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Young Writers Society


Introducing Word Wars!



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Mon Jan 05, 2015 6:14 pm
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Nate says...



Click here to play Word Wars

Often played in the chat room, a Word War is a game you play where the person with the highest word count at the end wins. You can play it as a motivator to write your story, or you can play it just for fun.

Several years ago, I began working on a way to play Word War games here on YWS so that you not only can see each person's word count as you type, but also so that other people can watch. I wasn't able to pull it off back then, but in the past couple weeks, I began working on it anew. It is now finished!

To start a Word War, click on "Word Wars" in the Resources submenu in the footer section of the site. From there, you'll be able to browse any current Word Wars, old ones you participated in, and (of course) start one.

After a word war is finished, you'll be able to see what you and everyone else typed. This way, you can copy what you wrote into your story.

A point of forewarning though: this is a beta product, so it's likely there will be some bugs. If you come across one, please report it! At this point, it's likely you'll come across one bug where the timers for some browsers are slightly different. What this means is that you may see someone's word count start increasing when you are still unable to type. However, everyone has the same total amount of time to type. So if someone starts early, they'll also finish earlier by the same amount.

Have fun with it!
  





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Mon Jan 05, 2015 6:21 pm
Aet Lindling says...



This is great, I had been hoping for something like this for a while. Doing it the old-fashioned way is nostalgic, but it got pretty distracting trying to pay attention to the time or waiting for times to sync up. Can't wait to try it out, I was thinking just yesterday about how impressive it is that you basically maintain this site and cultivate updates entirely on your own. Thank you!

Edit: The champions appear to be calculated inaccurately, I tried out a game and the second place word count was reported as the champion. Other than that, everything seems to work pretty well. The chat feature's nifty.
dun worry
it's all gun be k
  





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Mon Jan 05, 2015 7:34 pm
MaryEvans says...



I just tried this thing today. Concept and design wise it's great, but I have some technical issues with it. I am running an Ububtu 14.04 on this computer, the PC is a bit old, video card is nonexistent, RAM is 4 gig, CPU dual core Intel 3.2 Ghz, 500 gig hard, so there shouldn't be a problem running any web script.

The word war thing started ok, performance wise everything was great, then halfway in, it starts lagging until I can no longer type or do anything really, and the computer freezes. I was not running anything else, and this is a recent installation, so I am pretty sure no other process was messing it up. My resource monitor pointed to firefox as the issue, so I am guessing there's something in the script of that page that overloads the RAM memory (because the computer was forced to switch to Swap, which in my case is 4.5 gb hard drive space that was also completely clogged in a matter of minutes).

Maybe it's my particular configuration, but if there's something that might be causing memory overload in the code, I'd check it.
  





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425 Reviews



Gender: Male
Points: 11417
Reviews: 425
Mon Jan 05, 2015 11:16 pm
Nate says...



Thanks @Aet Lindling! Fortunately, there's an excellent moderator staff who make everything run smoothly.


On the errors that were experienced, I just rewrote the javascript code to make things run a lot better. I still need to make a few more improvements, but unless you're using Internet Explorer or trying it on a mobile device, it should work pretty well now.

Edit

Should work on pretty much any device now. If anyone continues to experience issues, refresh the page a couple times.
  








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