Puzzle Description Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

#1: Kristen Vognild (kristen) on Feb 7, 2019

There aren't *quite* that many. Quite a few have been deleted over the years, mainly by the puzzles' creators. Also, you can solve a good dozen of the smaller puzzles at a time. :)

The home page states that there are 26,184 puzzles on the site, so that shaves off a good 5 years. :)

so 24 years? at three a day?
if my math is right, that means you could be done in three years...at 24 puzzles a day :)

plus, just thought of this! if you are only doing three a day i doubt you'll be keeping up with the average increase per day...which means, if the ant on the rubber band is to be believed, you'll finish at the end of infinity...or something like that.

David--A quick, non-random check shows that there are seems to be more than 3 puzzles a day added to the total. To keep up, I will have to up my production to 6 or more puzzles a day! Maybe if I give up sleeping, or find a way to do puzzles at work....

Kristen: I've done all puzzles under 10 x 10 so far, about 2% of the total. The small ones go quickly, but as puzzle size increases, the time requirement increases as well.

I think my new goal will be to do all puzzles up to a specific size, say 20x20, and call it mission accomplished.

And they keep coming!

I just concentrate on the "Best Puzzles" list, but it's still daunting!

I'm with you SnarkyBear! I once had a similar goal -- to have solved 70,000 puzzles by my 70th birthday (or perhaps it was 60,000 puzzles by my 60th). Because I did not start on the day I was born (which would require about 3 puzzles a day -- less, in fact), it came to about 15 puzzles a day. Of course, solving the smaller easier puzzles was do-able, but the larger puzzles -- well, I didn't - and don't have 24 hours a day to do this. Also, there have been one or two crashes on this site so I don't really know how many puzzles I have solved -- but I do know that some of them I have solved twice. When all is said and done, I like your puzzle -- nice & "crisp", so to speak, and I enjoyed the thread of the comments.

I've been registered for nine years and have 8353 chalked up to my name. That'd be 2.54/ day, but there are nearly two years of missing stats. We lost the data from aug 19, 2014 - may 22, 2016 in a bad server update. So really I averaged 3.27 per day for the seven years that are recorded.

I tend to do more than 3 at a time, however. So to go into high gear I would just have to take less time off. And get a bigger screen. And build a tolerance for doing bad ones ("im board") rather than skipping them.

Nah, I think I'm fine. (Except maybe the bigger screen...)

I still feel bad about the server crash. I had no idea that Jan had put the database in an unusual place, and that our host would delete that place during an upgrade and keep *no* backups of what they were upgrading. Sigh....

It's okay. No one can think of everything bad that can happen without going mad.

Even though whatever Jan did with the database ended with its accidental deletion, having it there did *greatly* speed up serving of pages. It might be worth putting it back, but with a rigorous backup schedule.

Yeah. Everything on the site is now automatically backed up daily, thanks to a donation from a kindly WebPBN user who works for a company that does automatic backups. So it would take an impressive combination of circumstances for the universe to be able to wipe out the database again -- and at that point civilization would probably have bigger things to worry about than the WebPBN database.

Unfortunately, the database can't be put back where it was, because our host deleted that option as part of the same upgrade that deleted the database. However, I think there are some options that could still make the database faster, such as moving it to its own virtual server. I still need to research the options, and our host doesn't make any guarantees that any of the options would be faster, just more expensive. But I think it's probably worth trying.

It's interesting to read the dialogue here about how to get through all the puzzles. I definitely want to clear all the 15x15 or less. I chip away at random ones while waiting for tests to run.

I'm also curious what happens once I complete all the 10x10/15x15 or less puzzles and try to solve another random one with the "random" button.

Part of me won't mind if people keep sending them out, though, so there's more for me to do.

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