IconBuffet | Free Icons, Stock Icons, Custom Icon Design

So you can hear it straight from the horses mouth: Last week we discovered a bug related to some folks having duplicate deliveries in their account. For instance, my own account had multiple instances of the Oslo Finance icons under my "Icons I Have" tab. This bug turned out to be related to how the old IconBuffet trading system worked versus the new trading system. Obviously it does you no good to have two links to the same set of icons in your account. It was a bug.

In setting out to fix the bug it became apparent that there would be a few ripple effects. Specifically the following:

1) Stamps are calculated by the number of deliveries you own

2) That number included buggy duplicate deliveries in your account

3) Extra stamps allowed people to send extra deliveries

4) Extra deliveries sent resulted in extra points

5) If you knew about this bug, it could be exploited.

A decent number of accounts had one or two duplicate deliveries due to this bug. Without making allegations about the trading habits of specific members of the Buffet, there were ways to work this to your advantage (see point 5 above) resulting in even more extra stamps — and potentially points.

Correcting the bug was as simple as removing the duplicate deliveries from the affected member accounts — and preventing duplicate deliveries in the future. However, the by-product of removing the duplicates was the subtraction of any and all stamps and points that were related to those duplicates. We did not go in and manually remove peoples' points or deliberately punish anyone. We simply corrected the bug.

It is as simple as that. If you lost stamps, points, or deliveries over the last week, this is why. We're sorry about this confusion, and wish we would've caught the bug earlier. We're sorry to see anyone leave the site out of frustration with this fix.

We believe that every member should be given a level playing field here to collect icons and have fun. It would not be fair if we left an exploitable bug open on the site.

IconBuffet is about friends, fun, and icons. We did not build it so we could intentionally mess with the people who are members here. Seriously, what good does that do us? This is about having fun. Please remember that.

Finally, while we love the IconBuffet community very much, we are not here to solve petty squabbles. We built the site. We give away a ton of free icons. We're not getting rich off of this. (I can only hope and pray... please upgrade to VIP so we can buy a fooseball table for the office.) But for real, please enjoy yourself. Don't take it too seriously.

Okay, so that's all. I'll leave it now. No conspiracy theories. No intentional ill will. No love lost. Let's all just have some fun.

Posted by josh on Mar 28, 2007 in Blab | 10 comments