Archive for April, 2015
Winners of Typeracer 7th Anniversary Contest – and a new Typeracer World Record!
Hi All, I’m pleased to announce the winners of Typeracer’s 7th anniversary typing contest! The details of that contest were outlined in our last blog post. To refresh everyone’s memory, in the 7 days starting from Apr. 7th, all racers were given a score calculated by multiplying their average typing speed by the number of words typed during these 7 days; the users with the 7 highest scores have won a prize. Furthermore, all typists who completed at least 7 races during those 7 days were entered into a drawing, and 7 lucky winners were selected. Below are our champs (note that #8 to #15 are “honorable mention”, and in italics):
| # | Racer | Points earned | Avg. WPM | Races completed | Words typed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | erniechiew  |
16,363,180 | 122 | 2383 | 133,823 |
| 3 | shoaib_shahnawaz  |
13,270,459 | 109 | 2146 | 120,725 |
| 4 | nadel1232  |
8,631,589 | 111 | 1973 | 78,052 |
| 5 | aaron_livefit  |
8,186,580 | 139 | 1256 | 59,220 |
| 6 | elusoryx  |
7,470,999 | 131 | 1022 | 57,153 |
| 7 | kevinski1  |
6,658,903 | 96 | 1536 | 70,374 |
| 8 | lucean  |
5,635,020 | 97 | 1035 | 58,161 |
| 9 | zoli | 5,314,553 | 64 | 2200 | 83,091 |
| 10 | janlonden  |
4,686,780 | 90 | 920 | 52,187 |
| 11 | maximumchris2  |
4,401,835 | 142 | 846 | 31,162 |
| 12 | tesla_diesel  |
4,283,196 | 116 | 668 | 37,122 |
| 13 | aaindtharivalan_p |
4,188,288 | 92 | 819 | 45,625 |
| 14 | christhomas95  |
3,986,767 | 97 | 737 | 41,060 |
| 15 | kellysgreens |
3,897,979 | 126 | 863 | 31,255 |
We’ll be contacting #1 to #7 to ask what prize they prefer. A special congrats to our winner Ernie C (erniechiew), who completed 2,383 races at an impressive average of 122 wpm!
Moving on now, below are the lottery winners, who were randomly selected from the pool of typists who completed at least 7 races in 7 days starting on Apr. 7th.
| # | Lucky Draw Winners | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | little_dino |
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| 2 | rovr |
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| 3 | tm_mad  |
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| 4 | flyafyoungblood |
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| 5 | cvanskiver67 |
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| 6 | ashikur11 |
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| 7 | oscaroketch  |
Congratulations to the winners–we’ll be contacting you via email to arrange the prize distribution. Thanks for participating, and happy birthday Typeracer!
-David Pritts (valikor)
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 15 so far )Celebrate Typeracer’s 7th Birthday with a Typing Contest!
This month Typeracer will be celebrating its 7th birthday! When I think of how old Typeracer is getting, the first thought that pops into my mind is that I must be getting old too! I started playing Typeracer when I was back in college. When I see some of the super-fast 16-year-olds on here nowadays, destroying me with their 150-160 wpm averages, it’s pretty terrifying. I suggested to Typeracer founder Alex, that we should add a minimum age requirement to help me win more races, but he vetoed that idea, saying something about not wanting to discourage competition? Anyway… what we did agree on is that we should do something to celebrate! After discussing the idea, we thought it’d be fun to run a simple contest this week. Last week, we added a bunch of new texts (submitted by our users), so this week, we’re going to give a special bonus to our users and give everyone a chance to win prizes by doing some races, and allow people to try the new texts.
Contest Details
Contest winners will have their choice of either this nifty flashlight keychain2 or a free premium account upgrade.
The contest is pretty simple! Starting on April 7th, we’re going to monitor everyone’s races for 7 days. Anyone who does at least 7 races will be eligible to win prizes: either a custom-built Typeracer key chain, or a free premium Typeracer subscription for 1 year. Here are the two ways you can win:
7 Winners by Total Points
We will multiply everyone’s speed by the number of words typed1. For example, if you type 3000 words, at an average of 60 wpm, then you’ll have 3000 x 60 = 180,000 points. The 7 users with the most points after 7 days will be eligible for a prize.
7 Winners by Lucky Draw
We’ll also generate a list of all users who do at least 7 races during the 7 days following April 7th. From this list, we’ll randomly select 7 more winners, who also will be eligible for a prize.
That’s it! The results will be announced here some time next week. The winners, who will be notified individually by email, can choose which prize they want: a key chain2 or premium membership. We hope you’ll enjoy the new texts, and enjoy the contest!
David Pritts (valikor)
Notes
- We use the convention of 1 word = 5 characters for English text. Cheating (by using any program, script, or anything else) will disqualify you from this contest.
- Due to the high cost of international shipping, we can only ship the key chains within the United States, but everyone is eligible for the premium subscriptions. We will conduct the lottery on April 14, 2015, where each contestant who has completed 7 races will be assigned a random number. We will be contacting the winners (starting with number 1, then 2, and so on, to offer you a prize.
Let us know what you think!
Edit: Contest results have been posted here!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 18 so far )New texts come to Typeracer. . . thanks to all of you!
People often email or post about how Typeracer should add more texts. We have about 700 at present, but we realize that this number needs to keep increasing, especially as some users complete a lot of races and start to see the same texts over and over again. If you’ve been on Typeracer for a while, you probably are familiar with the “Wait, didn’t I just type that quote?” feeling.
If you included your username with your text submission, this how it will be displayed.
Text submission link on our home page.
If you’re a Typeracer veteran, you may be aware that you can submit your favorite texts to Typeracer. But if you’re like some most people, you might not have seen “Contribute” link at the bottom of the main page.
Anyway, starting last year, we requested help from some of our most trusted users, and put together a small team consisting of vonunov, schoaib_shahnawaz, fyda, Vikas Yadav, and Alexander Omorodion (Agizzlefizzle123) to help me comb through over 5,000 texts that had been submitted via the “Contribute” link. First, we eliminated the ones which were unusable, either due to being too short, being incomplete, being inappropriate, or other reasons. For a reason still unknown to me, some people go to the “Contribute” form and enter excellent, high-quality quotes such as “lol u sux”, and then hit submit. Most of these didn’t make the cut. Sorry.
Our text selection process involved a number of large, colorful spreadsheets.
After eliminating the big losers, we used a voting process, where each member of our super cool “new text team” indicated that they either liked a particular text (giving it “1 point”), or didn’t like a text (giving it no points). The texts were ranked based on this point system, ranging from 5 or 6 points (meaning nearly everyone thought the quote would be good on Typeracer) to 1 or 0 points.
I then entered the first batch of the highest-ranked texts into our database, making sure to match all the submissions to the username and Pit Stop page of the submitter. This way, the people who submitted quotes get credit for them. If your text got added, and you included your Typeracer username on the submission form, your username will show up whenever people finish a race on that text. After everything was submitted into the system, our tech genie Typeracer founder Alex Epshteyn (typeracer) did some stuff that we don’t really understand, in order to transfer and activate the new group of texts in the main site, play.typeracer.com.
Now that we have this curation process in place, we will be able to keep adding more texts at more frequent intervals moving forward. Today we’re launching about one hundred new texts, and there are still plenty of high-rated texts in our curated spreadsheet we could add. We’ll get them out there over the coming coming months. Thanks to everyone who helped! We hope all Typeracers enjoy the new texts.
Do you have texts you’d like to submit to Typeracer? Submit them here. We could also use more help filtering and choosing best texts from new submissions, so if you want to volunteer, feel free to email support AT typeracer DOT com and let us know!
Thanks!
David Pritts (valikor)
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 7 so far )
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