mechanism to warn judges/players of very minor (pending) updates?

[andrewschultz]

A fellow author came up with the following problem in the forum:

They had a bug they wanted to fix for their parser game. It was relatively small and isolated, but they didn't want to leave it in there. General craftsmanship, standards, etc.

However, their game was rather large and they didn't want to cause save files to break (e.g. if people left having completed the game 2/3 and came back, only to find the save state file corrupted, that'd be frustrating.)

We discussed ways to do this so as few game states broke as possible. One would be to use the blurb area to say "trivial updates occur once a week on Monday." But this means fiddling for the author. And it might (?) be an abuse of the blurb area in ways we hadn't thought.

Is there a way to maybe send in an update but have the site quarantine it for 3 days, maybe? And have? Or is it best if authors do stuff manually/not note future updates at all?

This seems like it's likely too much work for something that might not get used much. But if someone sees a simple way to fix things, that'd be awesome.

Alternatively, is it worth it to note in the update rules that small changes may break save states for web-based entries, so that is something outside to consider, especially for larger works, and IFComp bears no responsibility for anything that breaks?