Thread:BunsenH/@comment-30524275-20161118175413/@comment-24577221-20161118211543

Exactly. Nobody on the wiki has any connection with BBB, other than the couple of their Wall:BBB.Myles employees who pop in from time to time. Your best bet is to file a ticket as Abedshark suggested.

Amazon is usually at least a couple of days behind the other game versions for updates, and Android a day or two later than iPhone/iPad.

The "null" thing is interesting from a programmer's point of view. In many computer languages, when information is passed from one function to another, instead of actually moving all of the data, one just sends a "pointer" to it. In this example, the BBB server would send the news message to some function in the game which is dedicated to talking with the server. That function would need to pass the news message around through several other functions until the message finally gets to the code that formats it to show in the game. But instead of actually passing the message around, the functions just send a pointer: "Here's the location in memory where the news message is stored." This is much faster and more efficient.

But what if there's a problem -- say, the game can't talk to the server? Or the server is there, but it's not responding to the game's request for the latest news? In this case, the functions need to tell each other that there's a problem. One way of doing this, when messages are being passed around by pointers, is to use a "null pointer" -- the pointer is set to 0, which is never a valid memory location. Each function that use a pointer should check to see if the pointer is null, and fail in a "safe" way if it is. As opposed to, say, crashing, which is what usually happens if the program tries to read information from a memory location that doesn't exist.

Now, if the bit of the program that displays the news finds that it has a null pointer, it should just display a message that there isn't any news. Or it could display a message that says that there's a problem. Displaying "null" is a bad sign. It usually means something like that the news-displayer has got a null pointer somehow, and has just passed it along to the lower-level functions for formatting. The lower-level function "knows" very little, but it does have a safeguard: if it gets a null pointer, it displays the message "null".

It looks like someone has been careless.

One thing I did for my M.Sc. (Master of Science) degree was to change my project's software so that large sets of numbers weren't continually being passed up and down the program; it just knew where to find them. The program was doing serious number-crunching, taking roughly 8 hours to run, using the university's main computer system -- it had to run overnight so the computer resources were available. That one fairly simple change increased the running speed by about 13%. It's the kind of little thing that makes a big difference.