#1: Jan Wolter (jan) on Oct 28, 2004

This topic is for bug reports.

The biggest outstanding bug is that in some browsers in the Mozilla family the squares shift around a bit as you move the cursor over them,
causing lines to get wider and thinner. This is really strange - I haven't been able to make sense of it and suspect that it is a browser bug.

In the forum and in the saved games, all puzzles have a create date of Dec 31, 1969
That's not really a bug, this date really existed once... (grin. I was 14 yo then)

Another small thing, in the User Status page, I can see the number of puzzles created for everybody except me.

Yeah, I noticed that. It's on my list.

Thx. You've already done a great job!

Fixed the bug that was preventing display of Marso's count of created puzzles on the "Users" page. The database has "marso" in some places and "Marso" in others. It shouldn't matter, but in few spots it apparantly does.

Saving a newly created puzzle sometimes leaves you with a blank screen. I think I saw this happen once after saving a puzzle I was solving rather than creating. I haven't figured this bug out yet.

Just saved a new puzzle. I can edit it but when I try to check/solve it I receive the message "Game 170 has not yet been published by its author".
Is my alter ego making more problems?

Oy ve!
I bypassed the #9 problem by publishing the puzzle, saving a partial game then unpublishing it. It worked well for a while.
Now I have a new problem, puzzle 170 still appear as "unpublished" in my Puzzle Home page, but it seem not to exist anymore ("Sorry, no game 170" when editing and "Game 170 does not exist" when solving).
These French guys (that's me), always messing up something!

I wouldn't be surprised if it is another "Marso" vs "marso" bug. The way the database does string comparison these are the same, but when the perl program does comparisons, they are different. So it depends on how things are implemented in any particular place. I'm inclined to fix things up so that all logins in the database are pure lower case (though you'd still be able to log in with mixed case). Or it could be something else entirely. I'll try to find time to look into it soon....

Here's a bug I didn't used to run into: I can get the "Puzzle Home" page just fine, but I can't get "more puzzles." When I click on this, I get the same page as when I click on "Find Puzzles."

OK, I have another problem now. I cannot find a way to try to solve a puzzle I am trying to create without publishing it, and I am unwilling to publish it before I see how solvable it is myself.

I had the same problem with puzzle 170 and made it worse by publishing, saving then unpublishing it.
Puzzle 171 is suffering from the same problem but I didn't dare publish it.
Apparently it's not related to the "Marso" vs "marso" bug.

I guess I need to find time to do another round of debugging. I'll try to get to it soon.

Published puzzle 171 after all. It turned out nicely.
Puzzle 170 is still stuck in limbo.

Not a bug, maybe a missing feature: puzzle 148 qualified as multiple solutions with some guessing. I have just modified the puzzle so it is now unique and solvable by logic.
You should reset the uniqueness and solvability ruling when a puzzle is saved, so it can be reevaluated.

Yeah. I agree.

I have my hands pretty full at the moment and it may be a while before I get back to bug fixing here.

After saving a puzzle or solving one, when I go to the Find puzzles page and try to find more puzzles it just brings me back to that page. If I logout and login then I can go to another puzzle.

the RSS feed is missing... Just when I start to learn about RSS...

That's strange. Should be easy to fix. Probably just a file that didn't get uploaded with the last update.

Sorry for being slow about bug fixes (and entering new puzzles) for the last bit here. Too many projects, too little time. Like, in celebration of spring, I've spent the afternoon digging up a yew stump. One down, eight to go. Not counting the honeysuckles.

The RSS thing should be working. I'm not completely sure it is updating right when a new puzzle is posted. It should, but I haven't had time to post a new puzzle...

When I click on the "View and make comments" button at the bottom of a puzzle, IE pops up a new window. A box where I can enter a comment appears, as well as the "Clowe Window" button. But the "Post" buton is not visible because it is scrolled off the bottom of the window; I have to click on the scroll bar to see it.

I wonder if this results in some people typing a comment, then clicking "close window" because it's the only button they see. When I do that, my comment gets lost. Maybe there would be more comments on puzzles if the window was bigger, so that the Post button was always visible.

Several times recently I've saved the puzzle I'm working on, then clicked the restore button only to be served a blank puzzle, with none of my work filled in. It's saved, though, because I can go back to the main page, click on the puzzle, click "yes", and get back my work.

It doesn't always happen, so I think there must be something I'm doing that causes this condition.

I recently fixed a couple bugs that could cause that problem. Looks like I missed one. My guess is that it has something to do with the updates of the solvability/uniqueness scores. If so it would only fail on the puzzles where your opinion is asked on those.

I'm still having the problem described in response #24. I don't think it's only on puzzles which ask about solvability, but I'm not sure.

Same as Mark, the "Revert" button always returns an empty puzzle.

I also have a few saved games that I'd like to remove. Puzzles 170 and 194 don't exist anymore, can you delete these entries?
(puzzle 170 appears as unpublished in the games I created, but it really does not exist).

PBN managed to hang my browser today when I tried to save and then restore the Pollack puzzle. I tried it twice with IE, then rebooted my computer and tried it with both IE and FireFox, with the same result. The browser just goes catatonic when I try to load the saved puzzle.

I note that all the dates in this item are coming up Dec. 31, 1969, too.

Foo. The dates will probably be easy to repair, though I thought I'd fixed that once before.

On the Pollack puzzle, I had some problems with Mozilla hanging too. It was after clicking cells near the right edge with illegal values. But if I waited long enough (several minutes) it would come back. I think the regular expressions were running super slow. Those are long regular expressions with many terms, and if the first part of the pattern matches easily and in many ways, but end doesn't, then it tries looping through every way of solving the first part before it decides to give up and fail. Not sure how you could fix this. Probably I should make the fix you suggested long ago - provide a control to turn off the error checking.

But your restore problem doesn't sound the same. I solved that puzzle in many sessions, saving it as I went, but never encountered the same problem.

I've also noticed that the "revert" button seems to have stopped working.

Definately need to do some more work here.

Well, what I described could be the same problem. I'm not an incredibly patient person; I think I might have waited a minute or less for the borwser to load the saved puzzle, and then given up. Perhaps the saved puzzle was in one of those difficult states, and upon loading it the browser took a long time to figure that out.

(I wasn't using the revert button, BTW - that hasn't worked for me since, well, since "Dec. 31 1969", when I entered #24. :) I was going to the main screen and clicking on the puzzle there.)

Well, I fixed the Dec 31, 1969 bug. Luckily it was a display bug, not a storage bug, so all past posting now appear with their correct dates.

Fixed the revert button. It works again.

There is another very small correction that could be done: in the create puzzle screen, Width is above Height. After saving (where the puzzle can be resized), Width is below Height.
I never noticed that, but today I created a puzzle and almost immediately resized it, and I almost got mixed up.

I just downloaded a copy of Firefox 1.5 RC1 to my Mac OS X laptop. This is a pre-release version of the next major version of Firefox. The good news is that web paint-by-number works perfectly with it. None of the weird behaviors that I've been trying to figure out in current releases. I knew they were browser bugs!

I fixed the buglet in response 34.

Did some testing with the latest version of Opera (8.51) and found that it is significantly improved, but is still a bit slow and has issues with right mouse buttons. Still, it's usable now.

Alot of the browsers that brag a lot about being fast are actually rather slow on webpbn.com. I think they are mostly boasting on speed of loading ordinary pages, not speed of executing Javascript. Of course, my computers are all rather slow. It may not make a difference for folks with newer computers.

I have some problems under Internet Explorer with the new puzzle creation engine:
- The first time, the grid looks OK, but nothing happens when I click on a square, or click and drag on a few squares.
- If I save and continue editing, I can see black squares where I clicked before (but not where I dragged). Also, the area where the numbers are is completely black.
I have also Firefox and it works fine there.

When clicking on the FAQ or the Browsers link on the left, the sid is lost and I have to logon again.

I recently started a puzzle and then finished it a day or so later. When I tried to save, I got the "Your session has expired" screen, and then when I logged back in, was taken back to a page with a blank puzzle - so I lost all my work.

Oops. That's not supposed to happen. I'll have to check up on it. There's still something funky about sessions.

Today I accidently clicked on the "view and make comments" button while I was still working on a puzzle. (I had just finished, and meant to click on the save button.) That takes the browser (IE) to an almost blank screen with boxes to enter my username and password, and also pops up the comments window. Usually that's not a problem, but because I hadn't saved, I closed the comments window and tried to go back in the main window; but that took me to a page with a blank puzzle. So I lost all my work. :(

That's weird. I guess I need to check this in IE. The "View and Make Comments" button shouldn't have any effect on the main screen. It should just be popping up a window to view and make comments in.

It has always done the same thin for me: popped up the comments window, and taken the main window to this frame (I hope it's legible enough to recognize):

<HTML>
<BODY BGCOLOR=white>
Session Expired. Please re-login.
<P>
<FORM ACTION=play.cgi? TARGET=_top METHOD=post>
<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=oldsid VALUE="HFNCIHYRYDDP95JVQ3-M_XDA">
<TABLE>
<TR><TD>username:</TD>
<TD><INPUT TYPE=text NAME=lg SIZE=18 VALUE=""></TD></TR>
<TR><TD>password:</TD>
<TD><INPUT TYPE=password NAME=ps SIZE=18></TD></TR>
<TR><TD ALIGN=right><INPUT TYPE=checkbox NAME=rem VALUE=1></TD>
<TD>remember me on this browser</TD></TR>
<TR><TD></TD><TD><INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE=Login></TD></TR>
</TABLE>
</FORM>
<P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

The new interface seems to have fixed this problem. Thanks!

Yeah, I didn't fix it on purpose though. It seems to have fixed itself when I changed over to the new button.

I've fixed portions of the bug reported elsewhere by "punchy sue". Because it is now possible to save ratings without saving a board, some parts of the program were getting confused. The list of saved games included games that were rated, but not saved, and then the system wouldn't let you re-enter the game.

However I have not yet figured out the bug that was preventing "punchy sue" from saving the game. She said it said "error on page". If she, or anyone else encountering similar errors can give me more information, I would appreciate it.

I'd like as much detail as possible about what the error message says and where and when it appears.

When you click "save" the messages "Saving..." should appear under the puzzle. After a few seconds, when the save is complete, this should be replaced by the last save date.

In some cases, error messages may appear instead of the last save date. Or there might be an error message in a pop-up window, or in the browser's status bar, or the whole page might be replaced with the error. If you are just getting an error in the status bar, and you are using IE, I'd appreciate if you could enable error reporting (There is a checkbox for this on a panel full of checkboxes in the preferences menu) so you get a detailed error message you can report to me.

Never mind - I've been able to reproduce the bug now. It looks like large boards are not savable in IE. I haven't yet fixed this.

Should be fixed now. I was using GET queries to save the boards, but GET queries have a size limit. Many browsers/servers happily handled arbitrarily big GET queries, but IE doesn't seem to be one of them. So I changed over to a POST query for IE. I should do so for all browsers, but Firefox was choking on the POST. I need to figure that.

Having to test everything in half a dozen browsers wears a person down.

The revert button seems to be always grayed out for me (on IE).

You know, I don't think I ever finished writing the grey-out logic for that button. It probably isn't greyed-out at the right times, but it probably works even when greyed-out.

Right, it works even when grayed out.

Except that it doesn't always work correctly; sometimes a save a version of the board, but then when I hit revert, it goes back to a *previous* version, not the one I just saved. However, if I go to "Puzzle Home", click on the puzzle, and tell it to reload the saved solution, then I get the one I just saved. I think it only does this when I've saved (and maybe reverted) several times in the same session.

Interesting. It fetches the new puzzle with an http query. It sounds very much like it is the browser is caching queries. I can probably talk it out of that.

OK. Some simple fixes:

1. Revert queries now include a time stamp, which should prevent them from ever being retrieved from the browser cache.
2. The Revert button is now never greyed out. The rules for when it should be greyed out and when it shouldn't are complex enough that I decided they weren't worth the trouble and overhead (every bit of added complexity in the Javascript adds to the puzzle load time). If you click it when there is nothing much to revert to, then nothing much happens. That's fine.

my puzzles won't save on IE either. it says error on the page in the lower left corner. i was away all weekend, but mine has been doing it since last night the 9th and today the 10th.

I thought I'd fixed that. Sigh. Look again.

I had fixed it, but I broke it again while applying the fix to the revert button. Oops. Should be OK now.

When solving a large puzzle in IE, I find that the scrollbar on the right side of my screen doesn't work. If I click and drag the bar, nothing happens. If I click below the bar to page down, nothing happens. If I *double*-click below the bar, then it pages down.

The arrow keys still work, so it's possible to move up and down. But I'd like to be able to click and drag the scrollbar so that I can position the puzzle in exactly the right place on the screen, so I can see the whole grid and all the clues. The arrow keys don't give as much resolution.

That's very odd.

I've tested it on a number of puzzles, and it seems to be consistent. (And the scrollbar works as it should on other pages, including his one.) Is it possible you're grabbing the mouse messages and not passing them on when the click is outside the puzzle area?

That shouldn't be possible - no page should be able to effect mouse actions outside of the content area of the screen, but things are not always as they should be. I'll look into it, but if the browser is behaving so badly, I'm not sure I can do much about it.

Whenever I post an URL in the comments, the extension gets cut off from the link. For example,
http://66.49.151.193/morton_salt%20girl.jpg

Oops, it didn't do it that time! But it did when I posted the same URL in a comment for a puzzle.

You had it in parentheses (http://66.49.151.193/morton_salt%20girl.jpg) which was confusing the excessively simple-minded parser.

Well, that did a different wrong thing.

OK, I fixed that. Parentheses around URLs should no longer be a source of confusion.

While I was at it, I modified links to open in a new page.

Thanks!

WHen I finished puzzle 593 today, the program automatically saved it, but instead of coming back with the "Yahoo!" message, it said "No Response". Subsequent saves produce the same result. The same thing happened to me yesterday or the day before with a different puzzle.

Note the save was successful: if I go back to the main page, click on find puzzles, find puzzle 593, and click on it, and tell it to load my "previously saved" solution, it comes back with the completed puzzle. Saves before the completion were also successful, and didn't produce the error message.

Strange. The save encodes a copy of your currently solution into an HTTP request, and sends it to the server. The server saves the copy, checks if it is complete and correct, and sends back an XML-encoded response, including the puzzle description in the response if it was solved. Since the solution was saved, we know the request got to the server, and the CGI script ran. But apparantly the response did not get back. This is starting to look like it might be a bug - maybe under some circumstances the CGI server script crashes before sending back the response (but after saving the puzzle). I'll have to look into it.

Yesterday strange things happened.
Had to log in several times... And my comment to Puzzle #616 appears 4 times.....
Please delete the extras.

Duplicate posts in this (and many other) forums happen because the same post query was sent multiple times. It can be because people reload the screen after the post (though I think I defended against that on this system). Possibly the multiple logins were what triggered it. Haven't seen it on this system before. I'll put it on my list of bugs that need investigation.

Unfortunately, I've never yet written myself any tools to delete posts. I could do it manually, but it would be fairly complex. Probably I should implement myself a post deletion tool. The administrative side of the site is rather underdeveloped.

Incidentally, I have a new theory why puzzles sometimes fail to save.

If you are logged in for a long time, without sending any messages to the server, your session expires. The new quick-save thing won't work once your session has expired. I need to figure out a way to pop up a re-login box when people try to save from an expired session.

Until I do that, I recommend for people solving big puzzles that (1) you log in with the "remember me" option, which makes your sessions last for months, and/or (2) you save often as you solve a puzzle. I frequently just hit the "S" key to quickly save my partial solution. That would not only preserve you solution so far, but each time it will refresh your session.

I've attempted a fix for the bug that was mislabeling puzzles as having multiple solutions when they don't. I'm not totally sure that it is gone, so cross your fingers.

Fixed several small bugs in the "Find Puzzles" page.

The other day , my sister and I solved the same puzzles. (competing for fun...)384 a token of love, and 341 cold blood.
The site were very slow. Had to wait several times while puzzling, unable to do anything.

The next day, the puzzles appeared unsolved to both of us.
I don`t know if it`s a bug, or the internet-link between Denmark and the US is playing tricks on us.

That's odd. Mostly, net delays should only effect how long it takes to draw the puzzle initially. After that, there usually isn't much communication with the server going on. It might need to load a few more number image tiles to show numbers on the bottom or at the left, but unless you "save" or "revert" or something, you are pretty much just running a program on your computer and the biggest thing effecting how fast things go should be the speed of the computer, not the speed of the net connection.

Those are both small enough puzzles so that I wouldn't expect error checking delays to be large. So I really don't know.

Well.. I understand the problem with delay when saving... But the fact that the puzzles mysteriously appeared unsolved at both of us the very next day..?? (puzzle 750 too by the way..)
We got the message "Yahoo..." so they must have been saved correct.
That`s what I don`t understand. That`s why I asked if it maybe were a bug.
Fortunately the first time this happens, hopefully the last. ;-)

Yeah, if you got the "Yahoo!" message, then the puzzle was saved. When you save your solution is sent to the server, and the server saves it and checks if it is correct. If it is, it sends back the description which is displayed with the "Yahoo" message.

Looking into my log files, I see the following:

• Jan 24 17:09:39 2007 - Started puzzle.
• Jan 24 17:38:27 2007 - Saved complete puzzle.
• Jan 30 07:42:47 2007 - Started puzzle.
• Jan 30 08:12:31 2007 - Saved complete puzzle.
• Jan 30 08:15:21 2007 - Saved complete puzzle.
• Jan 30 08:16:38 2007 - Saved complete puzzle.

That hardly tells us anything except that you aren't imagining things. I really don't know what happened.

It looks like the Opera people may have actually fixed the regular expression bug that I reported to them. At least my first tests of Opera 9.10 seem to suggest it is gone. If so, it's possible that paint-by-number will finally be usuable with the Opera 9.10 web browser. I don't entirely believe it though. Opera has been resisting my attempts to support it for so long that I'm hardly ready to believe it would give in now.

I've noticed that the grey squares do not reset when you hit "Clear." Is there some way you can reset them instead of clicking one by one?

Oops. They should definately reset when you clear. That's a bug.

P.S. I meant the greyed-out clues. I hope you realized that was what I meant.

When I was working on puzzle #43 and rolled the middle mouse button down, it suddenley changed to the smallest size and some of the grid lines were missing. The numberes also got bolder. It stayed that way even when I changed it back to the largest size and clicked "Revert."

Hmmm...as far as I can tell, the greyed-out clues do reset when you "clear". Not sure what is going on here.

What browser were you using when you had the scaling problem? It sounds like you activated some browser zoom feature that doesn't interact well with webpbn.

IE 8 on Windows XP Pro. It does have a zoom feature, but I have done it before and it scrolled instead of zooming.

There's no IE 8. Digging through the log files, it looks like IE 7. I'll have to experiment with it.

Oh yeah, sorry. I know it's the latest version.

Another little bug: When I click on a discussion topic with new comments, it says "no new comments" where the new comments should be and I have to click on "wiew all comments" to see them.
It may just be that I have a pretty bad dialup connection, and sometimes it fails to load things.

Tiny Bug #4: On the side bar in IE 7, it is hard to see the RSS button. You can only see about about 3/8 of it on my farily big screen. Mabye a scroll bar would help?
(you can see it if you click and drag down to select, but that is hard to find out)

Tiny Bug #5
The RSS feed does not work on IE 7.
It tells me "Internet Explorer does not support feeds with DTD's."

Foo. I will have to look into this.

I removed the DTD from the RSS feed. It's really only used by XML validators, and apparently it can the be source of security problems, so Microsoft seems to have decided to reject all feeds with document type definitions. I haven't actually tried it in in IE 7 yet.

Looks like the fixed version does work with IE 7.

Thanks!
It might be neat if the feed contained info about the puzzle, such as board size and colors, but it's not nessacary.

Am I supposed to be seeing the "Admin Menu" button? When I tried clicking on it, the main frame said "internal server error"(and some more error junk) but it still had the buttons("Statistics" and stuff) on the left side.

No, you aren't supposed to be seeing the admin menu button. That's definitely a bug.

It doesn't show now... mabye it was my connection, or mabye something got changed.

On the zoom problem(comment 83) : When you hold Control and scroll the middle mouse button up or down, it will change the zoom level, making some lines look bigger or smaller(or even vanish). I think that was what I did.

I dont know if it's a browser bug or not, but when I click on a link, it doesn't change color(to show that I used it) until I click somewhere else. It dosen't matter that much though.

On the "Advice For Creating Puzzles" page, the black and white squares are tiny and the black blackground shows up where the rest of the squares should be.

My random guess is that they are only 1x1 pixels for faster load times and normally in the HTML you resize them by doing something like <img src="white.gif" width=10 height=10> and you forgot to do that on the examples.

Well, you're right that they are only 1x1 images for faster loading, but they are resized. What browser are you using? They look fine to me.

Internet Explorer 7.
The colors do work, though.
Under Help - About Internet Explorer, it says it is version #7.0.5730.11

Sometimes when I solve a puzzle, it tells me "Oops! There seem to be multiple solutions! Alas, this is not the intended one.", despite that it is apparent that there's only one solution. Just now it happened with puzzle #13.
I have Firefox 2.0.0.3

Oh. I should also say that if I clear the grid, and resolve the puzzle, everything works fine.

I've had that happen when a puzzle is modified while I am solving it. It seems that the solution is checked against the "new" version, instead of the version of the puzzle that is being solved.

That's certainly true, but puzzle 13 hasn't been modified for a long, long time. I'll have to invest some work to figure this out.

Until now I've always resolved the puzzles I've gotten the message on. I just realized that even though the puzzle tells me "Oops! There seem to be multiple... etc" it gets saved under my completed puzzles. This makes the bug less annoying.

Jan I've been working on the new pooch puzzle and the lines are dissappearing. Very frustrating.

Never mind. When I went back to it the lines were back and didn't dissappear anymore.

I'd be curious to know what lines were disappearing.

The grid was disappearing, both in the picture area and where the numbers were, but when I went back again everything worked ok. Maybe I was just too anxious and started puzzling a split second before my browser loaded it.

Were the black lines between cells disappearing? Were the cells turning black? Did the position of the cells seem to shift so the grid lines on one side vanished? I've seen all these things happen, for various different causes.

There isn't really a grid. What you are looking at is a big black square with a lot of little white squares dropped on top of it, leaving black from the background square showing through the gaps to make the grid lines. As you play, new images sometimes get loaded, and sometimes if they fail to load odd things happen to the grid. That might, or might not, be what went on here.

The cells were not turning black. Where ever I moved my cursor the "grid" disappeared. It turned white. This happened both where the picture was and where the numbers were. There was however not white between the squares I had colored but around the edges where the cursor had gone. I have not had the problem again.

Hmmm. I used to see something like that with older Mozilla browsers, but you seem to be using IE 7.0, which I never use (because I don't use Windows much). Clearly the browser was doing something odd, like outlining images with focus, but I don't know why. I'll not worry about it unless I get more reports.

I don't know if it is cool or scary that you know what kind of browser I have :). We won't worry about it anymore.

The owner of every website you ever visited knows what kind of browser you have. Your browser always identifies itself whenever it requests a page. Since so much of the code on this site is very browser dependent, I pay a bit more attention to it than some sites.

It looks like there are occasional problems in saving newly created puzzles. I've seen a couple puzzles show up on the list of new puzzles which were not saved correctly and could not be loaded. If anyone has any clue as to the circumstances under which this happens, I'd be pleased to have some clues.

Jan HELP... There are problems in Denmark today. We cannot puzzle. When pressing [Random Puzzle] it says: Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, jv@pair.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Same thing happens for me. I'm in Sweden.

Trouble in the west too. Home only gets the horizontal row listing headings, but nothing else, no puzzles

These problems were all due to the database crash. I hope they are gone now.

Yahoo... We can puzzle again. Thanks Jan :-))

Jan I can't begin to express how much you are loved. Thank you so much (once again) for all the hard work you've recently had to do. Your commitment to a site that you don't even see revenue from is phenomenal. Thank you for caring so creatively and with full passion for this wonderful community that has sprung from your creation of a pbn site. Good news is that I learned I CAN survive without Webpbn. The not-so-surprising news is that life isn't nearly as fun without it.
Thanks again. ^V^

Wonderful new changes Jan! Just wanted you to know that when I clicked on the "peek at solution" link. The picture did come up but the colored squares (here it was red) just came as dots in between black squares. Everthing else was ok. The puzzle was JC's tis the season.

Hmmm. Works OK for me. It sounds like it was failing to load the red square images (which would probably give white dots) or failing to scale them (which would probably give red dots). Which browser?

Mine does that too. Usually when I peek it's because I want to know if a humongous puzzle will be worth it, and even the little dots in black are enough to tell me that. I use Explorer.

Yep, same for me... also IE

Hmmm...still can't reproduce it, even in IE.

I wonder if dogs are somehow involved again.

Try rubbing a puppy on your keyboard, maybe that'll do it.

I don't have a puppy, but after trying it a few times it suddenly started happening in IE. The first few I looked at were fine, then there was one where some of the squares were rendered correctly and some where just dots, and after that they were all just dots. It's definitely a scaling problem. The images used to make the squares are all really 1x1 images, to make them load fast, which are scaled to 10x10. After a while, IE seems to stop scaling them. Looks suspiciously like a browser bug to me. It's probably fixable. I just have to make random changes to the code until I find something that avoids whatever random bug IE has. Since the puzzle playing environment works fine, probably I can use that for clues as to which random changes might be most profitable - ones that tend to make things work more like they do in the playing environment.

Gosh I love these kinds of things.

We are so lucky that you find pleasure in these problems Jan. Maybe you didn't need an actual puppy to reproduce the problem. Perhaps visualizing the puppy did the trick. In which case maybe your bug is a flea?

I have that problem too.
Also in the puzzle creation hints(unless you fixed it by now)

The puzzle creation hints are generated by the same code as the "peek at solution" thingy ("thingy" is a technical term among us macho programmers), so it makes sense that the same bug appears there.

I haven't actually even tried to figure this bug out yet though while I was stuck in traffic on I-94, I came up with some theories to try. On the other hand, I have cooked a dinner, cleaned a kitchen, bathed a child, and folded several baskets of laundry.

Generally, if a bug doesn't get fixed quickly, you should not be visualizing me slaving away at the keyboard, you should visualize me driving the carpool or vacuuming the dining room, or, most likely of all, conked out on the sofa thingy, fast asleep.

Wow Jan! Now if only you could use that transport thingy and do some slavery at my home...*anxiously drumming fingers*
(I have tofu)

I've made some changes to the "Peek at Solution" that seem to have convinced my copy of IE to do things right. Same changes have been applied to the puzzle creation advice page.

The bug where the count of how many times the puzzle was solved was sometimes higher than the count of how many times it was viewed has been more or less fixed. The counting was being done wrong. I used the logs to repair the past counts, but the logs are incomplete. However, I don't think the gaps in the logs correspond to the times when the counting bug was active.

This isn't really a bug, but it has been bugging me lately.

I'm having a hard time telling apart the blue and black clues. It could be old age setting in and my eyes getting weaker (I guess LASIK doesn't last forever). I've noticed this using IE6 and Firefox. Don't know if there's anything you can do about it other than recommend a good optometrist, or if anyone else has the same problem.

Can you tell I'm bored at work today? I think I've posted more comments today that I have since I found this site.

Well, it's nice to hear from you, Robert!

I have the same problem, and I supposedly have good vision. I imagine I look pretty silly frowning at the computer, then moving to within an inch of the screen, then saying, "OH!" and happily clicking on my mouse.

I know Jan mentioned before that this was the reason we don't have yellow-- it would be difficult to see. I would be surprised if even Jan, genius that he is, could figure out a solution for that!

I have the same problem with blue/black. I do have some ideas on the subject, but they are going to take some work.

I don't have a problem with blue/black...but I do have that problem with green/blue. Weird. I just suck it up though.

I also have a problem with the blue/black, but then again like Robert, I have age on my side.

Perhaps the easy fix would be to consider the blue/black to be just another layer of difficulty.


I also wonder if text written in blocks of color might work. A blue block might be easier to tell apart from a black block, compared to skinny lines.

Yes, it would. I've done some experimenting with that. What I eventually want to do is offer an option or either the "traditional view" with colored numbers on a white background, or a alternate view with numbers on colored backgrounds. The "gray out" thing would have to change in the alternate view. Maybe it would put a slash through the numbers or something instead of graying them out.

Yeah, by the way, I like this graying number things. Very helpful with big puzzles with lots of little numbers.

Dr. Annie Wong. 0>0

I think I have figured out the problem I mentioned in comment #102. It seems to happen when I fill in the last square in a puzzle. If the square is filled with a colour, I click the needed amount of times quickly. Somehow, the site registers my first click (which makes the puzzle wrong), but also my last click (which makes it right). So I get the "Oops! There seem to be multible solutions!"
If I enable error checking when this has happened there are no errors. Then I usually click back in my browser until I'm at the list of puzzles again. From there I click the puzzle I was just unable to solve, and get the options 'load' 'restart' and 'erase'. When I choose 'load', the puzzle loads with a complete solution except for the last square I filled in which is marked empty, and the error checker has it marked red. I simply fix this error which solves the puzzle and everything works fine.

Gee. I'm not good at all writing bug reports. I have no idea if this is even coherent. English is not my first language, so I hope I'm excused.

Jan - help. This is rmkummerfeldt. I have not been able to post comments to puzzles or forum topics since yesterday afternoon. When I try, I get an 'Internal Server Error' messaage. I have tried reloading the comment popup, reloading the puzzle, logging out and back in, and using a different computer.

I think naneki is having the same problem.

I tried using my normal account after successfully posting witha new account with no luck. I tried login in both with and without the 'remember' box checked on the login screen.

Hi, I posted a comment and cannot find it

-=asobi=-

Where did you post asobi. Do you remember? Topic Discussion or Puzzle?

When you go to the forum pages, the default is to show only topics which have new comments. On the top of a page you can select to show all topics. Doing that will usually reveal the topic you posted to.

I'll go looking for the bug bothering Robert, but the kids are off school and it may take a bit of time to be able to get on it.

Jan - I still can't post with my rmkummerfeldt account. I feel like I've been censored - lol. That's one way to keep me from posted my confusing puzzle solving descriptions.

Me too..(naneki)

You should both be able to post from your regular accounts now. Sorry about the bug, and sorry that it took me a few days to find time to fix it.

Thanks Jan - now I can catch up on the puzzles I wanted to post comments to.

thank you sooooo much..I feel alive again :)

Jan, for some reason I can't "CHECK" my puzzles..there is no error sign, it just won't do anything..

Odd. Seems to be working for me. What exactly happens when you click the "check" button?

it goes to the "Checking.." & and just stays there. I tried giving it some time, left the room for a min. & it still showed the "Checking..." I even tried checking the one that I know has an unique solution, same thing.
It's like it's stuck.

My "Check Puzzle" is working today!

It should never be at "Checking" for more than a couple seconds. Things seem to intermitantly fail on this server.

Javascript is particularly slow in Firefox. Especially trying to resize the grid tends to hang the browser so I've quit trying to use that. But just solving the puzzle the javascript also gets slow at times (in larger puzzles) and turning off error checking doesn't fix that.

My saved puzzles don't show up in the list, so the only way to go back to a saved puzzle right now is if I happen to know its ID.

The Settings link in the menu just throws a 404 at me.

Despite these problems, I love this site so keep up the good work! :)

Got another 404 when trying to edit my own posts.

Me too!

I am unable to print puzzle. this is the error message I get:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@webpbn.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.39 Server at webpbn.com Port 80

still having the same problem & I can't edit my own posts either.
Help me, Help me, sir she said!

So when do you think will we be able to print puzzles?

thank you I can now print puzzles..your my hero!

Looks like I can't change my settings. The 404 error-thingy just pops up. Does everyone have this or is it just me?

yep..it's going around like a virus

I can't seem to print puzzles in either areas. If I open the puzzle to print it comes out with number & columns blacked out & missing or when I try to print from the print puzzle function it come out with an obscure language (example when it should say www.webpbn.com it says xxx/x f cqco/dpn & the numbers don't match the puzzle on the site

Darn it, Naneki! And I just made a nice large B & W puzzle! Have you tried a different browser? At least until Jan finds your bug?

Jan I was instructed to tell you this and I am sorry to bother you with it. When I went to post a comment on puzzle #2433, after much waiting, my comment disappeared and was replace with the following:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@webpbn.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I had solved the puzzle, rated it and saved, then clicked to make a comment. I wrote the comment, marked it as a spoiler then clicked post. This is how I always do it. I did nothing differently. Oddly, when I checked the comments on that puzzle, my comment had indeed been posted. I am not experiencing any other problems (before or after).

I only just got around to fixing the settings page. I'd seen the message that that was broken, but then forgot about it. The code had never been properly installed after the move to the new server.

Puzzle printing seems to still have issues. I need to work on that. Among other things, the printed puzzle always seems to be the first version, even if that has been obsoleted by a newer version.

Gypso's bug in #173 is a mystery to me. Sounds like it was trying to redirect someplace unknown after the post.

This is not necessarily a bug, but it does bug me. When you click on "Check" and your puzzle has multiple solutions and this message pops up:

This puzzle has more that one solution. You can see one alternate solution by clicking the "Toggal Alternate Solution" button below. See this for advice on how to fix this.

You have misspelled Toggle (Toggal) and in the first sentence "that" should be "than."

:)

Oh my...everyone is an English teacher :)

I may have a bug...sometimes the error check tells me that there is an error when there isn't an error, and I'll ignore it and eventually the error mark will disappear. It's usually not a problem unless it's a frustratingly large and difficult puzzle and I rely on the error check.

I wonder if it's just being slow?

Hmm, I don't know about it being slow. Cause it would last for a long time while other errors come and go.

I fixed the typo's reported in #175.

I've seen similar problems to #177. The error balls are sometimes slow to appear, and then slow to disappear. I don't think it is actually the error checking that is slow, I think it is the loading of the image with the red ball in it. Sometimes the web server has been getting so slow that it takes a long time for the red ball to appear, sometimes so long that the browser gives up on it. But I think my browser had also gotten confused about caching, and was failing to fetch data from it's cache that it should. Since then the webpbn server has gotten a bit faster, at least at simple things like sending image files, and by some combination of reboots and cache flushes I seem to have got my browser working better again.

So, actually, I don't know what is causing nieboo's problem. I wonder if it is still occuring.

I don't really think the error checking code suddenly developed a bug - it hasn't changed for years.

It comes and goes. I haven't been using the error checker lately so I don't know if it is still a problem.
My internet is also very slow. Something wrong with my mac. So maybe the double slowness is causing it?

So I'm doing a puzzle, and the red balls appear when there is no error again.

then they'll just disappear after awhile. Don't know what's going on. Again, not a problem, just thought I'd tell you that it's back.

oh by the by, when this error thing was happening, the error checker thingie wasn't even on.

That's kooky.

I have to agree that kooky is the word. I'll see if I can figure anything out, but I have no idea right now.

Well in this case I was doing a puzzle, clicked on the chat room button forgetting that it would take over my puzzle, then clicked the back button to do my puzzle over. This was when the error check was not checked but the red balls would appear for non-errors. So maybe in going back I screwed something up. I'm pretty sure this is the first time it has happened without the error check being on.

OK, that makes a bit more sense. When you went "back" to the page, the browser remembered the last setting of the "Enable Error Checking" checkbox, but it didn't remember the state of the internal variable that actually controls whether or not error checking was on. So error checking was on, even though the check box was not checked. Probably when you went back it also lost the current state of the puzzle and reverted either to blank or to the last saved version. Going back to puzzles doesn't entirely work right.

So that explains to my satisfaction why you were seeing redballs at all when error checking was off - error checking wasn't really off. Why the redballs were behaving so weirdly, I still don't know.

Jan. I have a rather strange thing going on.
I have a HP printer & a generic Lexmark printer, any time I try to print a puzzle on the HP it prints out strange - the numbers are all wrong & the letters are gibberish, but the lexmark prints just fine..
Do you have any idea why it does that?
I would really like to get the lexmark off my computer but I still need my puzzle fix.

I have no idea. The "print" buttons on this site generate PDF files, while are handled by a program on your computer, usually Adobe Reader, though there are others. When you print, the generation of the particular commands to make things print on a particular printer is done by the printer driver software, which usually comes with the printer. The fact that it prints right on one printer but not the other, suggests that something is amiss with the printer drivers. One could check the HP website to see if they have newer versions, but I doubt if that could be the problem.

Is the puzzle image OK, and the placement of the numbers OK, but just the wrong number and letter characters appear? That sounds like some kind of font or character encoding problem. Not that I have any idea of what to do with that.

thanks for your input :)

Jan-- this is a silly, silly thing to complain about, and it's not actually a bug, but the text comes up wrong on the little mouse-over menu on "view information." For puzzles with black question marks, it says "believed to require much guessing," but then when you open the puzzle it says, "may require some guessing," which is accurate for black question marks. But the ones with red question marks say, "may require some guessing" on "view information" and "believed to require much guessing" on the puzzle. No big, really, but I thought I'd let you know.

Jan, Adam says he's been locked out of PBN & was wondering if there was anything you could do to fix it.

his e-mail is [DELETED]

I think I just fixed #190. Thanks for pointing that out.

Both of monkeyboy's accounts have had recent logins, so I'm going to assume that the problem is fixed. I normally wouldn't be able to help with that without a LOT more information.

I'm going to edit the email address out of that comment. I'm not sure it's a good idea to post people's email addresses.

Jan the think is he can acces from his work but not from home. That explain the lack of activity from Adam recently

Maybe if you communicate directly with him he can give you the info you need. He told me that he hadn't change a thing on his pc and that one day he was no longuer able to log in from home. He try diffrent browser reboot a couple of time I think he even format everything and start all over but nothing seem to work.

There have always been oddities with his access. I doubt if there is much I can tell him. I haven't even got a theory as to what would do that. Seems like it has to be his ISP, somehow, if completely reloading his system software and changing browsers doesn't help. Nothing has changed on this end, and the fact that he can access it from work suggests that things are OK on this end. But I can't imagine what an ISP would be up to that would do this.

Hi. I just checked my stats and something is goofed up. It is showing only 3 puzzles solved (I think I've solved at least 30) and no puzzles created (I haved created 3). Don't know if anything can be done but maybe someone else's stats are messed up, too.

I really am awestuck by the amount of time you must put in to keep this site working. Wish I had found it years ago.

BlackCat when I look you up it says you have solved 317 and created 3.... mine looks fine too

Thanks. It is showing up correctly at my end too. It is surprising to know I actually solved that many.

Jan, I was creating a 30x30 B&W puzzle and then saved it (#4530). When I went back to edit this one, I got a message that says #4530 does not exist. It still shows up on the list of my puzzles as unpublished, but the only thing I can access is the error message that it does not exist. I can start over with a new puzzle, but I would like to get rid of #4530. Can you fix that for me please?

There seem to be occasional glitches in puzzle creation that create these non-puzzles. I deleted that one. Sorry.

Thank you, Jan. Now another simple question:

Would it be possible for you to add a field for Description to the Puzzle Search screen under the Find Puzzles tab?

My aim is to create unique puzzles on things and people that have not been done before. I'd like to look for specific subjects and names that won't be in the title and might not be mentioned specifically in the comments, and therefore would not show up in search results.

I noticed that my score for the WC is divided in two... on both stjarna and Stjarna. How come? I only have one account here, but I know I created one of the puzzles at home and one at work. Is it different IP addresses that does it, or is it different logins? I usually stay logged in at both places.

Dunno. Case sensitivity is always a source for bugs, because the database is normally case insensitive while Perl and Javascript are normally case sensitive. So depending on where I do the comparison, Stjarna and stjarna may or may not be the same. Likely you logged in as stjarna in one place and Stjarna in the other, and the puzzles got stored with those names and this normally works fine because in most places the comparisons are done by mysql which thinks those are both the same thing, but the honors page does its comparisons in Perl which thinks they are different. In any case, it's a bug, and I should fix it instead of speculating about what would be causing it without even looking at the code.

Bet I'm right though.

I was right. Bug fixed. Thanks for the report.

Thanks!

Hi, Jan!
I'm not sure if anyone has had this problem, or has posted about it. For the last several weeks, whenever I bring up a new puzzle, several error checking dots (mostly red, sometimes green or a combo of the two) are already present. They remain there either until I solve the column or row, or get part way through solving. This seems to have started about the time I upgraded Java.
I use Safari 3.2.1, & am running Java J2SE 5.0.
Any clue? It doesn't interfere with solving, other than being a nuisance & a little confusing in larger puzzles.

When I read the first line, I knew you were running Safari. It's a new bug introduced in recent versions of Safari. I've reported it to the developers, but it hasn't been fixed in the beta release of Safari 4, and I don't expect it to be fixed in the final release.

Working around this bug requires a major rewrite of a lot of code. I've done this in the beta version, but not in the old version of the code running on the main website. Goto http://webpbn.com/beta/ and this bug should vanish. I hope to get the beta code moved to the main site soon.

Alternately use another browser, like Firefox or Camino.

The Java upgrade has nothing to do with this. In fact, this site doesn't use Java. It uses lots of Javascript, which, in spite of the similar name, is completely unrelated to Java. (The standards committee tried to fix this problem by renaming Javascript as ECMAscript, but that is a name only a committee could love and I don't expect it to catch on.)

Hmmm... this is really recent. I wonder if it started with a security upgrade. Oh, well... like I said, an annoyance, nothing more. Thanks for your reply! I'll save the beta URL in my bookmarks.

I'm rarely getting the "shadows" on the numbers to cross them out when I finish the line. The same thing happened the other day, when I tried the beta version.

If I start a line with a color, that line is immediately crossed out. If I start a line with white (a dot), it will never be crossed out.

OK, I think I may have fixed this problem. I recently wrote a new version of the line checker to work around a Safari problem. The old version is still used with IE, but I had to restructure the old version so that different line checkers could be plugged in. I broke the old version a tiny bit when I restructured it. So this IE bug was not an actual IE bug, just a Jan bug.

LOL I'll try again, then.

It works now! Thank you Jan!

Re the March 11 new version of the software:

I like being able to save my option preferences. Thank you. I have also noticed in the past couple of weeks that dragging with my right mouse button overlays a bright green line on top of the squares I am coloring, and then pops me out of the puzzle back to the "load previous solution" page. Has anyone else reported this problem? Is there a way to get around it?

The pbn puzzle is made of a lot of images tiled together to make a board. Normally the web browser does various things when you click on an image on a web page with various mouse buttons, including doing things like letting you "select" it or letting you drag it or pop up a menu to let you save it. None of this is vary appropriate or desirable on a webpbn puzzle, so I do my best to turn off all these things. Looks like one of them is still activated in your browser.

Hmm...you seem to be using firefox 3.0.3 on windows. I've never seen firefox put bright green lines on images. I'm wondering if you have a plugin that is doing this. Some plugs can cause trouble with webpbn. For example, the Adblock plugin will block any image if you do a shift-double-click on it. If that's turned on bits of the puzzle will slowly vanish as you solve them. That's obviously not what you have going on, but I'm wondering if some other plugin could be behind this strange behavior.

Thank you for your quick response. I have installed the Adblock plugin and others during this timeframe. I will look into them as possible causes. Thanks again.

I cant print any puzzles out as of today. I never had any trouble doing it before.

Jan, regarding dragging right mouse button causing bright green lines, your tip about plugins gave me what I needed. FYI, the culprit was FireGestures 1.1.6. Disabling it seems to have fixed the problem. Thanks again.

The puzzle printing bug should now be fixed.

When I save a partially solved puzzle and reload or revert to it, many of the clue numbers I have grayed-out are refreshed to not grayed-out. I then have to re-annotate my solved number clues, which is very time-consuming on the big puzzles. I did notice that when you gave us the option of switching the number clues from left to right or top to bottom, the grayed-out number clues seemed to save ok. But for several weeks now I haven't been able to switch the number clues from left to right or top to bottom, and the grayed-out number clues are not completely saved. I am hoping that you have some magic suggestion that will help me. Thanks.

Moving the clue numbers is now done with the arrow keys. I'll have to study why grayed-out clues are not restoring for you. That's always been finicky, but It thought I'd fixed it.

Jan, my puzzle #5796 is stuck in webpbn limbo. Could you please delete it? Thanks.

OK-- this is weird. I noticed this a long time ago and forgot to report it. When I try to print my puzzle #2813, it doesn't print the correct clue numbers. It's the right grid, but some of the numbers are completely different than in the actual puzzle.

I have tried to enable the "Maximize the surprise by hiding the puzzle title" option many times, but it never works. I always see the title of the puzzle when I load it. This is a small bug, I know, but it still limits my enjoyment of the site. Thanks!

past couple of days when I bring up a new puzzle, some of the lines are missing
both vertical and horizontal
clicking bigger or smaller changes the size and give me a different set of missing lines
also missing bold on some of the lines that are there
firefox 3.0.11

In firefox 3.0.11 when I middle click to bring up the color palette, one color is always missing. I never had this problem before in IE.

http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/9357/screenshotbtt.png

I've fixed the bug that erased your other option settings when you do random puzzles. I think this might be the cause of Michael Clark's bug in #222.

I have lots of other bugs to hunt down though.

The color menu bug reported by calcnerd in #224 should be fixed now.

Recently when I tried to save I got a timed-out dialog. I attempted to log in again, but my password was not recognized. I noticed that some of the key strokes were not echoed with the expected dot, and noticed they were keys that are used in your shortcuts. So I could not use the dialog to log in again. I opened a new window and changed my password, avoiding shortcut keys. Later I had the same problem with the new password, but with the letter '5'. I don't think 5 is a shortcut, is it? Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a known set of keys that will give me trouble?

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the numbers are used to change the colors.

Thanks Jen. I'll avoid numbers, too.

Oops. That's a rather ridiculous bug. I'll have to look into it.

The grids do not appear correctly in Opera 10 running on Linux Mint - lines drop out making it awkward to solve the puzzles.

When checking on a puzzle's solvability, I'm having a weird thing come up sometimes. I can click "helper," which fills in part of the grid, but after I add a few marks myself, the helper won't run again.

Actually, I've figured out that if I close my browser completely and then start a new session, I can use helper multiple times just once. The next time I have to close it down and start again. I'm using IE6.

I clicked on one of the "puzzles whose solution has changed since you solved them". I started with a clean board. When I hit save, partway through, lots of red dots came up, and a message said "you solved an older version of the puzzle". What should I have done?

I hit "revert" after saving and it's back to the way it was

When loading a saved puzzle (or using 'revert'), many of the greyed out clues are not restoring. Seems to be more prevalent on larger puzzles.

Using Firefox 3.5.5

Jan, is it just a problem with how Firefox handles Javascript?

I happened to notice it by accident when I loaded a large puzzle I had saved. I could reproduce the 'greyed out clues that restore as not greyed out' repeatedly. It also happened on a 25x25 (puzzle required guessing, so I was reverting a lot and the reload dropped greyed clues every time).

It's no big deal, I'm just wondering if the problem is a 'bug' at all, or if the problem is within Firefox .

Thanks!

[beep-beepbeepbip-beepbipbeep-beepbeepbipboop]

[ring]

[ring]

"Thank you for calling tech support. If you are a caveman, please press 1. If you are not, please press 2."

Ok.
[beep]

"You have selected 1. Thank you. Goodbye."
[click]
Hello? What the...

LOL
:-D

ive been printing out puzzles to solve and found something weird.

I printed out puzzle #2813 and got stuck so i desided to try solving it online and noticed the number cluess are different so i tried printing it again to see if maybe it had been changed but the number clues when i click print puzzle are the same as on my print out which is not the same as when i solved the puzzle online.

eks. of the difference
the 15 in row 18 is and 11 and the 9 and 3 in row 17 is also an 11 in the print-version.

Why do I always see "Tip #1: Paint-By-Number Puzzles" when I start a puzzle ?
Shouldn't all tips been displayed randomly ?
(Currently using Firefox 3.5.8, just in case)

As Cro-Magnon in December, I saved a 75x75, and at the restoring, there are no clues, and all the down part is empty, the lines which was complete.

Maybe a useful information :
On puzzle 9573, my save restored only the marked numbers which correspond to the first 9 lines.

Not a bug, but a spelling mistake...
On honours page, you write "To be eligable...". This should be "To be eligible..."

Every so often I can't get to the site. It might just be a network problem, though.

0 Raters bug!
Here's how it happens:
1. A new puzzle comes up (no ratings).
2. A player rates it (first rating).
3. Before anyone else rates it, the player resets the rating back to "Please rate this puzzle".
Error page 404 comes up. The rating is removed from the player's data but not on the new puzzle!

On puzzle #3853, when printing it, the PDF file gets a different puzzle than the one which is displayed for solving.

They are similar, but the displayed one is a 3 colors puzzle, while the PDF one uses 5 colors and I think it has many solutions. I suppose the PDF one is an older version.

On my puzzle 11360, the second or third rater caused a glich. The quality went to 2 and the difficulty to 1, it gained a "?", and the number of raters jumped to 16,777,215.

Since then, the quality has gone up to 3.25, and Gator got rid of the question mark. However, the difficulty has stayed at 1 (unlikely) and the # of raters has stayed the same as well (impossible).

I don't really care - I actually find it amusing - but thought you might like another conundrum to spend all your spare time on. ;)

HELP! Somehow I robo-saved 35 non-puzzles. They are 14315-14349. When I try to open or edit any of them it tells me they don't exist. How do I get rid of them or am I stuck with them?

It's happened before. I've had several and Teresa has as well. As it's a database glitch, it needs to be taken care of by Jan.

Hopefully it didn't happen to a real puzzle you were saving. That's what happened to me. :(

I was putting the finishing touches on a Star Trek image. I'll redo it. Thanks Joe.

Jan: I have a puzzle #7753 thats keeps showing up when i log on. I have to solve it to make it go away. But, it keeps on showing up again when i log back in. I'm so tired of seeing Wal-mart 7 days a week. Thanks in advance for your help with this stigma.

Started happening about a week or so ago. When starting and reloading a colored puzzle, numbers in both columns and rows come up greyed out and the wrong color. Clicking on them changes them to the correct color, however they are still greyed out. Also some that are the correct color, when clicked on change to a different color and do not grey out, making a solution very challenging. Any suggestions!

Not sure, but that's happened to me before, as well. And sometimes I try to put a color in a square and nothing will go there. I click, I press 2 3 4 5 for the colors, and nothing... it never lasts, but makes me sad when it happens.

All the elements you mention are images. So, it might be that when this occurs your cache is screwed up. Try pressing Ctrl-F5 the next time it happens to force a complete refresh and see if it fixes it.

Tried Ctrl-F5, didn't work. It occurs on every puzzle with three or more colors and seems to be color/number specific, ie: 3 green shows as 3 black, 8 green shows as 8 blue, 1 green shows as 1 blue greyed out, 9 blue turns to 9 red when clicked on, etc. Also the home page with 3's, comes up with them greyed out. Need help, because it is no longer fun to play!

Try clearing your internet cache. It may be called "delete browsing history."

Kristen: Thanks!!! Clearing my internet cache did the trick. All is well.

Didn't feel like starting a new topic, so let's resurrect this one.

Tried out the SVG drawing option and it does have a few teething problems, mostly involving the horizontal direction and double-digit clue numbers. I noticed on 12763 (and confirmed on 9401) that numbers on the right are partially blocking those on the left. Also, the number on the right indicating the number of squares only shows the first digit (this is not true of the one on the bottom). I'm using Firefox 14.0.1 on Windows 7.

Also, this isn't a bug, but the light grey doesn't seem to stand out too well against the white. It's not impossible by any means, but it is harder that the traditional white and white dot. Having plain white as the finished colour, though, I like, even though it does throw my instincts way off right now.

I should note that the "L" key now works in SVG mode.

I've made some improvements in to the horizontal positioning of digits, but it is still a problem, especially in Firefox.

The Mozilla people, as is often the case, were the early leaders in implementing SVG. When I did the first iteration of work on this, Firefox was really the only browser it worked in at all. Since then all the other browsers have gone to work on it, while the Mozilla people, as is often the case, forgot about the whole thing. There seem to have been no further improvements to their SVG support for years now. One of the features that they never implemented is font compression. When I display numbers, I tell the browser to scrunch them horizontally to fit them in the cell, and Firefox ignores my instructions. I may need to do a work-around for Firefox where I just use a smaller font.

I eliminated the dots simply because it was easier that way. One of the problems with grey is that shades of grey look different on different computers. On LCD displays, the angle at which you are viewing the screen greatly alters the shade of grey. So it's hard to choose a shade that's not to dark and not too light.

There's still quite a bit of work to do on the SVG mode, but I do kind of like it. Mostly I like being able to get bigger puzzles images without having to make new clue number image sets. (For each of the three sizes of clues there are 800 images - 100 numbers, 4 colors, 2 backgrounds)

dang Jan...didn't know this was soooo complicated...thx again

Well, the numbers are definitely legible now. You can tell they're not displaying quite as planned, but if the problem is on Firefox's end then that's fine, so long as I can read them.

I did play another couple puzzles and I am getting used to the grey. It seems to be on larger (which is to say, more zoomed out) puzzles when there's grey and white buried amongst other colours it starts getting a bit indistinct. Honestly though, I suspect that if it had always been this way I never would have noticed.

I did a bit more fiddling with the SVG mode - the grey is a bit darker, and for firefox we use slightly smaller fonts. Still needs a lot more work to really look clean.

Ah, I thought the clues suddenly got smaller. Definitely looks nice on my end.

Thanks for fixing the L key. :)

I'm now seeing about a digit and a half of the numbers on the right, which is a vast improvement over just the first digit, since I can at least generally make out what the second one is with half of it showing.

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, so I may be the only one using this feature, but I have the middle button set to "Pick color of cell or clue as current left-button color." The middle click is currently working with the cell colors, but not the clue colors.

Using Chrome in OS X 10.8.

Yeah, the color pick and the color menu are probably both not working in SVG mode. I'll add them to my list.

I've done a little more work on the font sizing. Maybe it's better now. Haven't tested it on a lot of browsers yet.

The numbers on the right are much improved for me now, thanks.

On puzzle #9466, when trying to print it, I get the error message:
An invalid character was found. Line: 0 Character: 0

The following has happened to me twice in the last week:

When I'm working on a big picture and need to close up for the night, I save the solution, naturally. However, twice in the past week, on both big pictures that I've needed to save before closing up my computer, I have lost a sizable quantity of solved grid. Everything seems fine when I first open the half-solved puzzle and I start working on marking off the number groups that I've already solved (some are always lost when I re-open a puzzle, but that's not a critical issue for me). Once I reach the limit of my screen and scroll downwards, it's like the image is cut off with a knife - everything past the first screenful is lost. If there is overflow on the right of the screen, I still have what parts I solved, but if it's overflow to the bottom of the screen, then absolutely every single cell is empty.

What could be causing this?

Is anyone else having this problem or is it an odd problem my browser (Firefox 15.0.1) has developed?

I can print if I use "print puzzles" then find the puzzle I want in the collections. But if I click on your "print" button from the puzzle page (which would be much more convenient), nothing happens -- well, actually, something happens: my browser locks up entirely and I have to use ctrl-alt-del to get out.
Can you please explain what I'm doing wrong?

It sounds like there's something wrong with your Adobe Reader plugin for your browser.

The files on the "Print Puzzles" page are in .zip format - so your browser saves them and then when you open them, you do it with the Adobe Reader program - not in your browser.

The files on the individual puzzle pages are in .pdf format, so the browser tries to open them with the Adobe Reader plugin.

TLDR: go to Adobe's site ( http://get.adobe.com/reader/ ) and re-download and install Adobe Reader.

Cannot get puzzles to show in Windows 8!!!!! Can see the home page, can search for puzzles, see the listing of puzzles, but when I click to open/solve, the screen stays blank. HELP!!! I'm in withdrawal!

Cannot get puzzles to show in Windows 8!!!!! Can see the home page, can search for puzzles, see the listing of puzzles, but when I click to open/solve, the screen stays blank. HELP!!! I'm in withdrawal!

What browser are you using? Try Chrome:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/

On every puzzle that I do, when I try to save it I get error trying to save 504. So many times I have had to start all over again. Happens in both Chrome and Firefox

Unfortunately it will. It's not your computer at fault. When Jan created this site he never dreamed it would become so popular. As a result we encounter problems due to the overload of users. Jan is very busy right now but will fix it when he can. Sometimes you can use the back arrow in the upper left and you can try to save again.

whenever i get the save error, i just click one of the puzzle squares three times and it will attempt to save again. usually just once or twice does the trick. that will keep you from having to redo the puzzle at least.

Sometimes even though it doesn't look like it has saved, it has. So make note of the # and go to find puzzles and bring it up and you may find it's OK. If you were unable to comment you may be able to do so here.

Having trouble with the screen resolution not showing the game/grid properly. Using Windows 7. Any recommendations? Also, can't get this site to run with Windows 8?

One way the display gets screwed up is when the site gets zoomed in your browser. Look under the View menu and look for Zoom - Reset. It's different in different browsers. (E.g. Chrome has a button with three horizontal lines instead of anything in english that normally educated people could read and understand...)

Control-Zero will reset the zoom to 100% in IE, FF and Chrome. (Control-Minus and Control-Equal zoom in and out.)

Also, no problems in Win 7 or Win 8.

Joe or David. I've tried for 5 days to solve my own puzzle and could not (timed out). I now have windows 8. Today I went and used my old computer with windows vista and was able to get to the solve screen immediately. Please advise.

Tom: coincidence. Timeouts are passed on to you from the server out there in the interwebs. Either that or Win8 is evil.

Agreed...and the evil inside Win8 is easily suppressed with the right mods ;)

okay....Jan could you please help me with my win 8 problem :(

Tom, what browser are you using in each operating system? It's possible the version is different and is causing a problem, but most likely it's just bad timing. The way to see is to use the two computers at the same time to see if the problem is the computer or the timing.

I have been having trouble with this site off and on. It can vary from really fast to 504s and back within 5 minutes.

Joe... thx for replying. I did do both computers right after each other. The vista one has e9. The win8 has e10.

have you tried chrome on your w8 computer?

Joe, lol, just seen your entry and I already downloaded crome and it WORKS! If you ever figure out how to make ie10 can be used please let me know. Thx

If I could figure out how to make IE work, I'd be working for MS and making a ton of money. Actually, I'd probably be working for Google and making as much, but with a better corporate culture. In fact, that explains why IE still doesn't work.

Puzzles have gotten larger and larger. Even a small one will not fit on my monitor. Any suggestions?

There have been some really large puzzles added recently, some of which I couldn't do because of the size, but actually the puzzles on a whole are smaller than when this site started out. When you go the the best puzzles site many of those puzzles are quite large. Those of us who make puzzles on a regular basis try to accommodate those solvers with smaller screens, but we also make larger puzzles for those who enjoy larger puzzles. By using the arrow keys you can flip the number clues from top to bottom and side to side. This may help a little for some of the puzzles.

Ruth, it seems like your browser's zoom is turned way up. Try pressing Ctrl-0 (Zero) to reset it.

You can also look on your browser's menu system for a zoom reset. (On Firefox it's in the View menu -- View | Zoom | Reset.)

My puzzle will not open. Does anyone else have this problem?

Sylvia: I have I.E. 10 and won't open puzzles. I downloaded Chrome and it works. Maybe you might want to try that.

I don't have any option but IE. Am I SOL? For good?

not true Peter Nessen: Try going to Settings, Options, Drawing mode (choose SVG) ... don't forget to save at the bottom of page... good luck

Sadly, I made the change and still can't get puzzles. Oh well. As it is free, I have no reason to complain. Maybe it will get fixed someday.

Did Jan make some changes to this site? Perhaps Teresa, or someone who knows how, could contact him and tell him that a lot of people all of a sudden are having problems. Particularly with IE. If he did something that is causing these problems, can he fix it so we don't lose people like R. Peter Nessen?

Peter, and those others with this problem - Tell what operating system you use (like windows xp, or win 7 or OSX) and also what browser version you are using (look on the Help menu for "About xxx"). It would also be helpful to Jan to know exactly what you see on the pages that don't work.

For example:

I have been having no trouble on a win 7 computer with Firefox 20, Safari 3.1, or Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m. I even started up IE 10 to see if it worked. The puzzles came up fine, but it looked bad at 100% zoom. It only looked correct at 125% zoom.

The puzzles also work on my phone with the default android browser.

They don't work on my Kindle Fire with either the default android browser nor the Maxthon browser. In both those cases the sidebar and the buttons and dropboxes below the puzzle appear, but where the puzzle should be there is just two rows of plaintext numbers.

For puzzle 21892 the numbers were the clues plus an additional "1015" at the end. For puzzle 21891 they were the numbers +"1515". (Aha, those are the dimensions of the puzzles)

hmmm now when I access forum "new replies to my postings...I get stuff from wayyyyy back

On a different note, today I opened the forum early today and only found a few new notes. I looked at them and went and did something else. An hour or so later I came back and found 49 "new" messages.

I say "new" because they were not actually new. The dates of the latest comments ranged from 2010 to January of this year. The puzzle numbers ranged from 857 to 21655. The only thing they seemed to have in common is that they all were puzzles with more than one version.

Okay, not so different since Tom posted while I was typing.

I'm also having problems displaying puzzles - Yesterday, everything was wonderful - Today, not so much.

WINDOWS 7, IE10 and WINDOWS NT, IE8
* Logged in: I get a blank page when trying to bring up any puzzle (New, mine or random)
* Logged out: I get HTML script for each Random puzzle I load

IPHONE 4, SAFARI
No problems

I, too, got a bunch of old comments. I think there has been a "hitch" with the forum comments. Some of them were my puzzles with old comments that I had not seen before. I had noticed that before. Sometimes I would click on the comments for my puzzles without going to the Forum and discover older comments I had not seen before.
So far I'm seeing the puzzles OK. I use Chrome.

Jan's email address is in the FAQ section.

That was weird. As far as I could tell, they were all new (to me) comments, and most dated back to April 2012. A few were addressed to me, thanking me for advice in making their puzzles more solvable.

Today the site is working like a champ on all my devices.

Kristen - I'll bet it's kind of like finding an unopened Christmas present from two years ago.

I fixed the IE 10 bug, but I'm afraid I broke all previous versions of IE. I'm working on getting things working on all versions of IE.

Thank you, Jan (for spoiling us rotten).

I spent a morning debugging somebody else's code on the tiny little laptop which has the only remaining IE 9 installation I can find, and I think I found a patch that makes things work on both IE 10 and IE 9. I'd be interested in hearing if it also works for people with older IE versions.

Yes! It works for me now. I installed Chrome last week, but IE works now, too. (Yikes, I have IE 8 on this netbook.)

Thanks. Anyone still running IE 7?

Apologies if this has already been addressed, but there are a bunch of puzzles in my "saved" list that I know for a fact I have never worked on - I only do monochrome puzzles and many are for large multicolors. Is there a way to remove puzzles from my saved list that I know I will never do?

When you click on a saved game you get three choices:

Load your previous solution, or
Restart with a blank grid, or
Erase your saved puzzle and return to the main menu..

Choose "erase", and it's gone.

Or this may work also. Hover over the number until the menu appears. Click on "rate puzzle". Along with the two rating choices is an option to mark puzzle as solved. Check that box and the puzzle will go away.

throwing your laptop out of the window won't help!

I'm having trouble saving solutions; also, when I try to continue working on a puzzle I saved with a partial solution, I get the error message "ERROR: Bad SQL: SELECT LENGTH(REPLACE(REPLACE(game,'x',''),' ','')) FROM user_pbn_data WHERE id=? AND username=? [23890,Rosemary] - Table './pbn/user_pbn_data' is marked as crashed and should be repaired"

samo

Me, too, as follows:

ERROR: Bad SQL: SELECT LENGTH(REPLACE(REPLACE(game,'x',''),' ','')) FROM user_pbn_data WHERE id=? AND username=? [9315,mrsthing2] - Table './pbn/user_pbn_data' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

Relieved to hear it's not my old clunker that's causing the saving problem.

Nope my new clunker has the same problem

I contacted Jan and ask him to read "bugs" forum.

I'm having similar problems; when I try to open a new puzzle, once the puzzle is drawn I get the text "Checking for Saved Games..." below it, which doesn't go away. I also can't save any solutions.

exactly Rebecca :(

having the same problems

having the same problems

I've updated all of my browser software and still experiencing the same issue.

Just to be clear to people concerned about this: it is a problem with the server, not with your own computer or software. There is nothing you can do to fix it from your end.

It would be nice if someone such as yourself, Joe, (hint, hint) could post a notice in a way that that people could see when they logged on when these problems arise so that they don't waste time reloading their browsers, etc. and don't repeat the same information in the forum that several people have already posted before them.

If someone tries to explain what is the problem exactly, I (probably) can help about the solution in server repairing.
It was more than three days (Saturday morning CET) ago when recognized the problem anf first signed in the chat.
Perhaps it could be better to write out the problem onto the top of opening page than this forum topic.

I'm sorry, but my only privilege here is making the "logically solvable" determinations. Otherwise I am just a user like everyone else.

Jan is the sole up-keeper of this site, and rightly so as he uses it as part of his resume. Since it was built and is maintained solely in his spare time (as it makes him no money, and actually costs him due to hosting bills) it may be a while before this problem is fixed.

Until the bug is fixed, stick to easier puzzles you can do in one sitting, then use "Mark as Completed".

How does one "Mark as Completed"? Is there a 'button' somewhere I've been missing?

Laetitia: when you point at a puzzle a list drops down. one of the items is rate puzzle, click that and rate or not, check off "mark as completed" and summit. hope this helps

(#330)Jan sounds like a remarkable individual - sharing this site with all of us!I love the site and look forward to when it is running smoothly again.

This may not have anything to do with the current problem and it might be my old clunker at fault, but I discovered that I had missed quite a few comments on my puzzles because they did not show up in the Forum. So you may want to check a few of your puzzles to see if you have the same problem.

The drop-down list does not appear on the "Home" page (for web-server performance reasons), but will appear on the "Puzzle List" and "Find Puzzles" pages.

Thanks Tom.

For those who want to keep track of a topic, but cannot find it when they come back to the forum:

In general, the "Forum" page only shows topics that have a reply that you have not seen. So if you display a topic, and then go back to the forum before anyone else has replied to the topic, it won't show up.

However, you can change that behavior. At the top of the page, there is a dropbox that says "Show: [New Comments for Solved Puzzles]". Change that to [All Topics] and the topic will reappear.

(You can use [All Topics You Have Posted to] for a shorter list if you have already posted in the topic that you're interested in.)

6th day... Our Omnipotent God created the whole world within this period! (and relaxed on the 7th) :)

Shut up Thomas.

:) Norma

I am new to this site, but I have noticed a couple things not mentioned in this forum. I went to 'Find Puzzles' and hovered the mouse over a puzzle number but 'Mark as Completed' is not one of the options. The options in the drop down box are: Solve Puzzle - Rate Puzzle - View Comments - Print Puzzle - View Information - Peek at Solution - Export Puzzle

I also noticed that although I do not get the 'yahoo' message when I save a puzzle and there is no check beside the puzzle number in the puzzle list, it does show in the 'Users' list that I have completed the puzzle.

"Mark as Completed" is a checkbox in the "Rate Puzzle" window.

As Tom said in 333, the procedure to mark a puzzle as finished is:
====
> Hover the pointer over the puzzle title on the "Puzzle List" or "Find Puzzles" page (not the "Home" page).

> Choose "Rate Puzzle"

> Check the "Mark this puzzle as completed." checkbox in the window that pops up and hit the "Submit" button.
====


I just looked on the Users page, and my counter goes up with each puzzle solved as well. So, this might mean that the finishes are being recorded correctly, and only the read from the user db is messed up. However, it could just mean that the count is tallied separately.

Thanks, Joe. After scanning down this page reading some posts and just skimming over others, my brain apparently did not grasp that I needed to do more than one step. I did go back and mark some that I had completed. I guess I will just keep doing random small puzzles until Jan gets the saving problem fixed.

Just to be updated on the fix!

this is not really a bug though, but an incident.

Why do you call it an incident?

This may not be a coding bug, but it certainly is a "bug" in the sense of a "gremlin", or a fault that causes things to go haywire.

a bug is a flaw in the code, an incident is something that has occurred to cause the program to stop working the way it was. it looks like something has happened to a table in the database, so the db needs to be repaired or restored from a backup.

Hello Bug! You're older than ONE WEEK! Congratulations! :)

Shut up, Thomas!

Just getting myself on here so I can be notified of the fix. Love this site and it was a sad day when I thought I couldn't record completes until I saw the forum posts about the "Mark as Complete" option. Hooray, forum!

Joe, I was just wondering if you're in contact with Jan. Since we haven't even heard anything from him along the lines of, "I'm too busy to fix this but I'll get to it someday," I just wanted to make sure he was okay.

Jan mad a brief statement on the 22nd on Facebook to the effect that he would look at the error log. Nothing since. I, too, hope he's OK.

It's been a couple of days since anyone posted, so I thought I'd mention that the bug remains. Patiently awaiting Jan's attention to this issue. Love the site and appreciate Jan's hard work (for free!!!).

We love you, Jan!

I truly enjoy this site and look forward to its fix. It is a huge undertaking to run such a site and I find it awesome how well it usually works. I too will work some of the smaller puzzles until a fix is made.

"Checking for Saved Games..." bug , please repars
this is my daily drug^^

I enjoy these puzzles so much. It's amazing that Jan does this for free/for fun. I do hope the save feature gets fixed soon... For the now, I hope Jan is in Hawaii, or something like that.

It is really too bad that this bug prevents us from commenting on the puzzles we solve. I have done several that were awesome and it would have been nice to say so. I did rate them excellent, but I think comments are very nice to receive when you do a good job.

That's odd that you can't comment. Most of us are able to comment. But I have a different problem. Comments on my puzzles do not appear in the Forum and I have to go to my puzzles to see if there are any new comments. So If I miss a comment I'll apologize here.

I've noticed something else that might need to be looked into. When I do a puzzle, I check every few moves and if it is right I save it. If it is not right, I undo to the first incorrect move. Usually it will undo just the last few moves since the last time I saved. But occasionally (usually when I am more than halfway through the puzzle) it will undo most of what I have done and take me back almost to the beginning.

I've had the same problem since the check program was first added. Frustrating to say the least. I check for errors but don't click on the undo button. Just try to find the problem.

Yes. Very frustrating. I'll have to just find the problem instead of undo. I don't know why I didn't think of that.

On one rather intricate puzzle I was working on I kept checking and it kept telling me it was OK but finally told me there was an error, so I saved thinking if it erased a lot of my work I could just reload. Wrong. It not only wiped out almost all of what I had done, it wiped it out on the saved version, too!

That stinks. I was working on a 45x50 grid when this bug hit and now I can't get back to it. I am working only small puzzles. I sure would like to try some of the larger ones after this bug gets fixed.

I know people get frustrated with Jan for not getting this fixed. BUT even though I too am frustrated, I am very glad Jan created this site and allows us to visit this site and do these puzzles free of charge.

Thank you, Jan!!!

The Revert button goes back to your last save: much more reliable than Undo.

Thank you, Kristen. I didn't know what the revert button did. I will use that from now on.

I tried the 'Revert' button. It said it was loading, but it took too long. My screen went black twice while I was waiting. I finally just erased my mistakes and went from there.

By the way, the mistakes I erased were not my mistakes (this time). When I do larger puzzles (the only larger puzzles I have done so far is size medium) the screen freezes. I just move the mouse around waiting for the green dot to move so I can continue. Sometimes when it picks back up, the mouse drags the last color I used all over the screen. Then I have to check and undo or erase.

At this point I doubt that you will be able to save or to retrieve anything you saved previously. As far as you screen problems why don't you post your computer "vitals" (pc or laptop, browser you are using, etc) as the site works better with some browsers than others. We have some really computer knowledgeable guys who frequent the site and perhaps one of them might be able to help you out.

Drat. The Revert button is probably temporarily broken, along with the Save function.

I'm getting a bit worried about Jan. He made a brief comment on Facebook on Feb. 22nd and nothing since. He usually makes a few comments to keep us posted, even if it's to say he's too busy. I hope he's OK.

yes but he's posted on his own facebook page. (unless someone else is posting for him?)

But nothing about our problem.

I just got back on after the site was unavailable for a few days. Was it down for others too? My solved puzzles are also not saving.

Yes, the site was down the past couple of days for me also. I am so glad to see it back as I was going through PBN withdrawl (sp?) symptoms. I was hoping this meant the site was being updated/fixed by Jan. Alas, this does not appear to be the case, as my solved puzzles are not being saved. I hope it will be soon.

It seems to be in the same state as it was just before it went down. Even though we still can't save, I'm really glad it's back where it was because I, too, was suffering from withdrawal.

ditto Norma

Along with not saving, the "Feature Puzzle" tab seems to be stuck on the same list for the past several days.

The save is fixed!

One of my completed puzzles just saved! Wahoo! Thank you Jan.

Sorry to be so slow to get to this. It should be working now.

thank you Jan :)

Yes, thank you Jan!!!

Yes, yes, yes! Thank you, Jan.

Peek at Solution is not working for me. Anyone else?
It's working OK now. Must have been a problem with my old clunker.

Thank you Jan!

My life is back to normal now! My husbands too! Thank you Jan!

Thank you, thank you, Jan. :)

Thanks!!!!

Thank you so much, Jan.

Thank you Jan, for the website and I look at this waiting period as a great learning opportunity. I learned about a few features I had not tried. and thanks to the avid PBNers that had some great ideas and explanations to help keep me puzzling.

I agree with your comments, Ronda. The same for me, too.

Thanks, Jan!
I've just returned now from griddlers.net
:)

Oh my gosh! I just solved a puzzle and was getting set up to take a screen-cap of it (which is how I've been keeping track of the puzzles I've solved) when...whoops! The "Yahoo!" message came up! Oh wow! Thank you so much Jan, for the work you do here, and for fixing the save feature!

THanks so much - wonderful site. Appreciate the puzzles.

Jan I hope you realize just how important you are to us and how much we appreciate this site. THANK YOU!!

I echo everyone elses Thank yous!!!

Ditto everyone above...thanks!

Thank you so much, Jan!

Many thanks for fixing the game save bug. Our lives can now return to normal :).

Thank you Jan!
For the fix AND for the PbN site.

Thank you very much Jan for fixing the "save bug". I really appreciate the amount of work this site takes. It is awesome.

I do see another smallish bug. The home page that I see has not changed for about a week. I don't know if anyone is having this problem.

Thanks again for fixing the "save" bug. Like someone else said, I learn how to use some of the other abilities of the site so it wasn't a total loss to me.

Thank you for all Jan!

Thank you for all your work on this site, Jan.

It's fixed!!! Yay! Thanks, Jan. I am doing a happy dance.

Puzzle 24460 http://webpbn.com/24459 seems to have an odd little glitch in the automatic Solvability rating.

It says: "Logical: Definitely to be line/color solvable" (with an extra "to be" there in the phrase). And it really doesn't seem to be, either.

Also the Solvability box is still open with "please rate this puzzle".

I've left it unmarked to show to Jan, but it is moderate lookahead.

The last two, or perhaps three, puzzles I have solved, have not been "saved". It appears the problem is back as of today. I appreciate this site very much, and hope the problem can be solved soon.

Here is the same problem with saving as three months ago.
Can anybody send a message to Jan?

Jan reads these forums

Surely... but at the last case he didn't send an answer and the bug lasted three weeks.

I get the following when loading a prev saved partially solved puzzle:
ERROR: Bad SQL: SELECT LENGTH(REPLACE(REPLACE(game,'x',''),' ','')) FROM user_pbn_data WHERE id=? AND username=? [1461,tonib] - Table './pbn/user_pbn_data' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

When using revert to prev saved version gets stuck on "Loading..." and loading a previously solved puzzle gets stuck on "Checking for Saved Games..."

Luckily, after you've finished a puzzle, the mouseover menu still works. Just click "Rate Puzzle" and then "Mark puzzle as solved". You can also enter your ratings for quality and difficulty from there.

Kristen, what is 'mouseover menu'?

The mouseover menus only show up on the Puzzle List and Find Puzzles pages. There you can set the mouse pointer on a puzzle name and after a second a menu will pop up.

On that menu is an option called Rate Puzzle. Here you can not only rate it, but also mark it as solved. (This was included for those who print out puzzles and solve them on paper.)

Thanks, Joe! I just marked a puzzle solved. Coincidentally (?) it was your puzzle.

Hello,

I am having the same problem as Toni B and getting the same error message when I try to load saved puzzles. Does this mean I have lost my saved puzzles and have to start over from the beginning?

Also, for MONTHS I have not been getting a normal grid on my new puzzles. When I start a new puzzle, the grid is not uniform with bold lines every five squares like it should be - there are bold lines scattered everywhere and that makes it very frustrating to try and solve the puzzles.

There has also been a problem for months and months with random saving/loading issues, etc.

I have been a fan and supporter of this website for a number of years, but lately there have just been way too many problems with it that were not an issue in the past.

Are these glitches being taken care of? Are others having these constant problems?

If I mark a puzzle as completed (not as saved) in this way, will it appear amongst my solved ones?

Katie No, you have not lost anything.
Thomas Yes, it will.

I've found that if you try to save a puzzle during the process of solving you will get an error. But if you work the puzzle to completion and let the autosave engage, it will appear as if the save doesn't complete but the next time you log in the puzzle will not come up as unsolved.

Katie, is your browser window set to an odd size, like 90%? I've found that if I resize my screen, the grid goes wonky.

I have no idea how it works as I have never studied it or used it, but could the Export function on the mouseover menu work in some way to save puzzles?

Katie have you tried using a different browser to see if the problem persists?

Katie, to me it sounds like you've set your browser to zoom out for all webpbn.com pages. You should also try adjusting your browser's zoom level. (For Firefox on Windows, you can hit ctrl+0 to reset, but it may be different for your browser/computer combo).

Kristen and Janet,

It WAS a zoom issue!!! My window was set to 110%!

I don't even know how that happened - I've never touched that setting before.

Thank you! :)

Oh what a relief it is! :)

Katie, The last time this happened was Feb/March. Have you had problems between then and now?

Norma, the export function lets you download the puzzle in a variety of file formats. This would save a copy to your hard drive, but it would do nothing to the database that records what you have and have not done.

Thanks, Joe. I knew you would come up with an answer. So if you just wanted to save your solution for posterity you could just do a screen capture.

it seam still broken ..

UUUUggghhh, it wasn't saving so I was trying to get by with marking them as complete. Now I have this grid issue as well (not related to zoom), and can't really play at all!!!

Has anyone said when this is going to be fixed? The site works with Firefox; but I cannot access my partially solved puzzles from there.

My puzzles will not save also. I've done as suggested (the mouse over and rate then save) after I've completed one. However, now the puzzles will not save when in progress. Up until yesterday I could save partial solutions (even though it didn't say 'saved', when I came back my partial solution had been saved) now they're not saving at all. I discovered this when I accidentally left the page of a nearly completed puzzle. When I came back it was all gone and I had to start over.

Have patience Sheila, Jan will get to this when he has the time. This is like a hobby for him, one he loves, not a business.

Hi Guys.
I too have been a fan of this site for years, however am starting to lose faith with the save issue reoccurring - now twice this year - and taking weeks for problems to be fixed.
Just wanted to say that I too get the same problem as Katie Y, with the bold lines not always appearing at every 5 rows. I have checked my zoom level but this is not the issue.
Hopefully when Jan gets around to fixing the save problem he looks at this too.

When they withdrew support of Windows XP I got a used laptop with Windows 7 on it. I was unfamiliar with both Windows 7 and laptops so was doing quite a bit of trial and error exploring. I think, but not sure, that I experienced the grid problem when I was trying different screen resolutions. As I said, I'm not sure that was the problem, but you might try changing the screen resolution. Make a note of what your current resolution is so that if that is not the problem you can always change it back.

As I commented earlier, there is no need to mouse over and mark as solved. If you don't save during the process of solving but work all the way to the end, a puzzle will not come up on your list of "puzzles I have not saved a partial solution for" list. The comments won't come up correctly but you will be able to rate the puzzle.

This has worked for me in this manner both times we had this issue.

If you don't mark it as solved, it will stay on the Puzzle List which may or may not be an issue. I think most people would like it to disappear so that they know they solved it.

I'm not sure what you're calling "the Puzzle List" but when I search for puzzles to solve on the "Find Puzzle" tab the ones I've just done don't come up and I the only puzzles I've marked as solved are ones I didn't want to do.

The Puzzle List is the second item on the menu to the left. Currently any new puzzle you solve will stay on that list unless you mark it as solved. I guess with some people it doesn't matter, but I prefer that once I have solved a puzzle I want it to disappear from the list.

Just wanted to thank Jan for the site. I did not know this was just a hobby. I am frustrated, but can understand it takes time to fix these things and life happens. So I will take what I can get and have fun solving these wonderful puzzles all of you are putting out there. Thanks again.

You nailed it, Ron. At least we can still publish, solve and comment, which are the most important things.

Thank you Tom. Please accept my apologies if I sounded impatient. I didn't mean for my post to sound that way :) I just wanted to mention what happened to me as far as the puzzles not saving while in process, when they were before. I didn't know if this was a 'new' issue or just part of the same one. I realize that this is not a business for Jan, and I THANK him for having this website!! I LOVE it!!! I'm so glad I found it and I've become addicted to it lol. The whole 'save' issue is NOT enough to keep me from coming here. :D

I only discovered this site a couple of months ago and do love this site. I had been saving the puzzles after every couple of moves so I could do some trial and error, sometimes for many moves at a time and then hit "revert' if I came to a contradiction. I don't use "check" unless I really think I have it right. Since the "Save" has been broken I have been doing somewhat easier puzzles without deep look ahead.
Thanks for this website!!!

Byrdie - You are correct, however the puzzles will probably still be in your "Puzzles I have saved partial solutions for" section. They will more than likely not be in your solved puzzles unless you mark them as solved.
This is just what I have found to happen with me while dealing with the save issue. If I finish a puzzle, and go back to the "puzzles I have not saved solutions for" tab - it will not be there. But it still won't be marked as solved.
It will be lingering in the Limbo that is the "puzzles I have saved partial solutions for" section. I just didn't want it to be a surprise for when you find all of these puzzles there at some point down the road. :)

Kerri Kemp - I agree completely with what you said above. I love this site, but am also losing faith and patience. Problems seem to be occurring more frequently and with more of a waiting time of when they get fixed.

Has anyone ever offered to help maintain the site with Jan? I would be willing to help in any way I can.

This is the latest posting from Facebook.
Jan Wolter Yeah, thanks. I do know that, but I'm completely swamped with work right now.
July 30 at 5:12pm · Like · 1

Valerie Mates (Not helping the situation any: Our nanny had an emergency and left us suddenly.)
July 30 at 7:02pm · Like

Mary-Jo Hausmann Ok! What's important is the family!
July 30 at 9:27pm

Hi,
How can I mark "as completed" puzzles from "Featured puzzles"? :)
When will this bug repaired? This session is longer than spring one.

I am not only having trouble with saving puzzles mid solve but also saving at the end of a completed puzzle. It completely freezes. It also constantly says it is checking for saved games. I hope things are improving with work and your family. Especially so that we loyal users can get these issues fixed. If there is anything I can help with let me know. I am majoring in computer science and am very skilled with databases.

Miss being able to work on my saved partial solutions. Hope things clear up for you so that we can enjoy this wonderful site again.

I hope, Jan has time to type myisamchk -r , soon ...

Jan, if you ever get to reading this, I appreciate the fact that you've kept the site free and ad-free, but have you considered sticking a couple ads or a donation link up, even temporarily?

I'm thinking that, although WebPBN is technically a hobby, you are a freelancer. Surely there's enough regulars here to pay for your time allowing you to fix the site up.

It's just a shame that I've checked back in after some time away only to discover the same problems. Despite the current issues, I've definitely had enough fun here over time to throw a few dollars your way.

Naomi: some of us already have sent some $ to help out via pay pal.

Naomi Millar -

I completely agree. It is such a waste for the site to have these problems for such a long amount of time without being fixed.

I would be willing to pay a small monthly fee in exchange for the use of this site on which I spend so much of my time, if it would help to get these issues taken care of in a timely fashion.

I'm sure money would be helpful to Jan, but his biggest problem is time. He's just very, very busy and we just have to wait until he can free up some time. I don't recall his exact words, but if I remember correctly he was talking about some major and time consuming efforts to fix it permanently. Right now we can still use the site and enjoy it and wait patiently.

There is not much to enjoy of the site right now. Even if you complete a puzzle, it doesn't save so when it is working again, we would have to repeat them all. I have offered to help but have not heard back. I hope his time improves. I miss this site.

Amanda, perhaps you missed the discussion on this, but when you have completed a puzzle, go back to the puzzle list and open the mouse over menu for the puzzle you have just completed and click on Rate Puzzle. You will then see an option to mark puzzle as completed. When you click on this box it removes the puzzle from your Puzzle List and it will no longer appear as an unsolved puzzle.

Please Help fix the crash in the program tried rate puzzle. Did not work. Tried other browsers. Did not work. I'm not getting past checking saved puzzles.

Mikor lesz már ennek vége?

When it does.

Thank you Norma Dee for that tip. I did miss that from earlier posts.

YW, Amanda. We miss all the bells and whistles, but we can still enjoy solving and creating. Thank heavens the save still works for creating puzzles.

Re #456: Veronica, rate puzzle works (see #455) if you use Puzzle List rather than the home page.

As frustrating as these issues are - I do understand being too busy to actually fix the problem at this time, as it may be quite time consuming. However, I find it discouraging that we have heard nothing from Jan himself on this problem.

It would take no time at all to post a quick comment reassuring us all that the problem is being looked into and possibly a time frame of when we can look forward to it finally being fixed.

I find it frustrating that a bunch of people who are essentially getting something for nothing can whine so much about something that is really not more than an inconvenience. You can still solve puzzles (just don't save as you go), your count of puzzles solved still increases for each puzzle completed (I know, I checked), you can still rate and comment on puzzles, and at least two work-arounds have been posted here.

Get over it. The problem has been reported and we've been told that it's been acknowledged. Quit effin' whining.

You said it Byrdie!

ditto JOta

ditto Tom. We can still solve and create, save while creating, and read and make comments. What else do you absolutely need? Patience.

but we cannot solve complicated puzzles

Hello. I am new to the site so I hope I'm posting this in the right place. I have finished a few puzzles and upon completion it says "Saving" at the bottom of the puzzle. However the word saving never goes away - it seems to be stuck. When I go to look at my Saved Puzzles, it is empty. I've tried pressing the Save Puzzle button, and the same thing happens - it says Saving forever. Am I doing something wrong or is this a current bug with they system? Thanks for your help.

It's a bug in the program. The creator of this site, Jan Wolter, is extremely busy, but he is aware of the problem and will check out the problem when he has time. For now though, when you have completed a puzzle you can go back to the Puzzle List and mouse over the puzzle just completed until the drop down menu appears, then click on rate puzzle and it will give you a box to check to mark the puzzle as completed. This will remove it from your Puzzle List. Even though there are problems you can still enjoy the site as the important things still work. So don't go away----keep solving,:)

Thanks for the reminder of how to "mark as completed", Norma! I had forgotten what to do so this was a welcomed message. Welcome, Bailey1121, to this puzzle site. This "glitch" doesn't happen often (my opinion) but does happen occasionally. I'll be glad when it gets fixed too, but until then, you can start puzzles and just leave the site open, even when you close your computer, and your in-progress puzzle should stay where it is until you've finished it. I have found that when it's taken me a few days to finish one, when I enter the final mark, a "pop-up" comes up saying I've been "timed-out" and asking me to login. That is mildly frustrating but you can still go back into that particular puzzle, unsuppress the solution (in the comments) to confirm what the puzzle was, then "mark as completed". It's a little more trouble but a "work-around" until this bug gets fixed.

Glad you mentioned the "timed-out" message, Meg. I thought it was just me. :)

Great to know. Thank you so much. I am enjoying the site so much and am so glad to hear there is a workaround! I appreciate the quick response.

Another quick question - How can I see what new posts are in the forum. I'd like to see what people are talking about as it will help me to learn the site, and hopefully how to solve these puzzles!

When you click on Forum it will only show posts for the puzzles you have solved. However you can go to Find Puzzles and do a search and for the puzzle(s) you bring up there you can click on the comments number and read the comments.

The forum page shows only new comments each time you visit the page. The dropbox on the top will show you the choices you can make for displaying topics.

Right now, I'm experiencing a very sluggish puzzle solving experience. When I move my mouse over the puzzle grid, it takes several seconds for the web app to respond. It's happening in between almost every click. It doesn't happen on any other website that I've tried to use and it doesn't happen on other parts of your website. My thought is that there is either a resource exhaustion issue or a bug in the web application...any ideas?

Have you emptied your internet cache recently? I haven't tried solving any puzzles yet today, but that's always a good starting point.

Does this happen on every size grid or just big ones?
If it's on big ones, you might try turning off the red-ball error checker. (Use the Settings button on the left, then on the Options tab uncheck Automatic Error Checking.)

Is anyone else having problems doing puzzles this evening (7 pm USEST)? I keep getting a SQL error message when I click on a puzzle title.

Error messages galore!

I am also getting SQL errors that say my user name is marked as crashed and not repaired. Puzzles work fine if logged out.

I just made a puzzle 45x40 and checked it with the checker quite a few times to sort out the multiple solutions. And then I saved it... and got the message "Declining to save empty puzzle" on a otherwise blank page. Puzzle gone.

I just found #482 now. Joe, I am sorry that the system ate that puzzle. No idea why that happened. Feel free to e-mail me or post in the WebPBN Facebook forum so that I'll see things sooner.

When I checked a puzzle while solving, a box came up that asked if I wanted to stop something (comments?) Stupidly, I clicked yes. Now the check button won't work at all, though the red error circle still show. How do I get the check option back?

Did you try reloading the page?
I'm guessing that it was saying "a script is unresponsive. Do you want to stop it?" Usually choosing yes doesn't break the page. Since it did, though, you basically just need to get a fresh version of the page to reset it. Click the refresh button or press F5.

Make sure you save your puzzle first, though!

I've been having save issues while creating. Sometimes when I save and come back it's gone, sometimes when I'm saving to resize it reverts back to a previous save state. I've tried multiple times on multiple days but it is inconsistent and I can't get it to save unless I'm resizing and even then it's not every time.

...and of course right after I post this it seems to be working fine :/

David, your problem might have to do with the aggressive local caching that many browsers have been doing recently. Every time you go to the create page you should immediately refresh the page with F5. This may solve your problem.

(The reason it doesn't happen when you change the size is because you are requesting a page that isn't in the cache.)

Good to know! Thanks Joe!

I agree -- that sounds like caching. There are some changes I can make to the code that should help, but the tricky part is getting programming time with my special-needs kiddo at home full time. But I will work on this.

Valerie, it's been a long (long) time since I did web stuff, but isn't there a meta tag that disables caching? Something about setting the expire=0 or the like?

Yes, but there are a number of things that control caching and interfere with each other. I turned off some caching today by adding some HTTP headers that request no caching, then found that our website's host has the module mod_expires set to add additional cache controls, so it was turning caching back on. I turned off our host's mod_expires, so now hopefully caching is disabled. Though that can cause other weirdness, like making the "Back" button lose text that you were entering, if it was not saved, so it may not turn out to be the final solution to caching issues. But hopefully this is a step forward.

I've tried making and publishing a puzzle multiple times since yesterday's update. The puzzles are saved but I can't seem to publish. Any suggestions?

It will save the puzzle the first time, but *any* edit will not be saved. It will also serve a completely blank page (no source) when trying to save.

So what should I do?

Brian, I have done some tests and at the moment, you cannot save any changes to any unpublished puzzle. I have sent an email to Valerie with my results.

The only way to publish puzzles at the moment is to publish directly from the create page. Thus there is no way to test a puzzle before publishing.

I would recommend creating small puzzles that are LLS until this is fixed.

Or, if you have a LOT of patience, you could create a puzzle, test it, and then make a new puzzle and transcribe it in and immediately publish it.

WAIT, (Derp) when you have finished testing your puzzle you can go back to the Create Puzzles page and then choose your puzzle from the "Edit an Existing Puzzle" dropbox and check "Make new copy". The Edit puzzle will take you to a page with a copy of your puzzle. The only difference will be the title which will have "Copy of " at the beginning.
You can then delete the "Copy of " and check the "check this box if your puzzle is ready for others to solve" and Save. I just did this on puzzle 34207 to make 34210.

Does this cause an issue with duplicate puzzles?

I'll try it. Thank Joe.

I found it. There's a bit of code that says, "If there is a PDF for this unpublished puzzle, delete it," and for some reason the site can't find the code to delete PDFs, so it is crashing when it tries to do that.

For now, since unpublished puzzles generally don't have PDF files anyway, I've commented out this code, which means that saving puzzles works -- though in theory it could leave behind a stray PDF version that is visible to the public after someone un-publishes a puzzle.

I need to come back to this to figure out why the code can't locate the part that handles PDF files, but this should get things working again for now.

Hm. The webserver error log is also full of errors that say, "File too large during global destruction." I have *no* idea what would cause that, but the error message is so weird that I am amused.

There are those that think we are in the midst of the apocalypse ...

A thought about the "file too large..." - it could be that the update changed how the filesize is reported - as in when the file doesn't exist, it gets reported as -1, which would actually be a huge number if it is expected to be (and looked at as) an unsigned int.

global destruction eh? check for:

SELECT ROUND(illuminati,(i/0))
FROM bunch_of_puzzles

Re #502: Hm. I think the "file too large" error message is coming from the operating system, or Perl, and not from Jan's code. But it totally makes sense that it would be what you described.

#503 made me grin. :) So *that's* where the pandemic came from!

Re #502: If the problem is a file size of -1 for a file that doesn't exist, then "file too large to delete" is an extremely harmless error message. :)

I found and fixed the problem with generating PDF files, so printing puzzles should now work.

Since that is fixed, I also put back the bit of code that, when you are editing a puzzle, says, "If there is a PDF for this unpublished puzzle, delete it." I tested it and it seems to be working correctly, but I would appreciate it if someone else would check it too.

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