7:31 PM that Anonymous user # 233,297 was dealt the 3 millionth hand in a game of "Klondike (Turn One)"! That's only 17 days since the 2 million marks! I want to thank everyone for playing and I hope you are all having fun. In celebration of this event, I've updated the game with a new deck! This deck is called 'Animals' and has a bit of a playful/cutesy theme. I've also vastly improved the speed of viewing statistics. The trade-off for this speed is that the Global and Leaderboard statistics are now only updated once every three hours. Your personal statistics are still shown in real-time. Over the past month or two, I've also received some reports about the game not loading up correctly. The progress bar when you first load the game Solitaire was getting stuck for some people which prevented them from being able to play. I've changed the way I preload the card images and I hope that this progress bar will no longer become stuck. Let me know if anyone experiences any problems.