#1: Jan Wolter (jan) on Dec 21, 2004

This item is for me to let people know what I'm up to in my role as site administrator (as opposed to programmer, puzzle creator, or puzzle solver).

User 'theo' posted a puzzle that was completely unsolvable - you could really only get three squares. It also lacked a title and a description. I decided to unpublish the puzzle. Theo can fiddle with it some more if he likes and republish it.

General rule for moving toward a more solvable puzzle is to paint more pixels. A line drawing like this works better if you thicken some of the lines by filling in additional around them, but you usually need some solid regions of black somewhere to make the puzzle work. This can be done by filling in some parts of the image, or by giving it a black background (the latter approach tends to lead to very easy puzzles). Adding some color can make a puzzle more solvable too.

Puzzle 134 from 'theo' was again completely unsolvable, and I again unpublished it. You really need to try solving a puzzle before posting it.

I've occasionally been tempted to "fix up" puzzles posted by other people, especially ones where the image is nice but the solution doesn't quite work, like #82 (hero). I think it'd just take a bit more fiddling to make that into a very fine puzzle. But on the other hand, I'm reluctant to start messing with other people's stuff without permission, and too lazy to try to contact people and ask. Also, I'd have to modify the program a bit to let me edit other people's puzzles, though that would be an easy mod.

I would not like my puzzles "fixed up" by someone else. If there were a problem with them, I would like it pointed out to me, and I would want to fix it myself. Unless, of course, if I didn't agree that there was a problem, in which case I would want a chance to explain or defend my work.

Perhaps if it was possible to modify a copy of the original work and submit it to the creator appreciation...

Another possibility would be to create a "public domain": the creator can add or remove his puzzle from this state, a little bit like the "publish" option.
Editing could be done only from the "Create Puzzles" page, for example.

I've thought of letting people create variations of other people's puzzles (or of their own). When you create a variation, you'd start with a copy of the original puzzle. It'd be a whole separate puzzle, but variations would be listed together, and there would be an explicit link back to the original, so it would be obvious that it was a design by Joe, modified by Sally.

I unpublished a couple puzzles. One was Clay's huge unsolvable one, one was Chad's X puzzle with many solutions.

I'll be away for a week. Not sure why I'm telling you. Will it make any great difference?

Post lots of nice puzzles for me while I'm gone.

I unpublished puzzle 306, Bikini Nights. It was pretty definitely unsolvable.

I unpublished puzzle #354: Sweetness. It was a big puzzle (80 by 60) with a very nice image but only about 75% of it could be solved. With some exhausting depth-first search it became possible to solve another 15% or so, but the remainder was just not doable at all, with multiple solutions. I hope the author will try working on it a bit more. It could be a cool puzzle with work.

I again unpublished Clay's huge, still unsolvable #194.

One of the oddities of this site is that if you have saved a partial solution for a puzzle that has been "unpublished" then it still lingers around in your saved game screen. The only way to make it go away is to solve it, which in the case of some of these puzzles is impossible. Someday I should find a better way to handle that.

In the meantime, I've gone in an purged a bunch of incomplete solutions to un-published, un-solvable puzzles that have been sitting around for a while. Probably didn't get them all.

I was still hoping to inish the partial solution I'd saved, someday.

Sorry. I should add some way for people to delete these themselves.

No big deal. I don't think I really could ever have completed that "Mama ain't happy" puzzle anyway, and you said the picture wasn't very good. But I held it out there as a possibility...

I could likely restore it for you. I backup the database pretty often.

Nah.

I started to comment in the #5 "Bugs" Forum and then I went out to check something and when I came back it is missing in the list. I even restarted my computer to see if I had done something and it is still missing, so I'll put my observation here.

The movement bars on the right side of the puzzle and on the bottom don't seem to work. They work in all my other windows so I don't think it is my computer. I can get the image to move (slowly) by using "Page Up" and "Page Down" on my keyboard, but then the puzzle moves in large jumps. Most of the time I can use the arrows at the bottom of the side bar but the movement is delayed and sometimes it doesn't work. It is very frustrating when trying to solve the larger puzzles.

I do like the ability to move the numbers from one side to another - very handy sometimes. Why ever you started this site I don't know but I truly admire the time and skill it takes. Thank you, Cec Jones

I did at one point see problems with the scroll bars not working in one of the browsers I tested. I think it was some version of IE, but the problem went away and I didn't research it further. Looks like you are using IE 7. I'll have to do more testing on that.

Thank you.

I went through the forum topics list and archived a bunch more topics.

Note that archived topics can still be seen, if you select "Archived Topics" from the pull-down at the top of the "Forum" page.

The reason I do this is so that when new users come to the site, they don't have to wade through tons of old discussion to find current discussion. So my criteria for archiving things is based on whether I think they would be of much interest to new people coming into the site. Many archived items are discussions about bugs that have been fixed, or social chit-chat that was fun at the time, but perhaps not of lasting interest. Some were lovely items at the time, and make for nice memories, but that's what archives are for.

User aguler01 posted 24 puzzles from Gemsweeper. I'm sure no harm was intended, but I think these are copyrighted puzzles, so I have unpublished them.

Gemsweeper is available from http://www.lobstersoft.com/gemsweeper/

It runs on windows. There is a free demo version. The full version has 225 puzzles and costs $19.95.

I just tried the demo. The graphic design is quite fabulous. Text is witty. The multicolor puzzles are a bit odd - you don't get multicolored clues. They are solve just like monochrome puzzles, but cells come up in different colors when you click on them. So they are really just cosmetically enhanced monochrome puzzles. There are bonus levels where every time you solve a row, it vanishes and a new row scrolls on. Of course these puzzles can never be finished, so it's a time trial sort of thing. Guessing is sometimes required in the bonus puzzles. Free demo has only very easy puzzles, no bigger than 10x10. Dunno how much more interesting the puzzles in the full version get.

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