#1: Valerie Mates (valerie) on Aug 18, 2026

There are under 100 puzzles left to be featured in the section of the home page for puzzles recovered from the database crash, so that section will soon be gone from the home page.

I've been thinking about what will go there next.

My current plan is to create Puzzle Themes, and use that to put timely puzzles there. The idea is that each puzzle could be attached to a holiday or other event. For example, the holiday "Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day" is in early August, so showing puzzles on that theme would be appropriate from about August 1st to 15th. The idea is to have a list of holidays and other events, assign them to puzzles, and then the site would randomly pick 20 timely puzzles to show in a new section of the homepage for seasonal puzzles. Themes could overlap. For example, there could also be a "Summertime" theme that runs for the whole summer, including when the Zucchini theme is running, and the site would pick random puzzles from any themes that are current on that day. There could also be a theme called "Timeless" for puzzles that don't attach to any particular date, so that they could be featured too, especially on random days that don't have many holidays going on.

I would like to crowdsource adding themes to the existing puzzles.

The part I am thinking through is who will be able to add themes and assign them to puzzles. Should it be a short list of trusted people who I choose? Or everybody on the site? Or anybody who has created at least one puzzle and solved at least one puzzle?

I would appreciate people's thoughts.

(Note: No need to suggest themes right now. That part comes later.)

What do you think?

I would think most of us could be trusted to add the appropriate themes (could be more than one) to our puzzles. Perhaps add a forum topic where others could submit comments if they think a puzzle is incorrectly themed or if a puzzle has been missed, perhaps because the creator is no longer active or such.

What a great idea. There are a ton of seasonal puzzles that sometimes pop up out of season on the featured puzzle page.

A featured series list might be fun too. There were a bunch of name the band or song puzzles. Mondegreen or Hinky Pinky puzzles were very popular. Remember the Sandbox and What's On the Roof themes. We've had a lot of mini puzzles such as 5x5 or 8's. Animal puzzles, cars, fruits & veggies, jokes, movies. These wouldn't need to be connected to a particular season but solvers might enjoy resolving all the community quilt squares.

I think I need to go make a zucchini puzzle now.

Oh I love that! Thanks Brian!

I think those could fit in as themes too, of the timeless type that doesn't have dates attached. So there could be a "5x5 quilt squares" theme, or a "When I was five" theme, definitely a Mondegreens theme, and themes for particular creators' series. Each WCP would also be a theme. I like that!!

Great idea!

I think only trusted people should be able to add Theme keywords to avoid things like #boring and #WOT. Then anyone could choose from existing themes to apply to puzzles. Maybe have a way to let people suggest a new theme tag?

From an author's perspective, there are many of my puzzles that could be spoiled with tags that might give away the object. So it would also be good if authors had the ability to remove tags (and even to have a way to ban a particular tag from a puzzle so nobody can re-add it later)

Good ideas -- thanks!

Hope my comment wasn't misunderstood. I meant that authors could add themes to their own puzzles and then a forum topic could be used to challenge those themes. Not everyone generally could add themes. Of course, moderators should always be able to edit themes as well.

After solving a bunch of the "one of (insert number)" puzzles, I'm thinking "earworm bonus" theme. lol

Ha! I like that!

Today puzzle 28017 rolled onto the "twenty restored puzzles" section. It's the last puzzle from the database crash.

If users could pick from a drop-down list of themes, then this could be truly crowd-sourced. Some puzzles may not fit any of the listed themes, but an "other" or "None of the above" option would cover that. Maybe a specific forum post to suggest new themes to be added to the list?

Thanks Eric -- this is helpful.

(I have not yet started programming themes, so it's anybody's guess whether they will be ready by the time puzzles from the database crash run out.)

Eventually there will be a large number of puzzle themes, and people will be able to choose up to three themes for each puzzle. So I am thinking about ways to keep it manageable to select from the theme list. Having three dropdowns with 1,000 themes to choose from sounds unmanageable. So does a grid with checkboxes for a thousand themes. Maybe it would work to set it up so that you start typing a word and the site suggests themes that match. But that wouldn't show people the full list of themes to choose from, and I think people might want that. So I am still thinking about how to structure it. Maybe offer both options -- make the default "start typing and see what themes match," but also have a way to select "show me all the themes as checkboxes so that I can choose." Other ideas would be welcome!

Adding: It also might be helpful to include recent and popular choices as possible checkboxes, in addition to having a way to search all of the themes.

I think a box for tags above or below a search box, when empty it can display popular/recent words and when typing it'll find all the best matches, then you can click on them from there - you could put a list of all tags elsewhere for anyone who is curious. The box would show, e.g. 20 tags. It shouldn't be particularly difficult for a person to guess what the tag is called, I base this off Sporcle's tag system when you create a quiz

Thanks Quetzalcoatlus.

I should note that I still haven't started programming puzzle themes. I need to fix the puzzle checker first, then themes are next, along with a couple of other things that I want to get in place.

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