Recently I've been playing Chess, making visits to well known site, chess.com to expand my knowledge in tactics and strategies. There is a very similar game to chess in Japan called Shogi, which both chess and shogi seem to have originated from the predecessor "chaturanga" in India around 600AD (but that's another story).Perhaps it was my Quality Assurance Engineer experience in my previous years, I found a problem on the site where I was able to force the server to abort any live game making the game seem as if it never happened, leaving no traces, therefore, the ratings to not be affected. This exploit would be great for the player who was losing as they could abort any game they might be losing, hence not lose any rating.
After having fun (some call it exploiting) for a while with the problem (it caused quite a stir in the chess community) as it seemed like it could turn into a serious problem, one which could destroy the rating and playability, I decided to inform the owner of chess.com of the problem as it looked like no one else was aware of it.
I just received a contact from one of the staff, they saw the potential of the problem, and it turns out it took 4 of their programmers a few days to pinpoint and fix the problem. As a gesture of their appreciation they gave me premium membership for FREE and I was able to give my Internet company a cheap plug, should they need future assistance.
All in all a good result, the owner was able to get it fixed and I got FREE membership. Now that I come to think of it, perhaps I should have increased by own ratings before I showed them the problem....
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