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It's ..... based on your IP. But not only is it based on your IP, some IPs are buggy and just automatically "win" with 6 guesses.

Looking at the javascript, the author is obviously very new to web development, so probably a bug on their side.

Edit: yeah, a bug on the backend as I suspected.

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Or they didn't want to use cookies for fear of GDPR :) ? But I'm not sure you can get off the GDPR hook by collecting IP addresses instead of setting cookies actually...

You can’t. It’s worse, in fact, because users can’t delete them.

Yes, that's why I was moving to LocalStorage based model but this created two different sources of truth which was the whole cause of bug. I'll fix all the issues and delete all data in cloud ASAP. :)

I wanted to view user's activities to make sure the puzzles aren't too easy or too hard. But seems using IP to do this is wrong.

I don't think there's anything wrong with storing the game state on the server, but you should use a session cookie rather than making it based on IP.

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