I had 2837 points before. I was at level 12. Remove as many pedagogist points as it takes to get me back to 2837.

This is a serious crime committed by pasting a lot of characters to an interim Lyceum article and then removing all the character dump. The fatal bug is that, in the removing of Lyceum text, at most 1638 points can be removed, leading to an inconsistency when more than 16385 letters are inserted.

Goluigi made a non-null Lyceum article about this: http://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/The+Pedagogist+Lyceum+Article+Exploit/

EDIT: Also, judging from the massive response over IRC, it seems there is a points log for every BotBr. I hope this is true (I was joining an OHC shortly before the abuse, so i might have more "legitimate" points than 2837 at the moment).

Kajingsol was screwing around too and testing it so he leveled up a lot as well. I think he was level 9 or something earlier.

Don't mummify them though!!! It was a test!

One person messing around with it is a test. Two people joining afterwards knowing full well the implications of it is cheating. If it were just up to me, you two would be banned.

I leveled myself back down though because I made sure not to do too many characters.

I went to level 13 then deleted all the characters so now I'm level 12 again. I was about 100-150 points from level 13 and so I went back to there so now the pedagogist points I earned are from the lyceum article I made here itself.

I think after this, it's cheating. I mean only one person doing it isn't really testing it, it's more of a discovery and then two people tested it, one of them going a bit overboard but still.

We should just fix the glitch and then level them back down to where they were earlier. Kajingsol told me he was 10 points from level 9 and hertzdevil said here he was at 2837.

if it were up for me, you two would be bananas

quick let's see how high the points ceiling is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

jrlepage, no need to get too harsh - puke has the ability to manually subtract points, so he will be able to put everything back once he fixes the bug.

I'm pretty sure puke7 would have better use for his time than to clean up the mess after certain folks intentionally use such exploits (now that the bug is known).

probably after now though

edit: it could probably be that you get 5 points for any lyceum article you make and 3 points for editing? like a flat rate amount of points you can get instead of basing it on characters you typed in an article.

Yeah, a flat-rate makes more sense, period. Nothing else here is paid out based on size of submission.

interesting week this has been

okay we've determined level 34 :)

Level 33 is the reasonable limit. We've gotten to 1159735 points.

Level 34 is 98840289 points away which means to reach level 34, you will need 100000024 points which is 99999999 points without the n00b points :)

Anyone want to try to get there legitimately? ;)

EDIT: http://puu.sh/1Tfds proof :) (this was like 2 minutes older)

So say that I am working on a non-troll lyceum article. I am. Markup text themselves should not be awarded for boons, that's for sure otherwise articles like the ! spam can still happen by replacing them with bold/oblique/underline brackets that contain no text. Thus it is computationally difficult to reward BotBrs with boons proportional to the size of text inserted.

Maybe pedagogist points should be given daily?

I'm actually at level 9 now that I got a bunch more other points. You can just delete all my pedagogist points if you'd like that.

I like how you guys are all like "yeah you can delete my points", as if that's ALL puke7 has to do around here.

I assume something like editing the amount of points a BotBr has is a one-click process or some small coding edit so it probably shouldn't take more than a minute.

Of course, I could be wrong because I don't know how this site works :)

You'd be surprised what things puke7 has to do by directly modifying databases, n00b.

i have stated many times that i am a level 12 n00b, my ohcist status lies!

u r sociopath

sociopath.

regarding the exploit account... the whole point of the mummi, troll, zombi, tags is that pukes doesnt have an easy way to delete accounts.

the exploit account to a testing account to see how high one can go without hurting anyone

Now I hope that nobody does this on a legit account. Puke'll fix it, it's not really hurting anyone most likely, so it's not worth banning for.

I am nonplussed to say the least. "Hey, puke, have fun on your date while your phone blows up with obviously hacky level up messages!" Ok, thanks guys? Oh yeah? You just want me to reverse a bunch of horse shit manually in the database? I can just write a little code and fix it up? How about you all make a $50 donation each before I reset your points? Sorry to say it, but I'm old, grumpy and my time is worth more than this bullshit. :P

*making an account just to test the waters was the best way to go (easiest to deal with for me). Of course, if you wanted to know all the level points you could have just looked here : http://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/BotBr%20Level%20Ups

oh SNAP

puke's not going to help thanks a lot SHERWYN for thinking only our ACTUAL friends have lives and not thinking about other people here on BOTB

Trying to justify the exploitation by acting like it was some sort of bug-finding service is BS too, and it's insulting that you're trying to pass it off as such. There was no "problem" until you guys decided to use the lyceum in a way in which it was obviously not intended to be used. You can also rack up points by adding a bunch of useless tags to entries (as lyceumexploiter did in order to get to level 7), or by making alt accounts and submitting a bunch of useless entries to your own OHBs. These are not problems at all unless someone decides to abuse the systems; the lyceum has been around for years without anyone else exploting it (AFAIK).

BotB development is a one-man show right now, and there are better uses for its development time than manually editing database fields and adding behavioral restrictions that wouldn't have otherwise needed to be implemented.

P.S. claiming ignorance is a stupid strategy at best, but it's especially not likely to work when I explicitly told you that resetting the data you messed up would probably involve "mucking around in MySQL". If you didn't know what MySQL was, you should have looked it up. At the very least, the phrase "mucking around" does not imply to me a "one-click process".

puke7, can we edit the Lyceum with good faith edits, or would you prefer that we wait until you've finished your course of action? I don't want to add to the clutter (EDIT: of others) despite my urge to edit a few articles.

I've assessed the basics of the situation. I'm not gung-ho on getting shit fixed, but I'll be doing it today. Kind of on the fence if I should try making some tools or just manually hunt and peck the DB.

I've been observing this silently, and I have tried my hardest to come up with a response. I think I'll settle with "=o".

"what on earth?"

Both works, but "what on earth" is more "how did this happen??!" and "=o" is more about "when are people going to stop this"

So I guess the more accurate version (2.0) would be "what on earth =o"

Strobe, why can't you IRC anymore? q____Q

It must be a totally difference experience not being #1. All of those fancy luxuries like integrated pizza ordering... gone.

Uncle Puke7 i'm not at home, so I haven't really been ircing lately.
Just been browsing the forum and giggling a bit and waiting for you to snap. I might be home tomorrow though for massive unlimited IRCing!

puke7, I apologize for the trouble I caused here, I didn't really know it had such drastic effects. When I was told it was database editing, I thought that was easy, but it isn't apparently. Then again, I don't know much about websites.

Also, no one knew what level 34 was lol, I updated that with the exploit, but of course that was a silly reason to I guess. I should know what's behind all this newfangled website technology.

sorry i acted like correcting the points manually was easy. hopefully i didn't contribute to the mess too much :(

Some of you guys need to install XAMPP and Wordpress or somethin'. Then open up phpMyAdmin and see the ugly, raw form of a database. :3

soiled, actually i'm too far in the other direction. i work with databases every day for my job so i'm desensitized to that kind of nonsense hassle ;)

Oh, I know, that's why I said "some of you" instead of "you guys."

*"some of you guys"

While you're painstakingly editing the database, could you make my aura permanently white + hearts and make it so that every time you click my name little hearts fly out of your computer and give you little smooches <3

I will take this scrub punishment with stride for my very bad deed.

Scrubbing the floors to wash out this spot.
Out, damned spot! Out, I say!