Hello friends,

I figured we should probably utilize this news feature more despite us being slightly more active in Discord for our communications.

There has been quite a drought in updates over the past several months, however I do want to assure you that Keymash isn't going anywhere. Actually, that's quite the opposite as of right now. We are hoping to start having more regular updates like we used to again, so stay tuned. 

For now though, we will get into some updates of what is going on with Keymash as of today.

**Ranked Matchmaking** and **Career Rating** have been removed from Keymash. We have substituted Ranked Matchmaking for our Sudden Death mode which does NOT impact any of your public statistics. We are also stopping all Career Rating calculations for its new successor that you should hear about in the near future. 

The reason why we removed Ranked Matchmaking is simply because it isn't used a lot and has caused a lot more negative interactions rather than positive ones. This is due to long queue times, uneven games and more. As always, we may re-introduce this at a later date but for now it's just not the best time.

Career Rating will be replaced, but the calculations just simply aren't a true statement of skill and performance for a typist. We would rather not waste any more time keeping this system up when it provides no benefits to anyone that uses Keymash.

As for bug fixes, there has been some stability improvements to the backend of Keymash and we are also currently fixing issues with the Replay system not saving at all - we will have more optimizations in due time along with more bugfixes as we are going through some backlog of them.

That is all for now, thanks for playing Keymash!

Thanks,
Cameron

June 2023 Update

On this day, two years ago, we have officially launched Keymash. To celebrate this occasion we're doing a limited event for everyone to play, no speed required, with generous prizes:

https://keymash.io/competitions/keymash-typing-madness/

Thanks for all the support up until our Big Two, we love you all! 🧡

Keymash: The Big Two!

Hello everyone,

we are proud to announce the **Salad x Keymash Typing Championship 2022!**
Qualify now under the "Tournaments section" until August 27!

Prizes are as followed (Salad Balance):
1st: $250
2nd: $125
3rd: $75

More information is available on our Discord or the Qualifiers page itself.

Good luck!


Salad x Keymash Typing Championship 2022

Hello everyone,

The majority of these updates are small, but since we haven't posted many changelogs recently we figured we would give you one now.

**CHANGES**
- Implemented RTL (Right to Left) mode
- Fixed bug with CSRF tokens being invalidated after logout
- Fixed bug with Logouts not fully resetting session
- Made logging out of accounts a smoother experience
- Updated links for GitHub (we're at github.com/KeymashGame now)
- Fixed bug with Discord linking using 6 or 7 digit codes
- Added some slight optimizations to gameplay
- Implemented fail-safe for new users where they have invalid characters in their name, will now use a default name typically assigned to Guests.

June 23, 2022 Changelog

JOSHU X KEYMASH & DROP STREAM

As part of our partnership with Drop we have teamed up with famous typist joshu to give you some sweet typing content on Twitch!

There will be a special keyboard build stream at https://www.twitch.tv/mthjoshu with all the parts being kindly provided by Drop (drop.com)

Of course, there will also be some typing content on Keymash, maybe even community games.

Tune in on Saturday, May 28th - 4PM PST / 7PM EST to see one of the best typists build their new keyboard as well as instantly destroy its lifespan by typing way too fast (just kidding).

We hope to see you there!

https://www.twitch.tv/mthjoshu
https://www.twitch.tv/mthjoshu
https://www.twitch.tv/mthjoshu

Joshu Keymash x Drop Keyboard Build Stream

Hey everyone,

On May 14th the Copper Rhino community is hosting a typing contest with a Q2 Custom Mechanical Keyboard for the winner. 

There are going to be some sweet random-draw giveaway prizes for attendees (including 3 mechanical keyboards courtesy of our host, MechanicalKeyboards.com), even if they don’t participate in the competition. You need to sign up for the event on the site and then be present on the Copper Rhino server during the event to win.

Sign Up / Information https://copper-rhino.com/win/prizes-for-the-copper-rhino-typing-competition/
Join their Discord: https://discord.gg/kpJMSvtsJ5

Copper Rhino Typing Competition

Hello friends,

As mentioned for the past week, we've been working pretty hard to introduce some major changes to our queue system and introduce some cool new features. This update will be a mixture of everything, so bare with us.

**Introducing NFT's to the Item Shop**
That is right, we have decided to jump on the Web3 train and have partnered with Solace to bring the Blockchain and all of its beauties to Keymash!

For now, we are releasing some teaser NFT's thanks to the hard work from our very own GATA! Our **NFT Minting stage will start in May 2022**.

We want to give a special thanks to companies such as Solace and Fractal for providing us information and helping us become **the first blockchain typing game**!

**Alrighty, on to some other updates**
- We have now added a "Career Rating" leaderboard that is based on your best personal bests. You must have at least 100 games to be on this leaderboard.
    - This leaderboard is new, we will be hopefully introducing new features to this based on feedback.
- Queuing now features an "accept" system, not accepting will remove you from the queue
- Replays can now be share-able via a Direct link, they will also contain additional information on your match details.
- Rank Decaying has been introduced, if you do not play in the last 5 days you will lose 35 SR every day until a game is played again.
- Glizzy SR has received updates in the payouts of SR in Ranked games.
- While in a match, your name will always be first in the list from now on.

Introducing NFTs! (April Fools)

Hello friends,

Ranked matchmaking is now live after a brief interruption with the queue system in the beginning. I have some quick notes about this update.
1. We are no longer using Glicko2 and are using an in-house system. It is **not perfect** and will likely be adjusted mid-season as more matches and more feedback comes in.
2. Queue system will now randomly select a player to match rather than queue based on who joins first. This will help make the queues go a bit faster for the players at the sacrifice of queue prioritization.
3. We have added a more rank gaps compared to our last season, to help combat the argument of "better gold players" and "worse gold players" (as an example).

The season will last until the end of June, however may be extended based on other feedback.

Thanks,
Cameron

Ranked Season 5 is now LIVE

Hello @everyone,

Today is Friday, and with Friday is a new update! First of all, just want to give a big thank you to everyone who has sent us very kind words on the update we released on Sunday. It certainly means a lot and definitely was not expecting such open / welcoming feedback.

However, it is a new day and we've been working hard to resolve some post-update bugs and introduce a couple new features for you guys today.

**Profile Replays**
When we first released our Replays future, the intention was to make it only available on the End Game screen for the time being. However, it's been clear that Replays have been one of the most commonly used features on Keymash since the update.

After a little bit of tweaking we are now allowing Replays to be accessed by any player on all Profiles. There is a slight caveat to this and that is that these Replays will be removed after 90 days. This is done to help ensure that our storage doesn't hit its capacity especially since we plan on doing Profile pictures at some point this year.

Enjoy, if there is any issues please let us know. You'll notice a new button beside any matches found on Profiles.

**Text Leaderboards**
This feature kind of stems from TypeRacerData created by Noah Horn, we are making it so it's easy to access any highscores for any quote/text including Dictionary texts.

You can access the Text Leaderboards by going to "Leaderboards" and selecting "Texts" in the dropdown. You have the ability to search for your favorite text, which also gives you the chance to use the text index in Custom matches to specifically select a text.

**Ranked Matchmaking Release**
We were considering releasing Ranked today, however I wanted to address some of the earlier issues and release these new features prior to doing so.

We are looking at releasing Ranked on **March 25, 2022**. We will follow up later next week regarding this date.

**Other Changes**
This isn't just a feature-release update, as mentioned before we have resolved some initial issues found by our players. Just a heads up, make sure you read the information on our "Troubleshooting" page before submitting a bug report to our Discord channels or on the Github Repository itself.
- Fixed issue where Next Game button would say "Return to Home"
- Fixed issue where Playercard Legacy would not update Placements properly (Battle Royale & 1v1)
- Fixed issue where Charts would show "Milliseconds per Word" instead of "Seconds per Word"
- Fixed bug where Guests were gaining Experience, Playtime and Currency
- Added "Copy to Clipboard" button on the Game End screen so you can store the contents of the Quote/Text that was typed. (Also available in Text Leaderboards)
- Added 404/500 pages (very basic)
- Updated Toast colors to not be so dark

Thanks :)
- Cameron

Profile Replays & Text Leaderboards Released!

## Introducing Keymash.io (rebrand)
For the longest time, we've had to explain people to check Keymash out by saying "Go to Keyma (dot) sh" which maybe to everyone else isn't a big deal. However to me it was pretty aggrivating and annoying to do each time. Because of this, we are now going to be **Keymash.io**! This won't necessarily impact players who visit Keyma.sh's old domain as it will just do a redirect to the new one. 

**Also BIG SHOUTOUT to @Aevi for designing ALL of the assets including the new logo. If you guys need a graphic designer, 10/10 would recommend.**

## Enhancing Design
You will see that we have modified several parts of the design and helped clean it up to be more consistent across all pages. We have removed some pages such as Challenges which has now been integrated on the home page with the leaderboards being moved with all the other Leaderboards.

We have also modified some font-types in game to make it more readable, including changing some default values on the configuration to make the game more appealing on first look.

## Introducing GATA
Before Keymash first started, there was ideas and intentions of adding our own AI system into the game. However due to limitations and eventually just saying "maybe later" this was eventually put on an indefinite back burner. Until now.

With GATA, it will be joining all Public Matches (excluding Tournaments) if there is no player before the countdown has ended. The bot may have varied speeds but will typically match as closely as it can to your skill level. If there are concerns about it being too overpowered, let us know!

There is technically another part to GATA, however this will come at a later announcement probably after Q2 2022. Let's just say he might be a teaching assistant as well - so be nice!

## Introducing Replays
For the longest time, we have had a huge request for Replays and we are finally delivering it. While this feature is a basic implementation, there is plans on expanding it further. The idea behind the Replay feature is to simulate your in game experience as much as possible so you can watch it. 

This means if you have Smooth Caret disabled in your settings, the replay will play without Smooth Caret. Same goes for other features such as text size, etc.

Note: The replays will not be available in Match history for now - this may change when it leaves its beta stage.

## Gameplay Rewrite
This rewrite has multiple layers, so I will try to keep this as short as possible.
1. We have scrapped our current Match system and started from scratch - we did NOT rewrite certain pre-existing parts. This was a FULL rewrite from scratch
2. All matches will now use the FKD system (First Keystroke Delay) where the first keystroke will be removed from the final WPM and Elapsed time. This ALSO goes for Free for All, 1v1 Duel, Sudden Death and Battle Royale.
3. Redesigned The End Game page, will now contain more information that can be more engaging to the user - this is where the Replay can also be found.
4. The Sockets have also been introduced to some performance enhancements with both packet-size and packet-delivering.
5. Packets are now being selected to be used in Spectator or Player - causing huge improvement in performance.

## Ranked Matchmaking's Rewrite
Thankfully this update is a lot more simplified, but let's go over it.

First of all, we have **removed** Glicko2's skillrating system and have now implemented our own. The reason why we did this is because a lot of players would take the deviation and skill rating numbers and create huge confusion with other players which eventually would always lead to people calling Glicko2 broken when the reality was that it was heavily misunderstood. Due to this, we have substituted for a more simplified in-house system.

The new system is a static variable that increases based on your rounds won and decreases based on your rounds lost. There is extra calculations such as difference between both players skill ratings however that's pretty much the skill rating system. Please understand that **this can and WILL take time to adjust** so there may be areas where you could rank lower or even potentially rank higher. We will likely adjust these numbers as we monitor Season 5, but just throwing that out there.

We also took the opportunity to refresh the Ranks as well, we are now introducing 3-tiers to each rank. Bronze now goes from 1 - 3, same for Silver and Gold. After Gold however you will then enter Diamond, Master and then Grandmaster.

By the way, Ranked will be coming back within the next week or so. We want to make sure we iron out any post-release issues before re-releasing Ranked again.

## Other Changes
- General
 - Added "We Stand with Ukraine" Flag to Store (it's free)
 - Added 500+ texts (HEAVY thanks to @Syndric by the way)
 - Updated Frequently Asked Questions page to address popular questions
- Matchmaking / Queue
 - Introduced Cooldown timers for quitting/leaving a match.
 - Leaving a Ranked game will set a timer of 20 seconds that increments each quit
 - Leaving a Casual game will set a timer of 2 seconds that increments each quit
 - All timers will reset at the end of day, this may change to be a weekly time
- Gameplay
 - Renamed Performance Mode to "Focus Mode"
 - Created Performance Mode or "Slow PC Mode"
  - Enabling this will force smooth caret to 30FPS
 - Fixed memory leak where leaving the match would keep socket connection alive
 - Added binary parsing which reduces message contents by 15% in size
 - Removed `sendWord` event from being sent, clearing around 5-10% of total packets
 - Cleaned up several Sockets events, reducing their size by 20% on each packet
- Custom
 - Updated UI to be more consistent in terms of placement and colors
 - Fixed bug where multiple dropdowns could open at once
 - Fixed bug with drag'n'drop feature where drag box would still be active
 - Fixed bug where non-lobby owners would see corners get cut off on players
 - Added ability to type a "textId" (numerical) in Custom Text box instead of a custom text
  - This option only works if the Custom Text field is 5 characters or less and is numerical.
  - Option will not really be publicly documented as we don't really have a directory for our Texts yet

**A lot of these features WILL LIKELY have issues along the way, any issues should be reported immediately on our GitHub as we will be spending the next few days for any major hotfixes**

Keymash v3 Released!

On Saturday, February 5th, at 7PM EST chak will be streaming exclusively on Keyma.sh!

Write it down, so you won't miss one of the best typists of all time play some intense Keyma.sh games and maybe do some community lobbies as well!

https://www.twitch.tv/chakklet

Play with chak on February 5th!

**6 DAYS LEFT** until we see the **first** [Keyma](http://Keyma.sh).sh LAN event held at the Esports Centre in Warwick. This is an incredible moment for us, as it is an even more exciting moment for the typing esports community as a whole. Want to give a shoutout to @eikomaniac for making this happen and the rest of the team at Warwick University as well!

**Event Details:**

**[🕐](https://emojipedia.org/one-oclock/)** January 29th 2022 at 12PM GMT

**[🏢](https://emojipedia.org/office-building/)** Esports Centre, Coventry, UK

**[🔗](https://emojipedia.org/link/)** https://twitch.tv/warwickesports

**Special Note for Attendees:** 

The event is opened for spectators, but must be registered on the list to show up. There will be **free pizza** given out at the event. 

Registration: [https://warwick.ac.uk/esports/calendar/typing-championship](https://warwick.ac.uk/esports/calendar/typing-championship)

**Press Release(s)**

[https://warwickinnovationdistrict.com/2022/01/20/university-of-warwick-to-host-uks-first-in-person-typing-tournament/](https://warwickinnovationdistrict.com/2022/01/20/university-of-warwick-to-host-uks-first-in-person-typing-tournament/)
[https://esports-news.co.uk/2021/12/15/warwick-uni-competitive-typing-tournament/](https://esports-news.co.uk/2021/12/15/warwick-uni-competitive-typing-tournament/)
[https://geekybrummie.com/blog/esports-roundup-typing-tournament-advisory-panel-uketc/](https://geekybrummie.com/blog/esports-roundup-typing-tournament-advisory-panel-uketc/)

Warwick Esports Typing Championship Event Details

Hello friends,

A few days ago we have made an announcement that discusses the future for Ranked which included the possibility of removing Ranked at a later date.

When we made this post, there has been a lot of communication received between you guys and myself and some of our other Mods. I've also personally contacted some other indie games in regards for how to approach Ranked.

While this decision may not be taken lightly, **I am personally making the decision to removed Ranked, 1v1 Duel, Sudden Death and Battle Royale**. Now, **before everyone busts out the pitchforks** please let me explain the decision behind this.

**1) Statistics**
Ranked is by far our least used mode averaging < 0.01% of all total matches. If you don't believe me, these are the numbers that were pulled.

In the past month, there were **1100 ranked matches** and **188k public matches** - this is a percentage of 0.0058%.

In the past 3 months, there were **2600 ranked matches** and *550k public matches** - this is a percentage of 0.0047%

**2) Ranked's Problems**
While it's hard to say how many players were turned away by these problems. There were a few notable problems ranging from the complexity of Glicko2 and smaller detailed issues including WPM showing incorrectly despite being correct. 

**3) New Solution?**
While no one likes the removal of features, I can assure that we would bring it back before the end of Q1 2022. The ideal goal is to fully rewrite Ranked, another rewrite of Matchmaking that will include **our own skill rating system** along with other important changes that makes the Ranked experience a bit more positive for a new user.

Everyone knows that I love competitive and want to keep the competitive spirit in Keyma.sh - I think while this direction may be disappointing short-term I do strongly feel this will pay off in the long-term.

We will be ending Season 4 on January 14th at 10AM PST. The top 3 winners will receive Discord Nitro Classic as a prize.

Thank you for reading.
- Cameron

Ranked Matchmaking's Future (updated)

Hello friends,

We have deployed an update that addresses a bug that is currently impacting Ranked players. We also want to have a mini-discussion about Ranked and its future with you guys.

As of now, Season 4 is now live meaning you can play it right now. We have introduced a few important changes to our Ranked matchmaking system.

1. You only need to be **level 5** to have access to Ranked. While this change is not something I wanted to do, it was almost necessary in order to get some new players that don't want to grind to Level 10.
2. We have decreased the Ranked Games requirement of **10 games** to only **5 games**. This means after 5 games you will see your new rank
3. Under any API, your rank will now display as "Unranked" until the criteria is met, meaning you cannot abuse Discord bots to see your Rank beforehand.

Now that we have that out of the way, **let's talk about Ranked's future in Keyma.sh**.
This mode was one of the only modes that I was excited to have on Keyma.sh, as a huge esports person myself I thought Ranked was going to be a pretty major addition to Keyma.sh. However with a mixture of the initial issues in the beginning of ranked, adding on an unstable playerbase there has been discussions of removing Ranked.

To put this simply, Ranked only accounts for ~1% of our matches throughout an entire month. To help visualize this, we can average between 150k-250k matches per month alone where Ranked within 3 months has only produced 2500 of those games.

While the community has voted against removing Ranked, I still do want to remove Ranked and am looking into removing it going into Q2 2022. This may seem pretty terrifying for our hardcore Ranked players, however I should express that removing Ranked is not a permanent change but more of an indefinite change.

I want to rebuild Ranked and the 1v1 mode to be a lot cleaner, while there's no time period for this. It is a lot easier to do these kinds of rewrites when we outright remove the mode since it removes the clutter and helps us go back to the original code that you see in Casual and perfect that even more. Ranked wasn't necessarily a rushed addition, but it wasn't a non-rushed addition. As someone who's played Ranked modes in several games such as Quake, CS, Valorant, Overwatch, etc. I had a pretty thought-out idea of how I wanted Ranked to work and how I wanted the 1v1 mode to work. That being said, once I started building it I just wanted to finish it just as fast as I started it which resulted in the rocky launch of Ranked as mentioned earlier.

The next phase of Ranked and 1v1 will be to find a way to utilize first keystroke delay in this mode. That way we can partially eliminate the problem where some players can finish before others despite having a higher WPM (tieing essentially). To clarify, I'm talking about when people finish at the same time, not people who were on the last word and almost finished (as we've seen people mistakenly report as the same issue for some reason).

Carrying on, my final note on Ranked Season 4 is that if we still see the lack of playerbase for it then we will remove it without a poll indefinitely and reintroduce Ranked at a later time when it feels right. Of course during that time we will be looking into rewriting 1v1 and Battle Royale (which is currently broken but unplayed anyways).

Thanks,
Cameron

Ranked Matchmaking's Future

WELCOME TO THE WARWICK ESPORTS TYPING CHAMPIONSHIP 2021! 

The qualifiers are now open! Here's how to enter:

1. Sign up using this sign-up form: https://forms.gle/wCpdHuLtLyZhBRDG9 
This is a required step, do not forget to fill in the form!
(You can check if you're signed up by the spreadsheet on the dedicated discord server for the tournament: https://discord.gg/tJkTCsYHcU)

2. Read everything on the Keyma.sh leaderboards here: 
https://keyma.sh/competitions/warwick-esports-typing-championship-2021/

3. Start racing!

Your score is determined by the average WPM of your last 20 matches.
Qualifiers end on Saturday 7th January 2022, 12pm GMT so you have 3 weeks to stick to a score you're happy with.

GOOD LUCK everyone! ❤️

NOTE: THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT. Please only qualify if you have the opportunity to travel to the Warwick esports centre located in the UK to potentially compete in the Finals. 

Warwick Esports Typing Championship 2021 Qualifiers are LIVE

**WELCOME TO THE NEXT PHASE OF KEYMA.SH**

Hello friends,

Today we have a few key updates that have been released and hopefully this will cover most if not all of them. This has been a change that I've promised since Open Beta, this is also a change I've personally wanted to do as well.

**Winter Shop Update**
It's time to refresh the item shop with some new sweet cosmetics! This time we've put more focus on banner designs rather than playercards since we had so little banners in the past. All in all you can expect 6 new banner designs with their respective color variations and playercards!
Go check out the new items in the shop and get yourself new virtual swag! 💜

**Transition from React to Next**
Since the start of Keyma.sh, one of my biggest complaints was the lack of SEO that we were unable to really add. Our Google search results were always pretty wacky, and it was pretty frustrating sharing a newsletter to Twitter and not have the title update in the social card. Because of this, I was waiting for a good time to migrate to Next and have finally found the time to do so.

Next.js is basically an extra layer to React that helps us utilize SSR (Server Side Rendering) which for us was the solution to all of our SEO troubles. There is also some performance enhancements but this isn't the place to get too technical.

While we did perform a migration, we have also optimized some frontend code and cleaned up some smaller areas though it's nothing too notable.

**Regular Authentication Added**
Over the year that we've been launched, we've had several players tell us to add a way to create an account via regular email address and password. This has now been added.

You will not be able to create an account if an email is in use (this includes emails attached to OAuth providers such as Discord, Google and GitHub). We also have added password restrictions including 8 characters long, 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase and 1 special character.

We also still have no plans on allowing files to be stored directly on the site, however we are looking into adding selectable profile pictures in the future. We may also consider allowing users to opt-in to Gravatar (opt in since it's easy to decrypt Gravatar's md5 hash to get a users email).

**Open Source**
We are closing <https://github.com/keyma-sh/game-tracker> and have transferred all remaining issues and information to <https://github.com/keyma-sh/next>. You may also notice that we have fully open-sourced our frontend (finally)!

This has been a personal goal since the very start of Keyma.sh and are super thrilled to finally do this. If you are looking to contribute, please make sure you follow `CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md` and `CONTRIBUTING.md`. We are also still new to this, so if any of our documentation has any errors then please let us know.

**Experimental Battle Royale**
I was recently made aware of a rare-ish bug with Custom matches where you could create a match with the 1v1 mode but with multiple players. After being made aware of this, I realized that making the 1v1 mode in a Free for All setting wouldn't actually cause any real harm so I have now turned it into its own mode that can be accessed only via Custom.

Honestly, I'm not too sure how this mode will play out, but instead of making it best of 5 rounds, they are best of 7 (and may increase to best of 10 at a later time).

Keyma.sh v2.1.0!

Hello friends,

Ever wanted to see the worlds best competitive typist in action on a frequent basis? Well now you can!

We are incredibly happy to announce that **Keyma.sh and Drop** will be partnering up with legendary typist chak to deliver you some weekly / bi-weekly streams on Twitch! Our first stream will go **live on December 11th at 2PM PST, 5PM EST, where the majority of the stream will consist of chak building a brand new Drop keyboard that will be used in future streams on Keyma.sh! Who knows, there might be even some typing involved.. 👀

Tune in to see godlike keyboard-building skills and incredible typing performance!

**Live on December 11th at 2PM PST**
https://www.twitch.tv/chakklet

Chakk Partnered Stream on Dec 11th

Ever been told you type fast? We have some great news for you!

We are excited to announce the UK's first ever LAN typing tournament: Warwick Esports Typing Championship 2021, which will be hosted in the Esports Centre!
There will be an online qualifications stage from 17th December 2021 - 7th January 2022 on Keyma.sh

The Top 24 will be invited to the in-person finals at the Warwick Esports Centre to play a double elimination bracket for the chance of becoming the fastest typists in the UK, and winning prizes from our generous sponsors: Das Keyboard and Mechboards UK!

For more information about the event, please visit its designated Discord server: https://discord.gg/hafkAx9rHv 

More information to follow in the coming weeks!

Announcing Warwick Esports Championship 2021 LAN!

Hello friends,

In celebration of our 1-year anniversary we have decided to do a T-Shirt giveaway! The T-Shirt we are giving away is the 3D letter print of Keyma.sh, and the winner will have it shipped to them free of charge.

**Participation Rules**
1. Join our Discord https://discord.gg/df4paUq
2. Go into #giveaways and react with the Mashy emoji (:petmashyviolently)

The participants that use the correct emoji will be thrown into a randomized draw.
We will decide a winner on December 11th at 12PM PST.

T-Shirt Giveaway!

On **November 22nd, 2020** we released Keyma.sh to the Public under "Open Beta". This was a personal project that I've been wanting to do since 2018 and will always be grateful for its existence today.

Keyma.sh was originally started from TypeRacer, I used to be a Moderator for their Discord and was one of the original OG's in the Discord when it first came out. I also was a Site Moderator for TypeRacer for a little while. During 2017 and 2018 I was a decent competitor in Typing esports, also managed to get a 272wpm (which was the second highest after Kathy's 276wpm) at the time and was actively trying to help Esports in several ways.

One of my first projects before Keyma.sh was trying to initiate a World Typing Association, it would be a global ranking of competition amongst every competitor from TypeRacer, NitroType, 10Fastfingers, TypingZone, you name it. The goal was to create a resource for typists who wanted to compete, and the goal was to create a sanctioned environment for Typing esports for the years to come. 

After a short while I gave up on World Typing Association simply because it was incredibly hard to get commitment to such a structure. During my Moderation with TypeRacer I was actively also trying to work for TypeRacer because I was disappointed with how little TypeRacer was improving (at least in my eyes). Unfortunately due to my lack of experience I was never able to get such a job with TypeRacer which while it was extremely frustrating and disappointing, was also a motivation factor for Keyma.sh

When I first started building Keyma.sh there were at least 2 smaller projects of me testing out text validation techniques, layouts, looks and reactive-ness. The original Keyma.sh was build under Project NNT (Project Not NitroType) and was built with PHP because that was all I knew at the time. As time progressed the project was also shelved and then a more improved PHP version was rebuilt with actual Websocket technology. Again, this was also shelved after a little while.

Around May/June 2020 I decided to re-approach the idea of building my own esports-focused typing game. I love Esports and I love typing, around this point I already hosted a couple typing tournaments and have competed in several typing tournaments and competed across a variety of FPS-based games so my approach going into Keyma.sh was always pretty clear.

When Keyma.sh first started going into Development, it was mainly with Lachney as he always had ideas for TypeRacer but was never at a level where they actually would "go anywhere". Soon after Lachney referred me to DayColor as he has a lot of experience with Javascript frameworks and has already done some projects relating to TypeRacer and Discord Bots.

At this point I was thrown into learning two new languages that weren't PHP and DayColor ended up focusing on school so I was stranded with pretty much nothing except the base validation system for the Gameplay (made by DayColor). From there one I spent over 5 months learning Javascript in-and-out, and learning the basics of building a basic typing game. Some of this progress was logged which you can find here.

July 2020: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nmf2zGCKLw>
August 2020: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG9tUURJ2xk>
September 2020: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfgRj-t6kEE>

At this point the Development was skyrocketing with different ideas that was never implemented, my main focus was a Spectator-mode which was never properly executed by any typing game until now. Which lead us to the Open Beta launch on November 22nd, 2020.

I will forever be grateful for **all** of our testers prior to Open Beta - they have helped shape this project to where it is and I can't imagine what Keyma.sh would've been like otherwise. 

**List of Testers prior to November 22nd, 2020 (labelled by Discord ID's)**
Aery#8535, ai#3734, Al_The_Awesome#0351, Amaranth#0069, Andrea#5347, Bailey#0048, bluely#6758, Bomb_Guard#0414, call me napkin#3817, chak#5471, Chriss#3132, Climbing Bird YT#4532, Conspyre#9999, craurd#3504, D y l a n#5666, DAN#9019, dancetheorist#5850, Dango#5524, Decone#2516, deroche#8343, dessle#9999, dicey#1000, discoRyne#6820, Dog Galindo xd#9031, eiko#5645, Eni#4999, erik aka shazzy#4466, faxlore#0069, felix.b#1633, firewaran#0241, Foggy#8530, Fruit#9006, poem#3305, Jisoo#2991, Jonathan#6666, Kathy#8713, KeeganT#1689, LaggyLuke#0001, LeSirH#0001, lib#2382, Lord Yhru#0403, Lucky Forrest#2201, luna#1234, MysteriousSilver#8509, Doppler#8434, Nova#1281, oats#6148, POLAKSTWO#6606, Pro QBr#7679, Reimi#0383, samuraipie#4319, Sean Wrona, Seraph#9999, Shouto#5759, sig#7811, Speed Typing#8829, EvilTexan*A$HL3Y*#0001, ssteve#6840, T_0nio#9879, tchke#0001, The Devil#4942, timjeffery44#0004, TyrantTick#1570, valikor#2036, Vielle#5703, Volhosis#6085, Voort Fujiwara#7197 and xX0T1Xx#0272

**Seriously, thank everyone prior to the Open Beta and to everyone who is still playing presently. While I'm speaking personally, I am grateful for everyone who has been a part of this journey.**

Thank you,
Cameron

1-Year Anniversary

Hello everyone,

We have been getting an overwhelming amount of feedback in regards to the slowness of Keyma.sh and periodic crashing that is occurring. We have been investigating this issue for some time now and think we may have found a small piece to the problem - however in order for us to fully debug this issue we are going to temporarily disable the post-match leaderboards until further notice. When or if this changes, we will let you know!

Thanks,
Cameron

Leaderboards temporarily disabled

Hello everyone,

A very unexpected update for many people, however this update has been needed since the start of Keyma.sh and should've 
been done before the initial release.

### What's actually new?
To be fair, not much is new. We have introduced a few new design changes with our settings, leaderboards, profiles and some other minor changes. 
However, not much has changed that it's really considered an important update.

Since June 2021, we have spent a lot of time putting development towards a "new" version of Keyma.sh. Not meaning as in
a completely new game as the functionality is mostly the same but we have made some huge changes to the code base
including **switching to a new database**, **recreating all of our API endpoints from scratch** and **completely rewriting most of the codebase**.

With these changes, we expected to only be rewriting our backend however decided to do a lot of changes to our frontend core.
Since going from a relational database to a NoJSON database is a huge infrastructure change, our naming conventions for certain 
data was just not going to translate easy so we decided to rewrite **most** of the frontend. This includes a rewrite to Settings,
Profiles, Tournaments and Leaderboards.

### Changes you will likely notice
- Moderators / Staff will now have a unique/exclusive staff badge rather than a verified badge.
- Improved matchmaking response time.
- Settings has been rewritten.
- Profiles has been rewritten.
- Profiles now have pagination on Leaderboards.
- Leaderboards have been redesigned
- Tournaments have been redesigned
- Keyboard shortcuts are now customizable
- Version mismatch will now be validated by the server
- Leaderboards will only show your best result instead of showing multiple results on the leaderboards.
- The front page leaderboards are now only showing for the last hour of matches played rather than filtering 400 rows of data down to 20.
- Leaderboards will actually follow which world they are assigned to.
- Rewrote how configuration settings work for Players (adding customization is slightly easier for us in the near future now).
- Notifications UI has been giving a minor facelift.
- Tournaments with more than 50 players will load like a beauty.
- Overall performance in terms of pulling data / sending data to our database should be increased almost literally 50%.
- Homepage leaderboards are now pre-generated every two minutes instead of sending a read/write every visit.
- Lobbies now have owner transfership.
  - In addition to this, owners will transfer if the owner leaves after 20 seconds.
- Lobbies now have banning abilities.
- Custom and Global chat will now show relative dates (2 minutes ago) instead of the timestamp.
- You can now download your data in the **Danger Zone** tab in Settings
- You can now submit your account for deletion in the **Danger Zone** tab in Settings
- WPM and Accuracy have been adjusted to be slightly more accurate

### Updates to Patrons
- Patreon Supporters will no longer have to deal with Ads anymore.
  - If you are a Patreon Supporter, make sure you log out and back into your account for this change.

### Changes you will likely not notice
- Custom matches have been fully rewritten (not partially like we have in the past now).
- Learning Center lessons have been fully rewritten
- Global Chat has been fully rewritten
- Queue system has been fully rewritten
- Notification system has been fully rewritten
- Match system has been partially rewritten
- All API endpoints have been fully rewritten
- All Utility functions have been fully rewritten

Keyma.sh v2 Released!

Our good friends at the Alberta Esports Association (AESA) will be hosting another series of tournaments called the **Capsule Series**!
It is a 2-day event from **September 4th - September 5th** and will be hosting another Keyma.sh tournament.

**Info and Register**
https://smash.gg/capsule

**Date and Time**
September 5th at 5PM PST / 8PM EST

**Prizing**
The prizing gets scaled based on how many participants are in the tournament. You can find a full breakdown on https://smash.gg/capsule.

If the event exceeds 129+ participants then our prize pool can be close to $250!

**Format**
The tournament's qualifications will start at **5PM PST / 8PM EST** and the qualification process will be open for **1 hour**. After the 1 hour, the top 8 fastest typists will be drawn into a Single Elimination bracket and will go head to head in a 1v1 Duel Custom match.

**Check out AESA**
https://esportsalberta.ca

Just to clarify this tournament is or **US and Canadian** players only.

Announcing Capsule Series Keyma.sh Tournament!

Big congratulations to **chak** for winning the Keyma.sh Summer Championship 2021 finals! He is currently our reigning champion from the last tournament back in December of 2020.

We want to give a tremendous shoutout to Das Keyboard, Drop, Modding Legacy and Wisconsin Computer Club for part taking in this experience with us. Without them, this tournament wouldn't have been possible.

Congratulations to our 2nd place player **Izzy**, making his first run being in the Grand Finals as well as Joshu and Alternator for making it to the top 4!

Chak wins the Keyma.sh Summer Championship 2021

32 players fought hard to pass qualifications, now watch them go head to head against people of their own skill til the end!
One life, no second chances. If you lose, you are out.

Bracket:
https://challonge.com/keymashsummerchampionship2021

Stream:
https://twitch.tv/KeymashGame

Thank you to all of our Sponsors:
Drop (https://drop.com)
Das Keyboard (https://www.daskeyboard.com/?utm_source=keymash&utm_medium=sponsorship)
Modding Legacy (https://moddinglegacy.com)
Wisconsin Computer Club (https://wisconsincomputerclub.com)

By the way, for the next 14 days you can use "15OFF" to get 15% off on Merch at https://teespring.com/stores/keymash!

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN!

Keyma.sh Summer Championships 2021 is now LIVE!

## Drop.com joins the Keyma.sh Summer Championship 2021

We are proud to announce our new Sponsor for the Keyma.sh Summer Championship 2021, Drop.com!

They are incredibly well known in the Mechanical Keyboard industry for selling enthusiast grade Mechanical Keyboards and Keycaps. They make some incredible products and they have generously donated two keyboards for our 3rd and 4th place winners as well as a Gaming Headset for 1st place!

**Visit Drop**
<https://drop.com>

**Buy Drop Sennheiser PC38X Gaming Headset**
<https://drop.com/buy/drop-sennheiser-pc38x-gaming-headset>

**Buy Drop ENTR Mechanical Keyboard**
<https://drop.com/buy/drop-entr-mechanical-keyboard>

**New Prizing Format**
1. $300 CAD, 25k Coins, Unique Playercard, Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate & Drop Sennheiser PC38X Gaming Headset
2. $150 CAD, 20k Coins & Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate
3-4th. $75 CAD, 15k Coins & Drop ENTR Mechanical Keyboard
5-8th. 10k Coins
9-16th. 5k Coins
17-32nd. 1k Coins

Drop.com joins the Keyma.sh Summer Championship

## New Inventory Items!
Hello friends,

I just want to give a special thanks to Aevi on Discord who has submitted over 60+ new playercards and banners for us. 
Including a special banner in support of the Keyma.sh Summer Championship 2021!

You can unlock this banner by going to "Shop" > "Banners". It is **free**.

### Other News
There hasn't been too much developments, and will likely remain that way until after the tournament is over.
The reason for this, is that we don't want to accidentally introduce a potential breaking change that can accidentaly harm 
the integrity of the qualifiers.

60+ new shop items!

## Announcement
It has been nearly half a year since the last Keyma.sh tournament, thankfully we've had some amazing people such as SpeedTyper and the Alberta Esports Association (with Edmonton Direct) help fill some of the gaps for the "drought".

As of today, I will be announcing the official **Keyma.sh Summer Championship 2021**!

## Qualification
From **July 19th, 2021** to **August 12th, 2021** players will go through a series of qualification based off their highest average speed in their last 20 games. On July 19th there will be a new announcement with the competition link where you will do your qualification matches on.

## Finals
The **top 32** players will enter a Single Elimination finals bracket where they will compete til the end. There is no second chances after the qualifications, you lose, you're out.

Date: Saturday, August 14th, 2021 at 11AM PST, 1PM EST

## Prizing
As of right now, this is our confirmed prizing and is currently being crowdfunded, if you would like to contribute to the pool please message GNiK#8129 for more information.

**1st:** $200 CAD, 25k Coins, Unique Playercard & Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate

**2nd:** $100 CAD, 20k Coins & Das Keyboard 4 Ultimate

**3rd-4th:** $50 CAD & 15k Coins

**5th-8th:** 10k Coins

**9th-16th:** 5k Coins

**17-32nd:** 1k Coins

## Special Giveaway
Our good friends at Das Keyboard is going to be hosting a Gleam Giveaway for a **BRAND NEW** Das Keyboard of **YOUR CHOICE**. This giveaway is live and will end on August 14th, 2021.
Winners will be announced on the Finals of the tournament.

## Sponsors
- ModdingLegacy ($60 CAD)
- Wisconsin Computer Club ($120 CAD)
- Das Keyboard (4 Ultimate Series Keyboard)

https://www.daskeyboard.com/?utm_source=keymash&utm_medium=sponsorship

Keyma.sh Summer Championship 2021 Announcement!

Welcome to a fairly large update to kick off July! We have created several changes, we have added a performance mode, rewrote Lobbies and fixed matchmaking!

## Sudden Death
Thanks to everyone who has been playing Sudden Death so far, there have been a few issues with it but we are hoping to iron them out sooner than later.

## Casual Matchmaking Fixes
For the past month or so we've been getting some complaints in regards to Matchmaking not ... well matchmaking. After some investigation we have found some partial truth to this and have now patched this issue. You should start finding games with other players more often now.

## Lobby Rewrite
This update isn't necessarily impactful, however the lobbies are now stored on the server rather than being constantly externally pulled from the Database. Once again like many of our other updates, this will help some optimization with Keymash as well as put less load on the Database.

## Performance Mode
This update is highly experimental, we are unsure if we will keep this change. However in Settings we have added a performance mode allowing users to play Keyma.sh without the distraction of playercards. 

If you really like it, let us know, as we are still indecisive on whether or not we will be keeping this change.

## Tournament Announcement
For the past few weeks we have been teasing a tournament announcement, we just want to confirm that we will be announcing something soon. We have been gaining some newer sponsorships and have been pushing the announcement back to figure out prize splitting for the players.

The tournament will be held in mid-August 2021 and will feature a good sized prize pool.

:) More info soon.

Matchmaking fixed, Lobbies rewrite

Hello friends,

As an experiment, we have now added a new Gamemode that can be accessed through **Custom / Lobbies** when clicking the "Mode" tab. 

### Info
Sharing similarities as "Master mode" on Monkeytype, or "Instant Death Mode" on TypeRacer. If you make a typo the match will end instantly. The winner is decided by who proceeds the furthest, and in the event of a tie then the winner is decided by the fastest WPM. 

This mode is still in **beta** and it will be difficult to tell the difference between a tie and a not-tie since it's based off the last keystroke pressed, sorted by the fastest timestamp recorded for said keystroke.

Introducing Sudden Death

## Overview
This is mainly a huge update of our ongoing improvements on Keymash on the performance end - we are still constantly working on improving the performance of the game itself so expect more updates that are similar to this.

We have added some changes to the Gameplay which is mainly directed toward our Stenographer/Secondhand users, however we do have some other minor UI changes that we've made.

**Also, we have a poll running in our #poll channel in Discord in regards to Ranked matchmaking - please go participate.**

## Gameplay
- The input will no longer register spaces at the beginning and only after a word has been typed. This will help stenographer users so they don't have to see the space register as a typo. Additionally this will also help the gameplay be more similar of TypeRacer's since they're the only other game that utilizes this.
- The actual characters are slightly contrasted better for the end user.
- Currency calculation has been slightly buffed to give more coins for longer texts.
- Hidden skillrating in Casual matching has been adjusted so you can find more players.
- Gamemodes now have a specific configuration for "Round End" and "Match End" triggers, this can allow us to create some different modes such as a "Sudden Death" in the near future.

## Items
- Borders have a reduced level requirement across the board

## Custom/Lobbies
- Lobbies will on longer hard-redirect on creation, or hard-redirect on exit

## Leaderboards
This change will effect the "Leaderboards" section, and the "match end" leaderboards, Competitions as well as Profile's "matches" section.
- Pagination no longer creates an additional ping to the server (this is a rough savings of 35-45k reads to the server per day)
- Pagination buttons are now re-activated for Profiles and the Match Leaderboards.
- Home page recent leaderboards now only filter 300 recent results instead of 400.
- Fixed bug where your Ranked position on the leaderboard wouldn't show at the bottom like it should.

## Other Changes
- Rewrote Casual matchmaking's script to be a little bit more optimized (again, rough savings of probably 10-15k per day).
- Due to Global Chat's being public and listing all users and because this setting wasn't really changed at all we have removed the "Show Online" option from Settings.

## Bug Fixes
- Fixed bug where Ranked Matches will create a win however update your leaderboard result as a loss. (If you are a victim of this, it will be fully resolved for all accounts on Sunday)
- Fixed bug where Blogs would always show a "NEW" on every new browser session
- Fixed bug where you could queue against yourself
- Fixed bug with profiles where stenographers couldn't see the graph

Performance / Bugfixing Update

Hello friends,

I never thought I'd actually do this, at least to this scale - but for our first time we have performed a server rollback on Keyma.sh
The positives of this is that the last backup was 4 hours prior to this Blog Post, the down side is of course the 4 hours of data being gone.

I am deeply sorry for this.

Thankfully, we also have a new feature that we've added to Keyma.sh that should at least mitigate some of the damage caused.

## Tournaments
- We now have **PRIZING** support - meaning we can give playercards, borders, banners or coins depending on what place you finish in the tournament.
- You will now get a notification for any prizing won
- You will now get a notification for placing top 5 in the tournament
- **All daily ladders** will be giving out 300 coins split between top 5

## Global Chat
- Fixed bug with duplicating users
- Fixed bug with scrolling when user posts new message
- Fixed bug where users list would overflow
- Fixed bug where the Chat would not overlap properly with the Ranked "How to Play" screen

## Blogs
- Fixed bug where the latest blog wouldn't fully register in your cookies

Rollback & Tournament Rewards

Hello friends, today we are releasing a series of "Quality of Life" updates in addition to a lot of structural changes with matches, lobbies, lessons and our Global chat.
This will be a lengthy changelog but I recommend reading through it all :)

**Note: You will have to re-log into Keyma.sh due to a security update as well.**

## Accounts
- Guests will now use randomly generated Adverbs with a number followed by it

## Global Chat
- UI Updated
- Includes Players List on the Side in Chat (has chat active)
- Moved to the bottom to make it less disruptive
- The design now shows the users avatar and border color

## Home / Play
This page has a series of changes, a lot of it is mainly quality of life and ease of access related.
- News posts will now show "NEW" for ones that aren't read yet
- The actual play options are smaller and are located on the top, they will not take up 1/2 of the page's screen alone
- Updated design for Blogs
- The Level 10 requirement for Ranked will now replace the Button, disallowing users from clicking it from now on

## Blogs
- Updated design for the Blog posts
- Added proper Markdown support in Changelogs

## Gameplay
- For **Public Matches**: the final placements are now stored and sorted server-side rather than being Database reliant. 
  While for some this might not seem like a huge update, however based off estimates we will be saving an estimated amount
  of 40k read/write queries per day (1,600+ read/write queries per hour). 
- Ping is now registered as a "volatile" event, meaning it won't be part of a Websocket's queue and will only update if 
  it feels it should be. Also testing a different way of calculating ping that may or may not be more accurate.

## Translations
- Added Arabic strings (no RTL support yet)
- Added Chinese Simplified strings
- Added Greece strings
To clarify, none of these languages have tournaments created for them

## Other
- Added H1, H2 and H3's around top-level items, this is mainly an SEO update and has no actual impact on the game
- Minor UI Changes to Profiles
- Minor UI Changes to Leaderboards
- Minor UI Changes to Lists (in Leaderboards)
- Minor Color change to Competitions

## Backend
- Removed unused data (including scrapped features such as Following / Messages)
- Removed unused fields
- Removed unused read/write queries
- Created a custom server event logger
- More server-side stuff that no one would care about
- Security change which requires accounts to re-log in (sorry)

June 2021 Update

**Hello friends,**
  &nbsp;
There has been a bug recently where newer players could not gain any form of experience whatsoever unless they completed a Lesson in the Learn section beforehand.
  &nbsp;
This issue has since been fixed and should return to normal. Any Experience that is not properly reconciled in your stats will be fixed on Sunday by our automatic task runner.
  &nbsp;
Thanks,
Cameron

Experience bug fixed!

**Hello friends,**
  &nbsp; 
I figured I would elaborate on why the server has been consistently getting restarted and is appearing to be messing up on certain PC's and platforms.
  &nbsp; 
We are currently in the process of separating our infrastructure, our goal is to create an API server, a gameserver and a webserver and help spread out the resources towards these systems as this will create a much better user experience for you and will help us prepare for the future of Keyma.sh to our more global audience.
  &nbsp; 
Currently we will be performing maintenance consistently for the next few days, this is going to include doing server restarts for other forms of maintenance/updating/upgrading between 9PM PDT/PST - 12AM PDT/PST. We will try to keep most of the restarts in this range, however it is rough and in some cases we could restart the server mid day.
  &nbsp; 
While this is a very inconveniencing process, we feel right now is the appropriate time as this is our "slow traffic" month as a lot of areas of interest are opening outside of gaming and of course the May long weekend. We hope you understand.
  &nbsp; 
If you are experiencing issues with popups not properly closing and other anomalies, please follow https://keyma.sh/about/troubleshooting for more information.
  &nbsp; 
- Cameron

Server Updating (May 23 - May 27)

**Hey friends,**
  &nbsp;
We are currently performing some maintenance on the servers, while the servers may appear online and may function for some games. They may go down at any given time, we are sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.
  &nbsp;
**EDIT:** As of 10:50PM, we are done with our maintenance :)
- Keyma.sh


Server Maintenance (May 22 @ 9:00PM PDT)

**MAJOR UPDATE**
  &nbsp; 
Today we are proud to announce one of our biggest updates that we've ever incorporated into Keyma.sh - at least on a visual aspect. To clarify, this will be our last "redesign" of Keyma.sh as we feel this suits our brand a lot more than our other ideas and designs that we have tried and tested.
  &nbsp; 
Secondly, we have also added a couple new features to Keymash which you will learn more about the more you read down. We've also added more customization settings in regards to Audio sounds and layout customization.
  &nbsp; 
**Final Facelift**
We are proud to announce our last facelift to Keymash - we will be keeping this new facelift for a much longer time and we apologize for putting this community through so many redesigns at this point. Part of growing as a game, obviously there will be some revamps and design changes over time but this layout is likely to be our permanent one.
  &nbsp; 
**Our Inventory System is now LIVE**
This update has been one of the most highly requested by our community and we are glad to have this officially take off after so many months of consideration and execution.
  &nbsp; 
Just to be clear, we are currently **not offering** trading of items and will not become the next "hey I found this new site". This is just a small addition to the game that will give players the incentive to play more and we hope to more regularly add content to the game. You can **gain coins** by playing public matches, this will include matches that are in the Competition section.
  &nbsp; 
When purchasing an item in the Shop, you can enable it via your Settings. If you are on a Guest account, you will not be able to use the Shop at all :)
  &nbsp; 
**Chat with other players**
As an experiment, we have created a "Global Chat" that can be accessed from the top-right corner of your screen. This will automatically close itself when entering a match however any closing will have to be manually done.
  &nbsp; 
To clarify, this chat has some form of self-moderation and while this chat can easily be cleared on a refresh. **Any form of rule-breaking found** will result in an instant ban of your Keyma.sh account. There is **no exception**.
  &nbsp; 
**Profile Banners**
In our shop you will notice we now are offering banners, we hope to extend the amount in the near future but for now we have provided a few different color schemes until we can get some more creative juices flowing. :)
  &nbsp; 
**Custom/Private Match**
We have made it a much easier experience for Lobby owners to modify their Private lobbies. We have also added new features to the Chat system such as including avatars, and sending typing notifications when other typists are typing.
  &nbsp; 
**Gameplay Changes**
We have reduced the background opacity of the Countdown, making it so you can see the text behind it a little better. I know players requested us moving us, but we simply couldn't find a good place to put it that didn't make it look odd for newer typists. If you **have any suggestions* then we strongly advise you to let us know on our Game Tracker on GitHub.
  &nbsp; 
In addition to this, we also added two new features which is the ability to change the size of the "container" where the text is. We have also added a countdown beep (that can be disabled in settings). This will also reflect our new "Match Completed" screen where we made a proper design that doesn't confuse Round duels from regular casual matches. This match end screen will also show Level Up, Coin and Achievement rewards. Oh yes, we also made the Ranked sounds also toggle-able in the Settings.
  &nbsp; 
**That was lengthy**
There is a few bug fixes in the middle of all these changes that we did not address in this post, however you can check our Game Tracker on GitHub as we closed any issues that are fixed.
  &nbsp; 
We hope you all enjoy this, we will have some more news around the Early-Mid June as well for a potential tournament. Oh yea **Ranked Season 2** has now started, our last Ranked season was supposed to end a while ago but extended it due to this update.
  &nbsp;
- Cameron


Major Update (May 21, 2021)

**Announcing Edmonton Direct 2021**
Hello everyone, today we have a very special and important announcement to share with you all. Hosted by the Alberta Esports Association and Edmonton Screen Industries Office (ESIO) we are proud to announce that Keyma.sh will be involved in the **Edmonton Direct 2021** gaming event on May 15th - May 16th.
  &nbsp;
This event will feature an insane amount of tournaments including VALORANT, Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Starcraft 2, Tetr.io and of course KEYMA.SH!
The Keyma.sh part of the event will be hosted on May 16th starting at 5PM PST (6PM MDT, 8PM EST) and will run on an estimate of 2 hours long.
  &nbsp;
If you are looking to participate, please register here (only for Canada/US participants): <https://smash.gg/edmontondirect>.
  &nbsp;
**Date (All times in PDT)**
Registration Ends: May 10th at 11PM PDT
Tournament Starts: May 16 at 5PM PDT
Tournament Ends: May 16 at 7PM PDT
  &nbsp;
**Format**
The tournament's qualifications will start at **5PM PST / 8PM EST** and the qualification process will be open for **1 hour**. After the 1 hour, the top 8 fastest typists will be drawn into a Single Elimination bracket and will go head to head in a **1v1 Duel** Custom match.
  &nbsp;
**Prizing**
1st Place: Halo Game Drive Xbox 5TB Special Edition 
2nd Place: Seagate Game Drive Xbox 2TB
  &nbsp;
**Playercard**
Since we are part of such an exciting event, we now have a free Playercard for anyone who wants to represent the event! You will find it under the "Playercards" section in your settings if you are logged in.

Announcing Edmonton Direct Keyma.sh Tournament!

**Hello friends**
  &nbsp;
In this little news post we will be addressing a **common issue that affects < 10% of users** that play on Keyma.sh - and what our response and testing has concluded into this issue.
  &nbsp;
For context, if you have experienced **one or more** of the issues below then this will likely tailor towards you.
- Not able to finish a match - progress bars on all opponents are frozen
- Countdown suddenly stops
- You're able to continue typing but your WPM does not change
  &nbsp;
Now, over the past 4-5 months now we've done several different changes to the game both on the frontend and the backend and there's been times that we've tried debugging it locally and in production and it can only ever be accomplished in a production environment. It has even gotten to the point where we added the new "Bug" button on the bottom right that logged every event between you (the client) and the server. To which we still cannot find anything relevant because in terms of the actual Socket listening it doesn't have an error or an unexpected error or anything that remotely indicates why a disconnect would occur with an immediate reconnect.
  &nbsp;
**When we released our latest frontend redesign update** we brought in a specific user named @Coda#0239 because he is able to have these random disconnecting issues happen in nearly every match he ever touches. Out of our testing we've only witnessed him actually be able to complete one single match before the next one creates the same issues. We requested him to screen share in the past and again we see no signs of error except the server registers the client disconnecting.
  &nbsp;
**Our Latest Experiment**
On our April 15th update we created a private server using the same configuration as current Keyma.sh 1:1 ratio and used it as a testing environment to see if it's a conflicting problem with SSL, Socket.io, Cloudflare or Nginx. After messing around with myself, Coda and a few other friends/players this is what we have gathered so far.
  &nbsp;
1. Socket.io with SSL and Nginx - working
2. Socket.io with Nginx - working
3. Socket.io with Cloudflare, Nginx and SSL- doesn't work
4. Socket.io with Cloudflare and Nginx - doesn't work
  &nbsp;
Our overall common denominator is that Cloudflare (despite allowing Websocket usage) has a conflicting issue with our configuration and we still do not know why, except that upon googling the problem it is "commonly" known that Cloudflare and WebSockets have never played nicely with each other. For full transparency here is a few links below where users have had similar or near-exact issues. And while some of the links have mentioned that it could be due to the "100 second" window that Cloudflare allows before disconnecting a user. It is still not appropriate considering that it doesn't take 100 seconds from the Countdown of a match to the start of it, there is obviously a much bigger issue beneath the surface.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40322431/websockets-keep-disconnecting-with-nginx-and-cloudflare
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39668410/whats-disconnecting-my-websocket-connection-cloudflare-apaches-mod-proxy
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54909597/websocket-disconnects-with-1006-error-without-a-reason
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/websocket-disconnects/70217
  &nbsp;
Now, we **are** looking at solutions that won't sacrifice the integrity of the server's security and are looking at moving away from Cloudflare however we are still investigating as much as we can as Cloudflare is a great platform for what it is - and hopefully sending this blog post along with our Support email will render a proper response this time.
  &nbsp;
We apologize that this is still an issue, but please understand that we are currently working on seeing on workarounds for this problem. Just no luck yet, and the amount of ideas we can throw are near the end. If you are currently experiencing this issue, the best action that has worked perfectly is using a VPN for now.

Randomly disconnecting mid-match

**Refactoring Frontend**
Our React frontend has been completely restructured, moving away from class-based components to functional components. This alone has over 160+ files changed, we've also went ahead and modified certain areas of Keyma.sh. Additionally, Session states will not generate per component or per page meaning you will see more performance in this area. There is only 3 class-based components that we hope to transition in the near future when more time is permitted.
  &nbsp;
**Removing Facebook, adding GitHub and Twitter**
We have removed Facebook from our SSO list of providers, I was going to make a more formal announcement but later discovered that we actually have 0 Facebook accounts so this won't be damaging to literally anybody. In replacement of Facebook, we have introduced GitHub and Twitter as new SSO options.
  &nbsp;
**Languages**
We have added Portugese (Brazil), Italian and Dutch as an available translation option in Settings. Due to lack of texts, we currently do not have any tournaments for these quite yet. But please feel free to submit them via https://keyma.sh/about/contribute!
  &nbsp;
**Settings**
The settings page has been redesigned, everything now contains a left side menu where you can select which setting you would like to change. **Note to Developers** we will be creating a partial Developers program where our API endpoints will require an API Key and all of the configuration for Developers will be found in Settings at a later date. Any current API's that exist are not being effected at this time.
  &nbsp;
**Other Changes**
There is minor UI bug fixes with our Login menu. We have also fixed a bug where accessing `/play/{regular|dictionary|random}` wouldn't redirect or rather work on Match end. Other than that, most of the bug fixing I've done with UI are mainly just small consistencies around the pages.
  &nbsp;
**Tournament**
One of our very own, SpeedTyping is hosting a $100 tournament exclusively on Keyma.sh - the Qualification round goes from April 16th to the 23th with the finals being April 24th-25th.
  &nbsp;
Video: https://youtu.be/QR8mekrbATg
Tournament: https://keyma.sh/ladders/spotlight-typing-tournament-1

Big Update and Community Tournament

Hey @everyone,
  &nbsp;
Since last year we told everyone that we would he hosting weekly Discord cups with prizing including Discord Nitro. And while we kept a good streak, our commitment to releasing ranked and our two redesigns have essentially stopped these from happening.
  &nbsp;
However this **Sunday on April 11, 2021 at 5AM PT** we will be releasing two cups with prizing being Discord Nitro. The following categories will be
  &nbsp;
a) Speed (Fastest WPM)
b) Average (Fastest Average WPM)
  &nbsp;
You can also find the competitions linked below:
Consistency (AVG/Fastest Average): https://keyma.sh/ladders/3cb8d719-9328-4a73-a092-3950bf028e26
Speed (Fastest WPM): https://keyma.sh/ladders/4c5aa9fc-3005-4131-8417-195bc6cbacd3
  &nbsp;
Again, the winner will receive a **1-month Discord Nitro**! So don’t miss out if you want access to GIF avatars, and whatever else you want.
  &nbsp;
- Cameron

Two Competitions for Discord Nitro!

**Major Update**
Today is the launch of our major April 2021 update, this will contain major improvements to a lot of areas of the game including our "Tournaments" and "Leaders" pages. As well as other improvements that are more on the Quality of Life. Oh yes, and finally resolving the Tournaments calculations bug once and for all.
  &nbsp;
**Gameplay Changes**
Debugging:
	- While in a match we have added a toggle-able button in the bottom right corner with a "bug" icon. Clicking this will open a prompt to where you can copy your Debug log and post it in #bug-reports or emailing us at support@keyma.sh.
	- This feature is specifically to address issues with people randomly disconnecting in between matches. While most of these disconnects are packet-loss, we are wanting to see if there's a way we can try to eliminate the packet loss either by limiting the number of requests we send and adding certain fail-safes if packets fail to send.
  &nbsp;
**Design Changes**
	- Redesigned and Cleaned Frontend in several areas 
	&nbsp; (Profile, Custom, Learn, etc)
	- Recreated Top Navigation
	- Recreated Homepage
	&nbsp; (Now includes Queue and Casual play directly when viewing front page)
	- Recreated Tournaments
	&nbsp; (Now has Search, Sort, Pagination filters)
	- Recreated Leaderboards
	&nbsp; (Now has Sort, Pagination filters for both Casual and Ranked)
	- Removed Sign in page
	&nbsp; (A dropdown when hitting Sign in will be visible)
	- Removed Achievements page
	&nbsp; (You can access it directly through your profile)
	- Removed Notifications page
	&nbsp; (A dropdown box will now show up when hitting Notifications)
	- Removed Play / Queue page
	&nbsp; (Now incorporated in the Home page)
	- Added more Achievements
	- Redesigned Toasts / Popups
	- Added CAPSLOCK warning in Game
  &nbsp;
**UI/UX Changes**
	- Custom / Lobby rooms now show a green square when moving players over
	- Custom/Lobby rooms now have a Profanity filter
	- Notifications has been recreated
	- Dropdown for "Sign In" has been added
  &nbsp;
**Misc Changes**
	- Added Troubleshooting, located in Footer or in the About us pages.
	&nbsp; (This will be used to address cache issues, and general troubleshooting before posting in #bug-reports or emailing us directly)
  &nbsp;
**Fixed Issues**
	- Leaderboards will now properly paginate (9 month old bug)
	- Tournaments results will now calculate correctly
	- Players who do not record a proper score in a Tournament/Ladder will no longer show up in the Tournaments player list
	- Alerts/Notifications from Achievements will now show up correctly / properly.
	- When you click a navigation link or any link on the page while in a match, you will now have a prompt instead of the prompt only showing if you CTRL+F5/F5 or close the tab.
	- Fixed bug where 1v1 Duel would not register a new round if the new text was the same as the current text
	- Bug where changing usernames / creating accounts could result in having the same discriminator as other players
	- Reverted accuracy calculation to be relied on Mistakes rather than Keystrokes. A more modified version of Speedtypingonline's calculation.
	&nbsp; (This may stay permanent, need to evaluate how we can make sure keystrokes that are being corrected do not register as "incorrect - possible later update)
	- Match "isTimeRanOut" flag now works again - don't know why it stopped.

April 2021 Update!

**Hello friends.**
  &nbsp;
Ever since Ranked Matchmaking's release we have had an overwhelming amount of feedback and would like to discuss some of the biggest questions and some of the biggest issues we are working through.
  &nbsp;
**How is your skill rating determined?**
Your skill rating by default is set to 1500 with a rating deviation of 350 (as per Glicko2's documentation). However, your rank will be hidden for the first 10 matches since you are going through the "limbo" stage where essentially you are not at a stable point of games played to determine what your rating should be. This is why most popular games also utilize this strategy. Your skill rating is determined by wins/losses and less about your performance in the game.
  &nbsp;
**Why do I [Gold] always find [Silver] players?**
Simple, the pictures / ranks are simply eye candy. Most if not all matchmaking systems are based off your skill rating and calculating a gap. Some games may make the lowest gap the rank of that skill, some games may  make it lower than that. Our margins that we search for is +-250 skillrating gap from your current Skill Rating, and every few moments your gap will slowly increase by +-4 that way when we face slower queue times then at least you will eventually find a game. We are not a game with a huge playerbase where we can make the gaps a lot lower and more precise, we are a small typing game with a new feature that has never been done in a typing game before. Keep in mind, our matchmaking is based off of your skill rating and not based off your words per minute.
  &nbsp;
**How come I have a higher WPM vs my opponent and still lose?**
There is a few factors we need to put into play, so I will go over these as thoroughly as I can.
-- 1. Keystroke Adjustment
Ever since we launched in November, we have added a system where your first keystroke delay is subtracted from your overall performance since this delay would include ping differentials and much more. This allows you guys to have a more accurate representation of your typing speed compared to others.
  &nbsp;
-- 2. Latency & Routing
Ever played a game like Counter-Strike for example and played a Europe server despite you being a North American player? Your latency will usually be in the 140+ms range and a lot of your shots will be lagged, some of your shots could be off the opponent and hit or you will just hit nothing in the game.
  &nbsp;
Keyma.sh is a very similar game in the sense that, the higher your delay is the more possibilities for anomalies. Now in Keyma.sh's case, the main anomalies will be visual bugs (sometimes in Ranked you could see two green progress bars in some cases) and usually nothing in the server side as Keyma.sh has been built to be purely server side verification (for cheating reasons mainly).
  &nbsp;
-- 3. Finishing a Game
In games such as TypeRacer, NitroType, TyprX and more, all the games allow ALL the players to finish at their own pace. Keyma.sh uses the same system for our Casual gameplay. However in our Ranked mode that option doesn't exist. Whoever finishes the race will tell the server to end the round ASAP meaning the other opponent will not get to finish their text. When you don't finish the round first, you simply do not know your final words per minute. Just because you see you got 130wpm at the 95% progress mark and your opponent got 124wpm at the 100% doesn't actually mean anything. I won't say this fully mitigates peoples complaints, however this is how Ranked works right now.
  &nbsp;
-- 4. Solution?
There's not really many solutions we can propose as some solutions will change other areas of the gameplay as well. However, next update we will be **disabling** the first keystroke delay from Ranked matchmaking ONLY. While this won't fully stop the initial complaints in point 3, it will help decrease the quantity of those complaints as at that point the only thing you have to blame is your Latency. We may implement a static delay removal under a predicted amount of 0.25s which should remedy most players first keystroke delay, however that is still yet to be determined.
  &nbsp;
I hope this answers most questions regarding this, thank you all for playing Ranked! We are hoping to improve this as we go on, this is why Season 1 is purely more of a testing season and not going to be utilized in our Competitive scene until Season 2.
  &nbsp;
- Cameron


Understanding Ranked

**RANKED MATCHMAKING IS LIVE**
Ranked matchmaking is officially released to the public. We are so incredibly excited for this and want to extend a huge thank you to our whole entire community that has stuck with us since November while we work towards this true goal of ours.
  &nbsp; 
**TWITCH**
If you notice on the top left you will see our new Twitch section. We have our own game directory on Twitch simply labelled as "Keyma.sh" so if you ever want to stream Keyma.sh then you can use the opportunity to get on the front of the game itself now!
  &nbsp; 
**MERCH**
We have also released our Merch from Teespring. Why not rock some Keyma.sh Swag while you're at it? Visit here https://teespring.com/stores/keymash
  &nbsp;
- Keyma.sh

Ranked Matchmaking is live!

**RANKED MATCHMAKING - FEBRUARY 7/2021 at 11:00AM PST**
It's finally here, on next Sunday you will be able to go head to head against players of your own skill and battle your way to the top. Now let's talk about some of the nitty gritty of how this will work.
  &nbsp; 
1. Seasons
Our ranked matchmaking system is going to take after certain legendary AAA games such as Overwatch which in this case is Seasons. With Seasons it's a great way to give players a nice refresh after a bad season of competing, or maybe at the tail end of the previous season they finally just started to improve. These Seasons will be restarted roughly every 4 months with the first Season ending on April 30th, 2021. Then Season 2 will start immediately after on April 31st and so on, you will find more information regarding new Seasons on our website.
  &nbsp; 
2. Esports
We want to make sure that our Ranked matchmaking isn't just another feature but rather our future instead. After every 2 seasons we will be hosting a tournament that will be based off the best of the best of our ranked typists for a cash / sponsored prizing. However, this the first Season of launch will not be included in this Esports plan as we will hopefully plan to host another tournament similar to how we ran our last one in December of 2020. We want to keep Season 1 more focused on making it the best competitive mode ever and less focus on having everyone complain about how we put effort into a tournament for a "broken" system.
  &nbsp; 
We hope you enjoy this announcement, please share with everyone you know. We are excited for this just as much as you are.

Ranked Matchmaking on Feb 7th

**Hello friends**
  &nbsp;
Today we have a few announcements in regards to Ranked and to our Spectating experience.
  &nbsp;
**ANNOUNCING 1V1 DUEL**
This mode has technically been an option in our "Custom" section for a long time. However today we have finalized most of the details of it minus some minor eye-candy and voice lines. We **will** be using this mode in our Ranked matchmaking when it is released.
  &nbsp;
Only two players will be able to play this mode at one time, you will go head to head versus your opponent in a round system. Each win you get will be a round win under your belt which will be displayed by a little circle/orb below your player card. The rounds are a **best of 5** meaning the first person to 3 wins will win the match. For tournaments we will likely utilize this system but using rounds in a best of 7 format as well.
  &nbsp;
We will be spending the next two weeks evaluating changes we can make to improve the round system - we want to make sure we can get this as close to perfection as this again is going to be our main mode for Ranked matchmaking.
  &nbsp;
**SPECTATOR REVAMP**
We have completely changed how Spectating works. Spectating will remain disabled for public matches but is an option in Custom matches. We have removed the keyboard layouts as it caused too much distraction from who is in the lead in a match. We have also made the players show up in a "leaderboard style" setting so you can easily keep track of who's in the lead compared to others. With this revamp we have added a caret on the match text for each player meaning you will see exactly what part of the text each player is at and be able to track them incredibly easily. The colors for each player is pre-determined and appears as a triangle next to their player card / avatar. There is a help icon when you enter spectator for more information too.
  &nbsp;
Thanks to everyone who helped test this mode so far, and we are looking forward to bringing Ranked soon!
  &nbsp;
- Keyma.sh Team

1v1 Duel & Spectator Revamp

**Hello friends**
Since our Redesign earlier this year we have made tons of new changes and improvements to the game. You will notice that a lot of pages are loading a lot faster and a lot of the gameplay is also loading in a lot faster. Here is the latest changes we have made
  &nbsp; 
**[CHANGES]**
- Added: Croatian, German and French translations
- Added 30 days to WPM Progression
- Added Ladders 
- Added Simplify Home (this will remove the marketing/advertising stuff on the frontpage)
- Lobbies will now expire if players are == 0 and are older than 1 hour.
- Lobbies players will now expire if they haven't rejoined the lobby within 4 minutes.
- Updated Patreon in About
- Updated "Thanks to Miodec" in About
- Added "Matchmaking" section in Settings
  * This section will be personalized settings for when you queue into a public match - example if you want to type in English language or Spanish in the near future.
- Added Dictionary for French, German and Spanish (Thanks Miodec from Monkeytype.shop)
- Added Anticheat measures
- Tournaments now have full Locale support
- Tournaments now have 4 columns (English, Spanish, German and French)
  * Note: The Daily Speed ladders will generate for Spanish, German and French every 24 hours in server time)
- Database cleanups
- Removed Infolinks as an Ad platform
- Removed Google Adsense
- Implemented NitroPay Ads
- Updated all frontend dependencies to the latest
- Updated all backend dependencies to the latest
- Rewrote gameplay code entirely (~50% code reduction)
- Improved performance on all API endpoints
- Improved performance on Leaderboards
- Improved performance on Settings
- Improved performance on Home
- Improved performance on Custom
- Improved performance on Profile
- Improved performance on Play
- Improved performance on Gameplay
- Improved performance on Learn
- Countdowns will now now let you type on 0 rather than type after 0
- UI updated for Free For All
- Updated matchmaking ranks assets (Thanks Joshua)
- Added Smooth Caret with 5 different speeds
  &nbsp; 
**[FIXES]**
- Error message on settings now appears
- Added hotfix for tournament text type
- Login colors (again)
- WPM Progression will now show last 12 months
- Fixed Countdown scrolling on side navigation mode
- Possible fix for winner placement bug on quitting match (testing)
  &nbsp; 
Thanks everyone again! Hope you enjoy!

Smooth Caret, Gameplay rewrites & more

**New Redesign**
Today is the day that we release our new redesign. This has been a 1 1/2 week project of mine that will make Keyma.sh feel a lot more comfortable. You will notice that there is some changes with certain pages, most text sizing is scaled upwards and we also have a new landing page.
  &nbsp;
**Frontend Stability**
During this redesign we put an extra effort to see if we could limit our footprint on our resources. With this we have losslessly compressed all of our assets and are loading some of our necessary components in chunks rather than one large file so the game will only load what is needed. 
  &nbsp;
- Statistics
CSS: 9KB from 354KB
Background image: 21KB from ~3MB
Playercards: 800kb from ~1.2MB
JS: ~90KB avg from ~500KB avg
Other: ~500KB saved
  &nbsp;
**Server Upgrade**
Since May earlier this year, we have been using the same host that we used in our testing which was a **five dollar** server. Shockingly enough though, the game actually has ran pretty swell in those terms considering how much money we were investing and how many memory leaks the source-code had during Open Beta period.
  &nbsp;
Today we have decided to upgrade our servers to a more expensive one where we have more control over our Memory and Processing power. This means that the game can in theory also handle way more connections simultaneously than ever before.
  &nbsp;
Obviously there is going to be the one down-side for our typists on the other side of the world as our new server is located in New York, NY. Thankfully typing games don't seriously suffer too much from ping disadvantage except minor desync for the most part, but we figured we should mention it anyways.
  &nbsp;
**Translations**
The biggest change in this update with the redesign is translations. All of the strings that you are seeing on Keyma.sh have been assigned in our translations. What this means is that once we start opening up our translation to different languages, that you will see all of the frontend's strings converted to your language. This does not include messages produced by the server (error messages, etc) but at least we're getting somewhere.
  &nbsp;
**Learn**
We have fixed a lot of bugs with our Learning center, including the bug where it doesn't save sometimes. We have also included a WPM and an Accuracy counter making it a lot more exclusive feeling than ever!
  &nbsp;
**Weekly Tournaments**
With this update, we're going to start promoting a tournament on every Sunday where the player with the fastest speed will win one month of **Discord Nitro**. 
  &nbsp;
And with this change as well, we will be rolling out different weekly tournaments in the future based off of activity so everyone will have even more chances to win different prizing.
  &nbsp;
NOTE: If you already have Discord Nitro but got 1st place, then the prize will be transferred to the next player.
  &nbsp;
**Upcoming: Player Configs**
An idea partially from Monkeytype but mainly from popular games such as Counter-Strike. We're going to be retiring our old method of just one customization like WPM to CPM in replacement of a new config system.
  &nbsp;
What this new config system will allow us to do, is to give users more customization freedom with what they want to see or do not want to see on the site. There's going to be some obvious limitations with this such as we're not going to have full layout customization (similar to Monkeytype for example) but we'll allow things such as how big of font size you want to see when you're in a match. Check if you want to hide or show certain things on the site including the landing page. The possibilities are a lot more endless with this route and more importantly, they'll have an export option so other players can implement their favorite players configuration!

Redesign Launched

**CHANGELOG 12/10/2020**
[CHANGES]
- ADDED SPECTATOR MODE TO PUBLIC MATCHES **STILL TESTING
  (When you finish a match and have more than just yourself playing, you can spectate after you finish your game)
- Spectating is slightly revamped to be more streamer friendly
- Added Mistakes death counter
  (If est. 80% of your text is just makes, then you will fail)
- Notifications are now upgraded to the socket rather than pinging a script every 10 seconds.
- Recreated Match front end
- Recreated Match listener 
  (going to change Keystrokes to keyboard events to later on be able to record CTRL/SHIFT; Useful for spectating)
- Achievements code is now moved for when a match is ending rather than checking every page load
- User playercard progress bar is now bigger (helps spectating)
- Countdown now features the game mode you are playing and which text type (Random, Quotes or Dictionary)
- Backend organization (removed ~15 unnecessary files of code)
- User queries will now try to only pull the data you request (exception of profiles)
- Match queries will now try to only pull the data you request (exception of profiles)
- Added maxlength to input field
- Added Cookie Consent message

[FIXES]
- Sortof - Fixed bug with Countdown not always syncing by syncing them sever side
  (The countdown now syncs with the server every 250ms, meaning the player can still potentially start 250ms minimum ahead.)
- Removed match teams table, the teams still exist and the code still exists. However we're not relying on a table to tell a player which team they're on as this caused a lot of unnecessary overhead and don't know how my peanut brain allowed it to exist anyways.
- Fixed bug where there was multiple players in spectator
- Fixed server-side memoryleak with session storage
- Renamed School to Learn
  &nbsp; 
**CHANGELOG 12/18/2020**
[MAJOR UPDATE]
- Rewrote ~80% of Keyma.sh's Backend
  (various fixes, optimizations and more - ~2,000 lines rewritten)
- Fixed 7 backend memory leaks involving Learn, Custom and Match
- Fixed 5 frontend memory leaks involving Learn, Custom, Match and Userbar
- Rewrote Keyma.sh's Client Endpoints (converted fetch to axios with token subscription)
- Rewrote error handling for nearly every method
- Rewrote match creation
While the performances may or may not reflective, this will help us in the future for new features and of course for me cleaner code.
  &nbsp; 
[MATCH]
- Matches are now generated in the "Play" section instead of the actual match content.
- Match authentication is now done via Socket
- User's notification bar is now handled via Socket
- End match's chart now only charts every second word (#polls vote)
- Mistakes will now include the first word when it is mistyped
- Players should no longer be able to be duplicated
  &nbsp; 
[PLAY]
- Redesigned UI - Free for All is the main mode of Keyma.sh
- New UI also includes in-page Custom match browser
  &nbsp; 
[ABOUT]
- Added @Dan to Team
- Added Patreon Supporters (+daangast)

CHANGELOG 12/18/2020

** SPONSORSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT **
  &nbsp; 
We have more amazing news and are excited to announce that **Das Keyboard** will be our newest sponsor! The top 2 typists will win a Das Keyboard of their choice, and the top 8 typists will win Das Keyboard swag. 
  &nbsp; 
In addition to this, Das Keyboard has also provided the community with a **15% Off** discount code that is valid any new keyboard purchases within the United States through December 13th, 11pm CST: KEYMASH. Discount cannot be combined with additional promotions. You can click this link to automatically apply the discount to your cart: <https://shop.daskeyboard.com/discount/KEYMASH?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fall-mechanical-keyboards>
  &nbsp; 
Here is the new prizing for the Keyma.sh December Finals
**1.** $50, Das Keyboard (any)+Swag, X-Bows Knight
**2.** $35, Das Keyboard (any)+Swag, X-Bows Nature
**3.** $15, Das Keyboard Swag, X-Bows Nature
**4.** X-Bows Nature, Das Keyboard Swag
**5.** X-Bows Nature, Das Keyboard Swag
**6.** X-Bows Nature, Das Keyboard Swag
**7.** X-Bows Nature, Das Keyboard Swag
**8.** X-Bows Nature, Das Keyboard Swag