At least the way it's happening my end, the waiting for payment will easily reach zero before i have any clue it's awaiting my payment. The only way i was able to buy potatoes tonight was by checking the site on my phone simultaneously to see i had won it (by recognising my ltc address and using my transaction history to find the right payment address for that potato. On chrome the site will say verifying payment on the last person until the whole countdown runs down, even if thats an hour and a half after i or somoene else has been given the chance to buy it. The notification to pay simply never comes.
When you say the buttons are now more tolerant to mashing does that mean if we mash them we wont get penalised or we will? If i take what you said literally it means we can mash away but i'm surprised you would say that? Thanks.
You shouldn't try to pay for potatoes by checking through your history. They use multiple addresses that they cycle through. You're better off waiting for the 5 minute timer to run out and then trying again. Contrary to what many people say, accidentally locking down a potato is not a crime. It's an inherent part of the payment system and people do make mistakes. That said we've been working to curb the botting issues as well as abusing the lockdown system. The notification to pay will not appear if you refresh the page, I don't know exactly what you're doing when you operate the site on your phone. However, in the next revision of the site clicking on a locked potato will bring up the user attempting to buy it, the amount and the address, so if you accidentally refresh the page you can still recall the info.
As for mashing yes, there was some optimization issues in the javascript that made mashing the buttons slow down the site. It's impossible to ask users not to mash the buttons, so we've adapted them to be more 'resilient' to being mashed. All this really means is that it's more likely for your request to make it in time, just be patient when waiting for the address info to show up, it does take a bit longer with the two step verification it's using right now. The site is also under heavy load right now, normally the responses shouldn't take this long. We're trying to find ways to optimize the back-end, but if that fails to significantly improve the site performance, we'll move it over to a larger instance.
Thank you for your feedback!
Bit Potato Staff