Hello world, and welcome to the thirty first Dev with Dave game progress update.

I hope you all had a great Christmas and that your 2022 has got off to a good start.

It’s been an odd start to the year for me, for a few reasons, but let me tell you about them in this slightly late project update 🙂

The Forum

Firstly, It appears that at some point over the last twelve months the Captcha I’d implemented had stopped working. This opened the floodgates to hundreds and thousands of dodgy forum accounts.

I had noticed there was a disproportionate amount of forum traffic, but it wasn’t until the other day that I noticed that there was no longer any Captcha when I logged into the Dev with Dave site.

Unfortunately I can’t remember how I had set up the Captcha the first time round. I know I had definitely done it because I remember having to tick the I AM NOT A ROBOT box before, and all the details for the website are entered into the Captcha website.

However, the thought of an external force disabling anything on my website was enough to set the alarm bells ringing and I decided to conduct a full security review of the Dev with Dave website.

Unfortunately as part of this I’ve had to not only disable the forum but also delete every single forum user account from the site. The website only allowed me to do this 250 at a time, and there were over 22,000 of them by the time I had disabled account creation.

However, I could find no evidence of foul play and I think that I was using a plugin which no longer provides Captcha 🤷

I will be further testing that the website is secure before I open up user registration and the forums again. In the mean time, you can still stay up to date with Flappy-vaders with the Dev with Dave Blog.

Updating things

I have spent more than a couple of hours this last week or two sat in the car waiting for people. In order to maximise my time spent working on Dev with Dave, I’ll often bring the tablet along and spend the time working on various things.

This time round I have managed to update the Trello board and the GDD as they felt like they had been neglected a little.

The Trello board is public so you can have a look and see how I use it to keep track of the various aspects of creating the game. The board is found here at https://trello.com/b/OpQv8TCD/flappyvaders

I’ll get the GDD saved as a pdf and get it uploaded to the website as soon as possible, but I’ll have to find a new place to put it until the forum is back up and running again.

Primary testing

I know in the last update I said I was thinking about using Discord to manage the bug reporting for the testing, but after some thought I’m not sure how effective this would be.

I’d much rather use the forum or perhaps one of the dedicated bug managing plugins for WordPress, but given the security issues I’ve faced recently, I have been unable to pursue an investigation into which would be the best.

That’s all for this time

Unfortunately what little time I did have to work on Flappy vaders this time round has been spent mostly on tightening security and making sure nothing too nefarious had taken place. I’m hoping that I’ll have a better update for you next time round.

I know I have a terrible track record with this, but the next update should be up on the 11th of February.

Until then 🙂