Rätselportal <-> Sudokuportal

[ildiko]

Ich denke, hier geht's um die beiden Listen der Rätselautoren und Rätsellöser in den Top 100.

Ja, genau.

[Richard]

In order to promote a broad variety of puzzles in the portal we suggest to publish not more than seven puzzles per week.

I think we are way beyond that point.
My suggestion would be to ask authors to limit the number of puzzles they publish to one or two per week, not seven. With the enormous number of new authors, it is already a challenge to get more solves to the individual puzzles in case there is such a limitation.
It is really a shame for all those nice puzzles around that they are only solved a handful of times, looking at the time spent to create puzzles. For hobby.
I just have taken a look; from the 100 most recently posted puzzles, around 50% has still blue stars. And I know from my own experience that there are real gems inbetween. Also on the pages after that, many blue stars, or just enough solves to have red ones...

Unfortunately the discussion about the puzzle flood didn't get much response. The 'problem' is still there; way too much puzzles are posted for this portal.
Some observations:
- more and more authors find their way to the portal;
- some of them publish only one or two puzzles and leave it to that, others have the vibes and are posting at a high speed;
- one player announced a stop in posting puzzles, which is a pity, since he/she has real good ideas. another player announced to reduce the number of puzzles posted, which is good, I think, unregardless of the quality of the puzzles.
- many of the new authors (not all!) don't solve puzzles themselves, or only a few; for me that is a bit strange: how can you expect solves on your own puzzles if you don't active solve yourself?
- some of the new authors are really bringing in very good new ideas, that really deserve more attention/solves;
- thermo, sandwich, magic squares turn out to be easy variants to get started writing sudokus; the portal seems really flooded with these types.

For what's it worth.
I hope the discussion will be continued...

Oh, and yes: there is of course a personal interest too. I will bring it up myself before someone else does. My puzzles are also solved less often then before. To a certain extend I can live with that, in case I get a lot of nice ones to solve myself in return that give me also new inspiration for SVS and thus also for coming competitions/championships that I organise or submit sudokus for. But I have to admit that I sincerely hope that the number of solves on my puzzles will not drop any further.

[Joe Average]

I think we are way beyond that point.
My suggestion would be to ask authors to limit the number of puzzles they publish to one or two per week, not seven. With the enormous number of new authors, it is already a challenge to get more solves to the individual puzzles in case there is such a limitation.

If such a limit is installed, I'd suggest making it a monthly limit, not a weekly or daily one. There are people like pirx or BFaw, for example, who often try new and refreshing things, and then post three or four puzzles of a new type on a single day, so that you can get familiar with the new concept. That still needs to be possible.

Something else, though - if a limitation system is installed, what's to keep people from signing up with multiple identities to circumvent that limit and publish more under an alias?    (Sorry, I work in a prison, ... it comes with the job to anticipate the worst outcome in terms of behaviour.) All in all, I may be a bit biased, as I'm more bothered by the fact that most of the new puzzles are Sudoku rather than than the sheer number of them. Sudoku just aren't my favorite (though I'd rather do 50 of them than some of those odd sequences with no apparent logical approach to solve them.)


Other possible angles at fixing the current situation:
a) posting puzzles is only allowed once someone has solved at least five to ten puzzles. (This will only delay the problem, though)

b) just limit the posting of Sudoku to one per day, which requirs people to make proper use of Sudoku tag.

c) set limitations based on status, paying members of Logic Masters Germany e.V. can post an unlimited number of puzzles, guests only up to ten and they might publish a new one only after deleting an old one.

d) as many of the new authors seem to be here only for trying to improve their Sudoku-creating skills and getting quick feedback, maybe invent some sort of new release type. Rather than a full release, it would be a "temporary release" that still allows people to solve it and comment to it, but the puzzle would automatically be deleted after a month or two? I mean most of these 2-star Sudoku, you will probably never go back to after having solved them, unless there was something truly unique about them, at which point one could make them be one of their ten puzzles to be kept in the long run.


These are just raw, random ideas that I haven't fully thought through and may possibly have some backlash or unwanted side-effects.  They'll definitely cause lots of extra work to our one-man web-team, so I think whatever approach is being taken, Statistica needs to have a big say in this.

[Richard]

I think we are way beyond that point.
My suggestion would be to ask authors to limit the number of puzzles they publish to one or two per week, not seven. With the enormous number of new authors, it is already a challenge to get more solves to the individual puzzles in case there is such a limitation.

If such a limit is installed, I'd suggest making it a monthly limit, not a weekly or daily one. There are people like pirx or BFaw, for example, who often try new and refreshing things, and then post three or four puzzles of a new type on a single day, so that you can get familiar with the new concept. That still needs to be possible.

Yes, it should be still possible to post such small series; it crossed my mind too that that isn't possible in case of a weekly limit.
And advent series might be something to be considered.

[Hausigel]

I strongly recommend not setting any publishing limits or installing any other kind of restrictions until the purpose of the Puzzle Portal itself and of such restrictions has been properly defined (or at least agreed upon). Any kind of restriction can only be a means to an end, and we must first clarify what that end should be. I could think of various objectives:

* to encourage new puzzle friends to solve puzzles;
* to encourage new puzzle friends to create puzzles;
* to gather feedback on existing puzzles;
* to provide puzzle material (as a pastime) for established members of the puzzle community;
* to publish puzzle series not suitable for contests;
* to publish leftovers from past events;
* to collect/exchange ideas for future events, regarding both creation and solving;
* to advertise membership in our (or any other) puzzle community.
There may be more, of course.

I daresay objectives were never actually defined when the Puzzle Portal was created, simply because there was no need. In the old days, puzzle floods were not a concern. The nature of the Puzzle Portal was self-evident; it served several of the above purposes, and at the time I don't think there were any conflicting interests.

That appears to have changed, as a - more or less natural - result of the growth of the puzzle community. Since growth was generally desired (not just for the Puzzle Portal, but for Logic Masters and its community as such), it is not a priori something to complain about. However, the increase in puzzle publication has led us to a point where the above goals can no longer coexist without conflict.

If we are about to devise restrictions of some sort to the use of the Puzzle Porital, I suggest that we prioritise its goals first. I am under the impression that the conflict mainly lies between the second and the third item on the list. And some of the contributions in this thread suggest that the priority should lie on the third item, but I am far from sure that this is a universal view.)

Settings limits quickly might chase away some aspiring authors, and as long as the goals of the Puzzle Portal are just vague ideas, it is not clear to me whether the benefits will really outweigh the drawbacks. And maybe there are other options as well, like restructuring the Puzzle Portal without imposing any actual restrictions on the users.

[Richard]

I fully agree with Roland and would like to add an important goal of the portal: providing a space where puzzle ideas can evolve in order to bring the puzzle sport to a higher level.
From it's origin, this portal has been a place where ideas from one author were an inspiration for another author who in turn was an inspiration for yet another author and in this way a lot of nice puzzles and variants were born and raised. I think last WPC and WSC contained many ideas that were born here in the portal.

So that goal must definitely be on the list too.

[Joe Average]

If we are about to devise restrictions of some sort to the use of the Puzzle Porital, I suggest that we prioritise its goals first. I am under the impression that the conflict mainly lies between the second and the third item on the list. And some of the contributions in this thread suggest that the priority should lie on the third item, but I am far from sure that this is a universal view.)

That is a good strategy to address the issue, as prioritizing the goals will also make it much clearer which actions may be better suited or needed to reach those goals.
Question though is, who is part of those "we" that get to prioritize the goals of the Puzzle Portal? Who gets to have a say and who doesn't ? Tough call to make.

[pwahs]

If we are about to devise restrictions of some sort to the use of the Puzzle Porital, I suggest that we prioritise its goals first. I am under the impression that the conflict mainly lies between the second and the third item on the list. And some of the contributions in this thread suggest that the priority should lie on the third item, but I am far from sure that this is a universal view.)

That is a good strategy to address the issue, as prioritizing the goals will also make it much clearer which actions may be better suited or needed to reach those goals.
Question though is, who is part of those "we" that get to prioritize the goals of the Puzzle Portal? Who gets to have a say and who doesn't ? Tough call to make.

It's the Verein's website and portal, so I think decisions about it should be done as all Verein decisions are done: By the Verein's Vorstand (or the people to which the Vorstand delegated it), with input from all Verein-members and everybody else affected, like the discussion in this thread. I expect we will have a larger discussion about it at the hopefully upcoming Mitgliederversammlung in November.

And I just wanted to mention one more possibility for the puzzle creation limits: If we don't like too many new puzzle because number of solves will lag behind, we could encourage solving by allowing e.g. creating one puzzle per week, plus one more for every X solved puzzles. Something like this happens at the online-quiz website jetpunk.com: Taking quizzes allows to accumulate points, so that you can level up, so that you are allowed to create more quizzes. I don't think we need something so involved, but encouraging our new puzzle creators to also try other people's work seems beneficial to many of the goals that Hausigel described.

[Puzzle_Maestro]

I am not sure whether it would be beneficial to set limits on puzzle creation based on solving. Any people who are solving purely to enable further publishing of puzzles would choose the puzzles which are easy and which have simple rule-sets, which would only serve to worsen the issue (namely that hard puzzles/puzzles with complicated rule-sets do not get sufficient attention).

[pwahs]

I am not sure whether it would be beneficial to set limits on puzzle creation based on solving. Any people who are solving purely to enable further publishing of puzzles would choose the puzzles which are easy and which have simple rule-sets, which would only serve to worsen the issue (namely that hard puzzles/puzzles with complicated rule-sets do not get sufficient attention).

True, that might happen. I thought the main problem was that the total number of solves did not grow as much as the total number of new puzzles, not specific to complicated puzzles. But I think that my suggestion is an improvement over the fixed number of new puzzles that some suggested. I don't see how that would worsen the situation?

We could also make it such that solving puzzles with less than 10 solves count more towards "unlocking" new puzzle slots. Maybe make time a factor (i.e. how long has the puzzle already been posted while not being solved?), to avoid people racing to solve a puzzle after it came out.