08.11.2022, 03:51
What it seems to me is that there are two issues here. Whether or not puzzles should be printable is the first, which seems more of a philosophical conundrum, and I won't address this, as I believe there are many more qualified to debate this than me. The second aspect (if I'm understanding the thread above so far) is how to mitigate spam/ads/paywalls, broken links etc, which seems to me like a technological issue.
So far, LMD's policy to hold the puzzle itself on it's own servers, has evidently worked to solve this issue.
One thought I had on the matter was this: What if a General Puzzle Protocol was developed, which outlined how the data of a puzzle was stored. My understanding is the current online tools for opening puzzles simply just use XML data organized in whatever way the tool's creator saw fit. If this was standardized, then the possibility for saving, transferring, importing, and hosting the actual puzzle data would be platform agnostic, and would allow anyone to load that puzzle into their favourite puzzle tool, effectively removing the need for external links of any kind, except for convenience.
This idea is not mine, I'm basing it entirely off of the General Midi Protocol, which made synthesizers from all manufacturers able to 'play' with each other, and has lasted decades past the technology of it's time being replaced.
I'm also not suggesting that LMD needs to necessarily develop this. I am just thinking it might be one solution, to the one half of the problem. If it was considered a viable solution, I believe the technical hurdles of standardizing a protocol are well within the ability of many community members. And I imagine hosting a puzzle data file wouldn't be much more of a headache than hosting the puzzle image file.
With that all said, I do understand that LMD may decide to go either way on both these issues, and fully expect I will keep enjoying the resource in whatever form it takes.
So far, LMD's policy to hold the puzzle itself on it's own servers, has evidently worked to solve this issue.
One thought I had on the matter was this: What if a General Puzzle Protocol was developed, which outlined how the data of a puzzle was stored. My understanding is the current online tools for opening puzzles simply just use XML data organized in whatever way the tool's creator saw fit. If this was standardized, then the possibility for saving, transferring, importing, and hosting the actual puzzle data would be platform agnostic, and would allow anyone to load that puzzle into their favourite puzzle tool, effectively removing the need for external links of any kind, except for convenience.
This idea is not mine, I'm basing it entirely off of the General Midi Protocol, which made synthesizers from all manufacturers able to 'play' with each other, and has lasted decades past the technology of it's time being replaced.
I'm also not suggesting that LMD needs to necessarily develop this. I am just thinking it might be one solution, to the one half of the problem. If it was considered a viable solution, I believe the technical hurdles of standardizing a protocol are well within the ability of many community members. And I imagine hosting a puzzle data file wouldn't be much more of a headache than hosting the puzzle image file.
With that all said, I do understand that LMD may decide to go either way on both these issues, and fully expect I will keep enjoying the resource in whatever form it takes.