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Replay Links

• ScottHope 10,445 Posts

  Wed, Aug 2 2017 9:44 AM

  After the recent 'maintenance ' downtime, I noticed that a lot of my replays didn't work anymore. Attempting to play them gave me the depressing 'REPLAY IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE' pop-up in the game client. I should point out that I get my replay URLs directly from the game client window upon playing the replay, which gives you quite a long URL.

  As only a handful of my 170 replays worked, I went to investigate, and it appears that the format of the replay URL has changed.

  I won't bore you with the technicalities, because I don't understand it myself, lol. But if you have a replay that does not work, then please try this fix before you delete it thinking that WGT has thrown your precious saved replay into the dumpster.

  What you need to retrieve from your replay link is the replay ID, and that is made up of 36 characters in the following format...

  xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

  That is 8 characters then a hyphen, then 3 groups of four characters each followed by a hyphen, then 12 characters.

  If you look at any replay URL you will see that only one part of it has this format. Once you have extracted this ID part, you need to add the following at the front of the ID...

  http://www.wgt.com/gameclient.aspx?view=showReplay&JSON=%7B%22GUID%22:%22

  Then add the following to the back of the ID...

  %22,%22Brand%22:%22%22%7D

  Once pasted into your browsers address bar, this URL should then play your replay in the game client.

  If you like to see the...
  A REPLAY HAS BEEN SENT TO YOU BY A MEMBER OF WGT...screen. Then you only need to add this to the front of your replay ID...

  http://www.wgt.com/replay.aspx?ID=

  Thank you.

• Essisdaddy 5,883 Posts

  Wed, Aug 2 2017 11:16 AM

  ScottHope:

  I won't bore you with the technicalities because I don't understand it myself

  Well that means the rest of us have NO chance, Scott  :D :D

• ScottHope 10,445 Posts

  Wed, Aug 2 2017 11:30 AM

  I bet there's someone out there who has a handle on it.  : )

  Here's an example of how weird this stuff can be. We were discussing this replay thing in the recent downtime thread, and discovered that some stuff needed changing about the URL. Now this change included adding some curly braces '{ }', but for the life of me I could not get the closing curly brace to appear in the browser address bar when pasted in, it just disappeared. It took me a whole day to discover that an opening curly brace needs to be substituted by %7B and the closing curly brace by %7D. If that ain't gobbledygook I don't know what is. Makes no sense to me at all.  : \

• ScottHope 10,445 Posts

  Wed, Aug 2 2017 1:45 PM

  This won't interest anyone except nerds, but in my previous post I mentioned that I was confused by the fact that a URL that had curly braces in it wouldn't work, and they had to be substituted by %7B and %7D for the opening and closing brace respectively.

  I've now looked into this a bit more, and apparently a URL can only be sent over the internet using the ASCII character set. Some ASCII characters are considered to be 'unsafe' apparently, and those that are have to be encoded, and the curly brace is one of those that is considered 'unsafe', and so has to be sent encoded, and that's what the %7B, %7D is.

  A space is also considered to be an unsafe character and the encoding for that is %20. I have seen plenty of those in URLs, especially my Photobucket links, and there are plenty of %22 and %25 characters in WGT replay links, and the characters those represent are the double quote " and the percent % character.

  Unsafe:
  Characters can be unsafe for a number of reasons. The space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs. The characters "<" and ">" are unsafe because they are used as the delimiters around URLs in free text; the quote mark (""") is used to delimit URLs in some systems. The character "#" is unsafe and should always be encoded because it is used in World Wide Web and in other systems to delimit a URL from a fragment/anchor identifier that might follow it. The character "%" is unsafe because it is used for encodings of other characters. Other characters are unsafe because gateways and other transport agents are known to sometimes modify such characters. These characters are "{", "}", "|", "\", "^", "~", "[", "]", and "`". All unsafe characters must always be encoded within a URL. For example, the character "#" must be encoded within URLs even in systems that do not normally deal with fragment or anchor identifiers, so that if the URL is copied into another system that does use them, it will not be necessary to change the URL encoding.

  Okay at the back, you can wake up now.  : )

• Essisdaddy 5,883 Posts

  Fri, Aug 4 2017 9:02 AM

  You've just defined me as a nerd, Scott - nice one.

  I thought I understood the rationale for replacing spaces with %20 but I obviously didn't understand the "big picture" - it does make sense, but it would be nice if it were easier to unravel. 

  Have you thought of applying for a job with wgt, mate? With the number of screw-ups they come up with, and the fact you seem to be able to work out the nerdiest (no offence!) issues, you could run rings around them...

• mnshiner 1,382 Posts

  Fri, Aug 4 2017 9:20 AM

  Appreciate the information Scott, but why should we as members have to take the time and check every replay when we didn't mess with them in the first place.

  This fix should be on their end not ours.

• ScottHope 10,445 Posts

  Fri, Aug 4 2017 10:11 AM

  Essisdaddy:

  Have you thought of applying for a job with wgt, mate?

  When everyone is so fed up with the game that they wished it didn't exist anymore , then I'll apply for a position. Having me in the mix is a sure fire way to bollix it up completely, lol. But thanks for the vote of confidence.  : )

  mnshiner:

  Appreciate the information Scott, but why should we as members have to take the time and check every replay when we didn't mess with them in the first place.

  You're absolutely right of course, we shouldn't have to tweak things this end to make them work. But having said that, as far as I know, WGT have never suggested taking the replay URL directly from the game client window to save a replay. Which, I think, are the only replay URLs to be affected by the recent changes.

• pmm711 5,711 Posts

  Sat, Aug 5 2017 12:05 PM

  ScottHope:

  What you need to retrieve from your replay link is the replay ID, and that is made up of 36 characters in the following format...

  xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

  That is 8 characters then a hyphen, then 3 groups of four characters each followed by a hyphen, then 12 characters.

  If you look at any replay URL you will see that only one part of it has this format. Once you have extracted this ID part, you need to add the following at the front of the ID...

  http://www.wgt.com/gameclient.aspx?view=showReplay&JSON=%7B%22GUID%22:%22

  Then add the following to the back of the ID...

  %22,%22Brand%22:%22%22%7D

  Once pasted into your browsers address bar, this URL should then play your replay in the game client.

  Scott, Please post a "final example" as a link.  Thanks!  Paul P.S. Yes...I need to see the whole entire link cuz I'm a dumb ass.

• ScottHope 10,445 Posts

  Sat, Aug 5 2017 1:21 PM

  pmm711:

  Scott, Please post a "final example" as a link.  Thanks!  Paul P.S. Yes...I need to see the whole entire link cuz I'm a dumb ass.

  Here's one I made earlier today...
  
  http://www.wgt.com/gameclient.aspx?view=showReplay&JSON=%7B%22GUID%22:%2273d57664-96c6-49c7-81b4-a7c6008fc308%22,%22Brand%22:%22%22%7D
  
  FRONT | ID | BACK
  
  ...and no you are not.

• pmm711 5,711 Posts

  Sat, Aug 5 2017 1:25 PM

  ScottHope:

  ...and no you are not.

  Are you sure?  LMFAO

  Thanks for all that color...took me into a 70s flashback. ;-)