Unfinished puzzles states now saved

[admin]

Call it censorship if you like, but I try to keep this site fun/light and approrpiate for all audiences. Politics has invaded nearly every other corner of this world at this point - I'd like to keep it out of our puzzles as much as possible.

[DogMa]

By acceding to this person's demand, you have invited politics into this site. I would very much like to know, was the quote itself racist? I don't believe you would have chosen it to make a puzzle with if it were racist.

Here are two quotes from John Derbyshire:

"After much importuning by my kids, and as part of the never-ending quest to find something that holds more interest for them than computer games and TV, I agreed to build a tree house in my back yard. I kept a record of construction progress on these pages."

"In the early weeks of 1984, for an hour each Tuesday and Sunday evening, a strange silence fell over England, or at any rate over the bourgeois precincts thereof. Streets were deserted; bartenders and waiters dozed idle at their stations; theaters and cinemas played to half-empty houses; telephones and doorbells went unanswered. The English middle classes were in front of their TV sets, gripped by the first (Tuesdays) or repeat (Sundays) broadcasting of The Jewel in the Crown, in fourteen weekly episodes. . . . It was, I think, the greatest success for a TV fiction miniseries since The Forsyte Saga seventeen years earlier."

Anything objectionable here?

The great American writer Flannery O'Connor was racist. Roald Dahl, a war hero and wonderful writer of children's stories, treated his wife very badly and made anti-semitic comments. Would you refuse to use quotes from either of them?

Please rethink this decision.

[admin]

I didn't like the quote. It was boring, and not up to snuff with the sort of quotes we've been using since the last batch of updates in 2019. That plus the baggage attached to the author's name made it a pretty easy decision to cull. And for the record: I am regularly removing puzzles like these from the rotation. Some are objectionable, but most are just lower-quality quotes from the early days of the site (2008-2013) which aren't particularly interesting or evocative.

Deciding which quotes are and are not appropriate for any given audience isn't always easy. I do my best, and I'm sure I've often fallen short in some regards, and that my decisions will always in some way reflect my own biases. But in the end it is my site, and my decision. If you disagree with it, that's entirely your right to do so, and if you choose to go elsewhere for your acrostic puzzles, I fully understand.

Cheers,
Stephen

[PatienceCrabstick]

Changing the subject a bit..... Has the site been working properly the past few days? I'm getting a lot of unprompted page reloads. Thanks!

[admin]

Hi Patience -

No changes on our end - does this happen on the game play page? And when it does, is your puzzle progress reloaded properly when the page reloads? I added code a few months back that should periodically save all puzzle progress every 10 seconds or so for cases like these. iPads in particular seem to be susceptible to these unwanted page reloads.

[PatienceCrabstick]

Yes, on the game play page - but only after the puzzle is solved. It's still spontaneously reloading today, but (so far) not as frequently. And, yes, of course I have an iPad (notorious, as I well know, for not playing nice with a good number of websites).
Another odd one for you: I've been accessing the site via https://acrostics.puzzlebaron.com/check.php, which as of two or three days ago no longer works for me. It now gives the following error message: "Oops, something bad happened. Please go back to our home page."
Thanks for looking into all this. The website still works for me, so it's no major crisis, merely a minor annoyance!

[admin]

The consensus on iPads seems to be that it's a low-memory issue that causes Safari to auto-reload pages. This can often happen if there are too many apps running in the background, or too many tabs open concurrently within Safari itself.

Also, the check.php page definitely shouldn't be bookmarked - as that's the "game over" page it is only intended to work when a puzzle is successfully solved. It is best to bookmark the home page instead.

[PatienceCrabstick]

Thanks for the input. It may be the tabs, as I don't have much in the way of apps running in the background. As for the "check.php" link, Safari saved it automatically as a "frequently visited" favorite, and it did work for the longest time. I'll delete it and replace it with the properly bookmarked page. Thanks again!

[SGreenNYC]

Too many cheaters here. Some of the record times are ridiculous. Those people are pathetic.

[sewaneesue]

sgreenNYC. Perhaps a players has played a game before, remembers the entire quote, and types it in quickly. ???

[duhmel]

sgreenNYC. Perhaps a players has played a game before, remembers the entire quote, and types it in quickly. ???

I've solved nearly 4000 Acrostic puzzles and NEVER had a puzzle repeat itself. Our admin does a fine job of ensuring that you are not served repeat puzzles. We've gone back and forth on this 'cheating' issue, but nobody is going to convince me that someone can solve a puzzle of 150-200 letters in less than 100 seconds. It would be a push to just type in the solution if you 'knew' the answer.