#1: Eric (kelalatir) on Oct 29, 2026

Every time I try to edit a puzzle, when I press the "Check" button I get a window that says "Checking..." which stays indefinitely. I tried letting the checker run overnight, but it never went away.

To troubleshoot I tried editing one of my older puzzles, then I tried editing a brand new puzzle, then I checked a different web browser, but every test has the same result: whenever I press the "check" button the puzzle hangs.

I did not edit any puzzles while the red warning message was up this week. I cannot be sure whether the issue existed before the red warning appeared. Has something changed or broken with the checker?

Oops, I just found this now. Thanks for also e-mailing me to let me know to check here. I will go take a look at it.

Update: It turned out that the problem is that the solver is hanging when it tries to check a puzzle. It needs rebuilding with a dozen years of updates to the standards of how a C-language program should work. I put in a few hours on it but need to do other things now. I will put an error message that is shown when people click on Create Puzzles, so that people don't put in time creating a puzzle only to have it lost without saving. And I will circle back to working on this soon. I am not sure how much more work it will take to get this working -- it might be really close, or it could be several days.

There are several places where people asked about this. I will post updates here in this thread.

Thank you, Valerie!

Is this something that Claude or Perplexity or some such could fix for us? I don't like to use AI for most tasks, but this seems like a good fit - boring, time-consuming technical work

I like technical work! It's more a problem of having time and brain cells to work on this.

Heh; here I was wondering "why's nobody creating any puzzles lately?" "Okay, so I'll create one, then!" Clicked [Create Puzzles], and bam! I saw the note. [Note to self, make the hippopotamus puzzle.]

@Gaynor, possibly. I've been cautiously impressed as I slowly integrate one of these AIs into my work life, letting it draft lengthy, complicated (to me) SQL queries and small python scripts for me in mere seconds. Having lost one of my database admins recently, I've picked up almost their entire workload (I am *not* a DBA), thanks to this AI help.

Gotta consider the risk though. So far, I've only used it where the headache of failure would be entirely my own. Nothing customer-facing (internal or external).

I also noticed that the "Twenty Restored Puzzles From The Database Crash" section no longer shows puzzles. Wondering whether that's related to this same problem?

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