- Saturday 26th May
Phoned up Camelot again - this is getting irritatingly more frequently
necessary as the "scandal" of omitting the drawn order of Daily Play
and Thunderball draws continues to rumble on. I got last Thursday's and
tonight's Daily Play drawn order, completing the drawn order info
for that game (probably the only place on the Web to actually have
the full set!).
Meanwhile, the habit of Camelot's Webmasters being crazily slow to
update the winning numbers and full results continued tonight - it
was a full 3 hours before the info turned up (and even then, it was
dribbled out 5 minutes apart). The tardiness did roughly coincide
with the missing drawn order info (and link to said info) and
Camelot have now told me about 4 times on the phone that they had
a "virus", but don't the people maintaining their systems run
anti-virus software (especially on Windows servers)? Maybe if they
ran Linux, they wouldn't be in such a mess...
- Friday 25th May
Phoned up Camelot for my usual Friday night Euro Millions UK prize
winners request and also asked them for info about the drawn order
of recent Daily Play draws. It allowed me to fill in the drawn order
for last Friday and Saturday's draw, but my auto-grab code had actually
managed to snaffle the drawn order of tonight's Daily Play (it's done
this one or twice since the official Camelot site inconveniently "lost"
that info since 8th May).
This threw me somewhat, so I forgot to ask about last night's Daily
Play drawn order (which I still only have in sorted order) and, yep,
no doubt I'll have to phone Camelot tomorrow night again (this time
for last night's and tomorrow's Daily Play drawn order). It is
completely ridiculous that this drawn order saga has dragged
on for over 2 weeks now without any sign of a resolution!
I checked my Daily Play auto-grabbing scripts and - thanks to changes
made to the official site a while back - you can actually use either
GET or POST to pass the appropriate parameters now to get the last
6 months of results. Hence, I can reveal that
this is the link
that gets the Daily Play draws in drawn order. However, note that most of the draws
from 8th May onwards are wrongly in sorted order (the only exceptions seem
to be Thursday 17th May and tonight's draw) - this suggests that the data
for this is manually entered in drawn order and someone's been doing it
wrongly for weeks now!
- Thursday 24th May
Bought two more tickets (online) for Saturday's main Lotto rollover
draw. Camelot finally displayed the unwon jackpot amount on their
official site this morning (it was "£0" overnight!), but I'd
estimated to within 5 quid of the actual figure anyway. Phoned Camelot
to get last night's drawn order of the Thunderball numbers and
similar info for last Monday's Daily Play (just realised that I don't have last
Friday or Saturday's Daily Play drawn order either - I'll phone Camelot
again tomorrow for those).
- Friday 18th May
It turns out that last night's Daily Play numbers have re-appeared again
in drawn order on Camelot's official site, but the previous 8 draws
(8th-16th May) remain in sorted order - quite bizarre really. It'll be
interesting to see how tonight's Daily Play numbers end up on the official
site. Answer: They're back to sorted order again for tonight's Daily
Play numbers, ho hum.
- Thursday 17th May
Camelot were ridiculously late updating the winning numbers and the full
results for last night's draw. The full results for the main Lotto, for
instance, didn't turn up until 1.10am this morning! I ended up going to
bed at 1.15am without updating the Hotpicks full results that hadn't come
in by then (I got up at 7.30am and updated them then). I really don't know
what's been up with Camelot's full results delays in recent weeks - even more
strange is that they release the full results for Dream Number and Thunderball
first and then the rest up to an hour later!
Bought two more tickets (online) for Saturday's main Lotto rollover draw.
Phoned up Camelot and got last night's Thunderball drawn order info and
Monday-Wednesday's drawn order info for Daily Play too. The bloke on the
phone line claimed that Camelot's computer systems had a "virus", but I don't
really think that sounds right (because you'd roll back the site to before
the infection and it shouldn't lose the drawn order link/info then!). They
are still supposedly working on restoring the drawn order info on the Web
site, but it's been 9 days now and counting...
Meanwhile, it could have been tiredness I guess, but I may have got the
5+bonus prize wrong for last night's main Lotto (I had it down as £67,174,
but this morning, Camelot has it as £67,119). I corrected the info and
also adjusted the ticket sales because of this.
- Saturday 12th May
Interestingly, my auto-grabber for the Daily Play drawn order numbers did
actually get the drawn order numbers for tonight's Daily Play draw (it's
done using curl posting some params to one of the official site's scripts).
This suggests that Camelot have started to try to fix this drawn order problem
still afflicting recent Daily Play and Thunderball draws, although there is
still no direct hyperlink on the official site to the drawn order data that I
managed to scrape tonight.
- Friday 11th May
Finally realised that the Daily Play numbers for all draws since
Tuesday 8th May were in sorted order in the appropriate CSV file on
the official lottery site. When phoning Camelot for the Euro Millions
UK winners info, I got them to dig out Tuesday through to tonight's
drawn order numbers for the Daily Play draws and duly updated the
site (the second Web exclusive of the week?). Camelot have claimed
they'll fix this problem and restore the drawn order information,
but I'm not particularly confident at this moment in time...
- Thursday 10th May
Checked the official site's Thunderball Draw History Download CSV file this
morning and
it had sorted order numbers for last night's draw and drawn order numbers
for all the previous draws - what a complete mess! Phoned Camelot and
they were able to give me the drawn order numbers for last night's
Thunderball draw, which I put on the site (a Web exclusive perhaps?).
- Wednesday 9th May
It took until after tonight's draw for me to finally spot yesterday's
official site changes, because the Daily Play auto-grab code is still working
(albeit only able to find sorted order numbers and not drawn order ones) and
tonight's lottery TV show doesn't televise the Thunderball draw, preferring
to list only the sorted order balls, which usually means a trip to the official
Web site to get the drawn order (which wasn't there!).
- Tuesday 8th May
It looks like Camelot made some coding and HTML changes today on their
official lottery Web site and, yep, predictably they were for the worse.
Firstly, the long-present "show numbers in drawn order" link in their
Draw History
section seems to have vanished (strangely leaving behind a solitary vertical bar, like it
was some sort of rush job to remove the link).
Secondly, the somewhat tardy
Draw History Download
page - usually belatedly updated the day after a draw takes place - has links to CSV history files that
are now a messed up mix of drawn order numbers (for all draws prior to today, 8th May 2007) and
ascending order numbers for some games from today onwards (for the
Thunderball and
Daily Play CSV files,
but bizarrely not for other games' CSV files).
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