FartDump Feed

I love when people exploit my code, it only makes me better. Click the Damn Potato was built mostly client-side, meaning your device handled the clicks and just sent the final score to my server. Lazy, yeah, but the game was never meant to be serious. I mean, who’s really bored enough to hack a potato game?

Well, today, someone was. You can fudge the score right from the console. Normally I wouldn’t care, but when I saw someone hit 100 points, I had to check. That’s basically impossible. Digging into the logs, I saw they were “clicking” up to three potatoes per second; which I know is humanly impossible.

So I took the hint and reworked the game: scoring now happens server-side. To whoever pulled that stunt, thanks. You pushed me to do it the right way, and I had a blast doing it.

Added a fairly major update to Baby Launcher today. I ran the JavaScript through Claude AI to help reorganize it, and the codebase is now much cleaner and easier to read. It was starting to get a bit unwieldy.

In-game, you’ll notice a small info link in the bottom-right corner that opens a popup (clicking “Baby Launcher” opens it, too). The modal shows the version, last updated date, and credits.

The main reason for the modal is that I changed the background music to “Children’s March Theme” by Cleyton Kauffman, and I needed a place to give proper credit.

I’ll use this modal for other things later, too.

I also tweaked character and obstacle positioning so they display better on phones. I’m not 100% happy with the layout yet, but it’s getting closer.

I've been on a bit of a break from working on the site this week. While there are still tons of features I'd like to add and a few minor bugs that need fixing, the site overall is running pretty smoothly. So, I plan to take some time away to play video games or something. I'll still be moderating the secrets to keep the really dumb stuff out.

I plan to build out search functionality for secrets, along with filtering so you can customize how the wall displays. The ability to track particular secrets is also on the agenda. But these features will take some time, so I want to wait until I'm motivated to sit down and bang them out all at once; probably live, because I’m lazy.

But for now, keep posting secrets, playing games, and sending me your ideas via the contact page. I'm listening.

It costs about $15 a month to run this site. Not a huge deal, but getting that to zero would be nice. I’ve had Google AdSense running for a couple years now (about 4 months on FartDump), and across all four of my sites, I’m making a whopping five cents a day.

AdSense also slows the site down, so it just isn’t worth the hassle anymore. Today I ditched the ads and started sprinkling Amazon Affiliate links around the site instead. I like this approach because one conversion a month can match what I’d get from thousands of ad impressions; and I can actually make the links funny, which is way more fun for me. These fit the FartDump vibe way better than generic ads. That’s a win for me and for you.

Small update to Click the Damn Potato

Lately, I've been focusing on making small improvements to the existing games. Little things that bug me as I play them. Today, I gave Tater a little love and tweaked a few settings.

• Added a countdown timer before Tater starts appearing.
• Music stops once the game is finished.
• Decreased the time between Tater spawns to speed things up.
• Added a margin around the area that Tater appears to keep him away from the edge of the screen.

I am trying to keep this particular game extremely simple on purpose. That's what is fun about it; it's simplicity.

>>>Play Click the Damn Potato<<<

Finally got around to creating an endpoint for high scores in Baby Launcher. Now after you submit your score, the leaderboard automatically updates without the need to refresh the page. 

This should have already been finished, but I kept putting it off. Sending JSON from the endpoint is the easy part. The JavaScript to send and receive the info and dynamic updating of the HTML is what usually trips me up. But, I got it and it's working now.

Also, I'm GOD on the leaderboards. I'm all over that bitch from testing. 😆

Fart Factory upgrade

You can now use your built-up farts to launch rockets! This gives you a reason to click away and collect as many farts as you can.

Go launch some rockets!

I was just about to make the Church of FartDump ordinations meaningful, but chose not to. At the moment, when you generate a certificate, the site generates a random certificate number. No data is saved or kept on the servers. 

I thought it would be fun to generate and store the names and numbers and make them meaningful, but opted not to. It's a dumb page, no sense in storing personal information for it. Let's keep it anonymous!

The page did get a slight upgrade. The certificate looks and feels more like something you would see on FartDump.

Made some more progress on Baby Launcher. The full screen API works much better now. Still need more tweaking on the positions of everything on smaller screens. This game is NOT optimized for tiny screens. If you play on your phone, flip ya shit horizontal!

Slowed down the background by giving it a parallax effect. It looks much better now. I may add some foreground clouds and things later.

Wall of Secrets Tweak

I decided to revisit the algorithm that I slapped together last year for showing secrets on the wall. It wasn't the greatest. I was giving new posts a huge boost for six hours, then they tank if there is no engagement. That was bumped up to 12 hours.

I was giving older posts too large of a penalty, so engaging posts were falling down the list too quickly. That logic has been tweaked, so you will start seeing older posts higher up now. A few other variables were adjusted as well.

Remember: Upvoting, downvoting, and commenting have a huge impact as to where the secret lands after 12 hours.

We will try this new approach for a few days and see how it works out.

You were driving to work the other day....

I've taken a bit of break this week. One feature did get worked on though and that's DOTZ. A simple game where you try to connect dotz  to create squares. 

The AI still needs a bit of polish to make the game tougher to beat, but it's playable for now. I may add modes so you can set the difficulty in a few days.

Made some privacy gains today: no more personalized ads, no more Google tracking. I built my own lightweight pageview system, so I ditched that annoying cookie consent popup too. Asking for tracking on an anonymous site felt dumb. Now it feels right.

I brought the Google reCAPTCHA badge back to the surface. Hiding it was causing some issues and occasionally triggered misleading “Invalid Captcha” errors; even though the forms still worked.

While digging into it, I found out hiding the badge actually violates their TOS. So yeah… shouldn’t have done that. Live and learn. Still better than clicking “I’m not a robot.”

I've wanted to build my own StumbleUpon clone for a long time, and today, it finally took off. It's still basic, with only about 15 websites in the rotation, but it's functional and ready for you to start browsing.

There's a link at the bottom of the page if you want to submit your own weird finds to the Stumbler.

Planned features include up/down voting (or maybe just a like button) so I can build an algorithm to surface the best sites more often. I’ll also add a reporting option in case you hit a dead link or something that won’t load right.

Both are easy adds, but my brain is fried after building the foundation. The rest will come soon.

I switched to invisible Google reCAPTCHA last week, but their badge was huge and obnoxious, so I nudged it out of sight. That caused some errors on a few forms (oops). I think it’s fixed now, but if you still get an “invalid reCAPTCHA” error after leaving a secret or comment, hit me up on the contact page.

Also updated the Privacy Policy to mention that FartDump uses Google reCAPTCHA.

Not much got accomplished this week; sometimes that’s just how it goes. I’ve got several ideas for the site, but I tend to sit on them for a while to mentally map out how I want to handle the functionality.

That said, I did get Soundboard submissions started and fixed the datetime inconsistencies across the site. I had been using server time instead of UTC during testing and forgot to clean it up before pushing to production. That caused some odd output quirks and incorrect timestamps, though it was subtle unless you were paying close attention. It should be working properly now.

While tinkering with the secrets files, I tracked down and fixed a few other bugs too.

So... hey, not a total waste of a week. Any progress is still progress.

Something Stinks

Celebrities like to die in three's. This week, we lost:

• Ozzy Osbourne
• Malcolm-Jamal Warner
• Hulk Hogan

The week isn't over, could we get a fourth? Who... is... next?

Cranked up the character limit on secrets and comments from 255 to 1,000. Some of you needed more space to spill your guts (or just rant). Hopefully, this means less cryptic nonsense and more actual stories. Give us the juicy details, not just a headline.

New Feature Alert: You can now upload your own farts! If your masterpiece fits the vibe, I’ll add it to the Soundboard. This will either be epic or the day hackers finally destroy FartDump. Either way, worth it.

If you have audio or video of a fart, send it in! >>>Submit Fart<<<

Fun Fact: The average person passes gas about 14 times a day. If you didn’t fart at all, you’d be in trouble; holding in gas causes bloating and can even affect your mood. In fact, doctors say healthy farts are a sign your gut bacteria are doing their job digesting food. So next time you let one slip, just say you’re "optimizing your microbiome."

Wonder how many times you’ve farted in your life? Check out the fart calculator on the homepage.

I decided to move the captcha to an invisible captcha instead of attempting to build my own. Hopefully, everything is still working. We will find out if no one posts any secrets for a day or so. I'd say send me a message if you find something not working, but I moved the contact form to the same logic. haha

If everything is working as expected then it should be much easier to submit secrets, comments and all other forms on the site. Fingers crossed.

I was supposed to build my own CAPTCHA this week. I’ve got it mapped out in my head, but honestly, I just couldn’t force myself to mess with it. Still sitting on the ole to-do list.

Next week, the plan is to tackle Fart Factory. It needs a serious re-work to make it more fun, more addicting, and with upgrades that actually feel like upgrades. Fart Factory was my first browser game, so it’s basic as hell right now. Time to make it something people actually want to play for more than five minutes.

Crypto Puzzle & Fartle Daily Reset Just Got Smarter

Did some code cleaning in my daily games. All input boxes now actually limit to one character; no more loopholes if you click or paste like crazy. The game enforces it for every input, every time.

On top of that, I streamlined the whole UTC midnight reset system. Both games now use the same bulletproof logic for “come back tomorrow” and show a live countdown to the next puzzle, based on universal time. No more timezone voodoo, just smooth resets for everyone.

I built the code and would get confused as to when I could play again. Yeah, I play the daily games on most days. Now we all know when we can play again with the timers.

Fun Fact: In 1995, McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks with lemon juice smeared on his face, believing it would render him invisible to security cameras; just like invisible ink. Smiling at the cameras, he was arrested within hours.

His bizarre confidence inspired psychologists Dunning and Kruger to study and publish their famous work on why incompetent people overestimate their abilities, now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.