I gave up after 2-3 games as well. Time kept running out in three seconds. The semantics are also murky, what do I need to match? The regex doesn't assume ^$, but then do I need to match all intermediate characters? Or just some of them? Or what?

Also, the UI is bad, there's a "match" column with a tick and an x, and you get the tick when you match good regexes and the x when you match bad ones. However, why is the column called "match", then? It should have the tick when a regex matches and the x when it doesn't.

Great idea, very frustrating execution.

You need to write a regex which matches the ones that say "match" by them and excludes the others.

The column with the tick and cross are whether your regex puts this entry in the correct group or not.

"match" and your regex matches it -> tick. exclude and your regex excludes it -> also tick. Successful test.

"match" and you don't match it, exclude and you do match it -> cross, failing test.

It looks like you just need to match anything in the line, not the whole line. Basically, re.search(your_regex, line) should not return None.

The ticks are just bad UX, because "tick" means pass, "x" means fail and blank also means fail. I know which ones I shouldn't match, just give me a tick on ones that match, good or bad, and I'll figure out the rest.

I got the 5 second timeouts too. Not sure about the viability of the whole game concept. I kinda like the other idea in this thread of giving both players a fixed amount of time, minute or 2, and whoever comes up with the shortest regex that solves it wins. Then you could probably populate it with random words, and let people skip ones they didn't think they could solve. You'd probably get some interesting solutions that way.

Totally valid, sorry about that. Looks like I'm not clearing some js timeouts.

The Rickroll should be fixed.

Still there actually, but in a different place. There's another XSS, if you just paste this in your solution:

  |<audio style="width: 0px; height: 0px;" controls autoplay><source src="http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/rickroll/images/d/d0/Rick_Astley_-_Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up.ogg/revision/latest" type="audio/ogg"></audio>

Ok, now THAT rick roll should be fixed

Nice, thanks for being responsive! I agree it's a great concept, sorry if the critique came across as harsh.

Np, glad someone's playing it. I was loling when I started a game and rickroll started playing.

Yeah, the "time ran out" prematurely bug killed it for me.