The Great Ywotian Fog
The Great Ywotian Fog was an event caused by exploiting site's poor server side code handling that started on April of 2024 and lasted until July 1st of the same year, lasting roughly for 3 months.
The event is characterized by YWOT loading extremely slowly, making any amount of scrolling a significant hassle.
Many YWOT users tried to migrate to more up-to-date site OWOT temporary.
Cause[edit | edit source]
YWOT has a system in place so that a strict rate limit is set upon all users whenever too many requests are being sent at once. As a result of this, a single script sending a massive amount of requests is enough to lag the site for everyone.
The specific cause of the Fog is believed to be a scripted deletion of the East and West Roads, which erased hundreds of coordinates of text. The damage would then be repaired by an unknown party, after which the delete script would start again. It is unknown how many cycles this went through or who was behind it.
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Destruction of East Road at X:72 on May 2nd, 2024. -
Destruction of West Road at X: 77 on May 2nd, 2024
Pauses in the Lag[edit | edit source]
On May 22nd, 2024, the lag briefly stopped when the scripter agreed to stop erasing the East and West Roads.
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"Hence the stop at 150, I'll spin it up again when the site isn't molasses." -
"Might not bother since typically mass wipes might just cause the site admins to redraw from an older snapshot." -
"Now it's me pissing against the wind ;) In case I'm wrong, RIP 500 city :( (Oh yikes, sorry about that. I was just goofing around. I hope they can bring it all back! How about we call it a truce? i'll stop destroying things now......." -
"............and sorry again for the road wiping. it kept coming back, so I thought it was funny. Joke is on me, i guess.)"
They would presumably restart soon after, as the lag returned on the same day.
The lag also cleared up from June 4th to June 12th.
Who Was Behind It?[edit | edit source]
The perpetrator of The Great Ywotian Fog remains unknown to this day.
Kubex300, a user responsible for two large scaled griefs in 2022, denied any involvement in causing the fog. It must be noted, however, that prior to this point they had denied accountability for causing The Void, only to claim the incident as their own a year later.
Intervention[edit | edit source]
Multiple users reached out to Andrew Badr throughout June to notify him of the lag. Andrew would later respond, saying that an update will come soon. He did explicitly state, however, that someone other than him was in charge of fixing the issue. It was later confirmed by FP that he had contracted a freelancer to work on the codebase.
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Andrew Badr responding to the user Mandrake(June 17th, 2024) -
Responding to RedtheAnimator, announcing that an update will come soon(June 20th, 2024)
The issue was fixed on July 1st, 2024 by throttling requests.
Community Response[edit | edit source]
Weather Report[edit | edit source]
After a request from The Goosh, user Credrscr began running a weather report in one of the YWOT Discord servers.
The report would update 1-2 times each day, documenting how long it took to open the site as well as well as the time it took to load a single screen.
By the end both statistics averaged out to roughly 20 seconds, though time to open the site can at times be several minutes.
Each report also kept track of how long the Fog lasted for(counted upwards from a message made by Salevn on April 29th, 2024, which was the first recorded acknowledgement of the lag) along with time since the fog last subsided.
And ever since Andrew Badr began responding to emails concerning the lag, the report also counted the number of days since Andrew was notified about the issue.
Credrscr's weather report lasted from June 13th to July 1st, featuring 30 individual reports.
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