CasperVend 2/Gift Cards/V3/Black Friday Update

The introduction of the CasperTech V3 gift cards in 2019 brought a significant and much needed improvement in security.

The "Classic" distribution method is the closest to how the older V2 cards worked, but has the unfortunate added requirement that the customer has to rez their cards in order to activate them. This really isn't ideal, but it's required to protect against a known no-copy cloning exploit. Even with this protection, however, there are still ways to clone these cards before activation.

Therefore, we always highly recommend that merchants use the "Modern" method, which is 100% secure against any in-world cloning because it's strictly enforced by our servers.

Here's how the "modern" method works:

• A customer pays a vendor to purchase a configured gift card product
• The customer is delivered an empty gift card (L$0 balance)
• When they wear the card, the system allocates the credit from the purchase to the card.

However, this process has some drawbacks.

• If a customer purchases multiple cards at once, and doesn't wear them in the order that they bought them, the system might allocate the wrong balance to the card.
• If a customer purchased a gift card a long time ago, but forgot about it, they may receive an amount they weren't expecting (because the system is applying their credit from ages ago).

As of 2022-11-25, we have updated the Modern algorithm to hopefully address these issues.

Previously, the system simply searched for the oldest pending credit and applied that to the card.

Now, a more intelligent algorithm is used (when NOT in precocious mode):

• Firstly, the gift card name is parsed. If the gift card object name is, for example, "My amazing 100 L$ gift card", the system will identify that the card is supposed to have a L$100 value, and it will search first for a ::credit of that value to apply to the card. This is designed to be flexible, so "500 L$", "500$", "$500", "L$500", "500l", "500L", "L500" or even just "500" will all cause the system to search for a credit with a value of L$500.

In the case of numbers without any "$" or "L" symbols, the system will sort the numbers in descending order before attempting them. Therefore, if a card's name is "My TOP 10 GIFT CARD 100", the system will try L$100 first ::before trying L$10.

• Next, if no match was found, the system will search for gift card credits from the past hour in ascending order (oldest first).

• Next, if no match was found, the system will search for older credits (older than one hour ago) in DESCENDING order (newest first).

This should hopefully result in customers almost always getting the gift card credit that they expect to receive!