#1: AM (adrian) on Aug 9, 2025

First of all, thank you for maintaining this site for all these years!

I have a few suggestions that I think would be helpful:

1. bind Redo functionality to the corresponding key combination, such as Ctrl-Y. Undo is already bound to corresponding key (Ctrl-Z).

2. sometimes when undoing, some cells get filled with random incorrect content, causing the puzzle to display errors. For complex puzzles these errors are hard to find visually, thus requiring a full undo or restart of the puzzle)

3. show whether a puzzle has been solved, started but not solved, or not started (using colored checkmarks for instance).

4. show more information about a puzzle on the puzzle solving page (and maybe elsewhere too), such as date it was published, date it was last saved by the solver etc.)

5. disallow publishing puzzles with multiple solutions, or that require guessing

6. display the number of identical contiguous cells under the cursor (not the clue numbers) even for empty or dotted cells (currently only shown for filled in cells)

7. also, display the numbers in suggestion #6 on both sides of the grid - they are currently shown on just one side.

I think 6. and 7. would be very helpful when solving large puzzled

Thank you

6. would turn EVERY puzzle into a fill-in. That would make a majority of solvers rage-quit, I fear.

To clarify, #6 isn't referring to the puzzle clues, but to the numbers that are displayed on the line and column corresponding to the current cursor position, indicating the size of the area the cursor is hovering over. Currently, these only appear when the cursor is over a black or colored cell, but not for empty or dotted cells.

Same for #7.

1) The "r" key does redo. You can go back and forth by using "z" for undo and "r" for redo.

2) If you mean when the site offers to undo back to the last time the puzzle was correct, that is a known bug, on my To Do list. I know where it is in the code, but it's a touchy spot to make changes to. But I do intend to fix it someday. I aim to be really fast to fix bugs, but haven't yet dived into this one, even though it's been there for ages.

On the other hand, if you are saying that just repeatedly clicking on the "Undo" button is adding randomness, I think I have sometimes seen that, though only rarely, and usually I assume that I clicked in a wrong spot and created the problem.

Undo can be weird at times. There's are times when you can undo, make a change, and then do a bunch of "redo" while the change is still there. I haven't fully pinned down the details of how to repeat this, so if anybody can come up with instructions for how to make it happen, I would appreciate it. (Being able to repeat a problem is the first step toward fixing it.)

3) I think you can find this info on the Find Puzzles page, though it's not in the same format as what you are describing. Jan set it up so that the home page doesn't show this info because the site loads faster for everybody if the home page is the same for everybody, rather than needing to look up each person's current status for each puzzle that is shown there.

4) Again, some of that is on the Find Puzzles page. Actually, that page used to be the Home page until Jan changed to the current Home page to speed up the site.

5) Jan's thinking about letting people publish puzzles with multiple solutions or guessing was to let people publish these types of puzzles but put an icon next to them, so that solvers can choose whether they want to try tackling that. The "Featured Puzzles" section never shows those puzzles. The key to what the icons mean is shown at the bottom of pages that show the icons. (I think it was Bill Eisenmann who suggested adding that to the home page. It's a fairly recent addition there, though it has been on the Find Puzzles page for a long time.)

6 & 7) These are good ideas -- I'll add them to the To Do list. I haven't been working on the site's programming lately, but I do intend to someday spend a good chunk of time making upgrades. (I live in a difficult caregiver situation for my youngest child. He will turn 18 in February and in theory move out into a safe housing situation that is Not With Me! After that I hope to finally do a *lot* of things in my life that are backlogged.) Thinking about this some more: If there was a mix of empty and dotted cells, would it only count whichever one it was hovering over? Just thinking through how this would work.

Adrian, thank you for the suggestions!

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