TypeRacer has been online since 2008, and we’ve stored every race. That’s over 300 million races completed! This massive amount of data has made the site slow and expensive to maintain.
To address this, we’ve made a significant change:
TypeRacer will now only display the last two years of race results and history because we’re now only storing that much data in our live database. This change dramatically improves site speed, stability, and reduces operational costs, ensuring TypeRacer can continue running long-term.
How this affects you:
- Viewing race results older than two years won’t display on your
/pit/profilepage. - If you navigate to your
/pit/race_historyand try to go back further than two years, the results will simply cut off at that two-year mark. - Directly accessing old race results using a link like /pit/result?id=|tr:typeracer|1 for races older than two years won’t allow you to view that specific race.
- Old ghosting links won’t work.
What isn’t affected:
- Your total races completed, total average speed, and total points will all remain the same. These overall stats are unaffected.
- All your profile information remains intact.
- New race data (under two years old) can be viewed as normal.
- Ghost links for races within the last two years will work.
- Race replays itself remains unchanged.
Important: We are NOT deleting your old data. This has been a major point of confusion, and we want to be absolutely clear. All historical race data, beyond the last two years, is being moved to cold storage where it’s archived. Your old races are safely stored and will remain accessible anytime you want them (unless you specifically delete your account, which is a separate action). Think of it like moving old files to an external hard drive – they’re not gone, just not immediately visible on your desktop.
Download and export your data anytime for free here!
Leaderboard Snapshots
To keep serving and displaying the top historical records on our site, we’re implementing data snapshots for text leaderboards and competitions. Instead of storing thousands of individual data points, we now take snapshots.
Here’s how snapshots work:
- Competition Results: As soon as a competition ends (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly), we take a snapshot of the top 20 records. This significantly reduces the data we need to store for past competitions.
- Per Text Leaderboards:
- All-Time Leaderboards: The all-time leaderboard for each text is updated instantly as soon as a new record-breaking score comes in. For example, if someone breaks into the top 10 for a specific text, that change is reflected immediately.
- Recent Top Scores: The latest top 10 scores for a given text are updated every two hours. These are handled differently because they’re calculated on the fly and are more performance-intensive to update constantly.
This snapshotting process allows us to keep TypeRacer fast and stable while still providing accurate and up-to-date leaderboard information.
Coming Soon: New Developer API
We’re also launching a new developer API. This will allow community tools like TypeRacerData and the TypeRacerStats Bot to access and process race data more efficiently and powerfully.
You can check out the API documentation here. While the API is currently in a closed testing phase with select users, we’re excited to empower our community with greater control and new opportunities to build innovative tools for TypeRacer.
Thank you for your continued support.
—The TypeRacer Team
TypeRacer Blog 