I'd suggest adding a "No Sudoku" quick-search . For the LMG portal, that is the much more popular option. I really hope you will not encounter the same "flood" of 90% Sudokus though.

We are working on a providing a similar option. Thank you for the suggestion.

We have provided a "Puzzle Excluding Sudoku" under quick-search.

Additionally, we have also provided a mechanism to customize the Expo landing page. Using this, one can hide Sudoku related puzzles if needed.

The "customize" options appear everytime again I enter the front page. Is that the intended behaviour? (Firefox)

No, that is not intentional. We will have this checked.

It's every time I have to log in again, which is everytime I had all browser windows closed (e.g. after system restart). I have not blocked any cookies. Loging out on purpose and loging in again has the same effect (but in this case it is mentioned that all cookies are deleted).

For now, we have disabled the popup for everyone. Of course, the button to customize is available for manually customizing.

Puzzle links on this page appear to be broken: https://logicmastersindia.com/expo/search-expo-puzzles

Fixed.

Loving Expo so far! Two suggestions:

- A link directly from the expo page to this thread would be good (unless I'm just blind and it's already there).
- Maybe puzzles under review could be removed from the "recent unsolved" list, since they're also not currently solvable.

Suggestion: Remove "Puzzles under review" from the lists of recently published puzzles (all/unsolved). Or at least give them an icon.

Thank you both. Nice suggestion about "Puzzles under review".
For "Recently published puzzles" : We will mark it is broken.
We have removed from "Recently published puzzles (Unsolved)" List.
No, you are right, there is no direct link. We will add.

There is still something wrong with the time measurement I think. Tapa (Windows) by Chiel shows a solving time of 10 hours something for me. I'm almost sure, I have opened and looked at the puzzle on friday or saturday, when I did my first few puzzles. Even if I'm remembering that wrong, I'm sure I did not open it and started the timer around 6am today when I was in deep sleep.

Thanks for removing the puzzles under review from the unsolved list, but it seems they're still counted by the "and N more unsolved puzzles" link. That's probably less critical, but might be confusing.





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puzzle-expo-unsolved.png (9KB - 0 downloads)

Fixed. Can you please confirm?

Yes, there is some display issue whenever the actual time take is more than a day. We have decided not to show timing, if it is more than a day.

Looks good!

Edited by Menderbug 2023-07-05 12:06 AM

- Can we have this thread be linked from somewhere prominent within the expo itself
- Can the search expo puzzles function for time (Best solving time etc) be actual time format instead of number? I cant see how to input MM:SS other than converting 0:15 to 0.25
- Can we have a thread to report incorrect timings? I started https://logicmastersindia.com/expo/?ppid=9sm-djs-gsv#timing-replay assuming it's easy (Best timing is 0:04) but it was not. Admins can manually remove anything from the thread that's clearly a bug

We have now added a "Help" menu at top of each of the Expo pages. Once of the submenus point to this thread.

Have added an icon to Recently published puzzles. As posted earlier, have removed them from "unsolved" list.
Thank you so much for sharing very helpful suggestions.

The "List of Standard Puzzles/Examples..." has a different header than the other pages (in particular it is missing the freshly introduced "Help" menu, but also a few other options). Smae for some other pages. I can't see a system behind it. Maybe the header should be the same for all pages.

Edited by Realshaggy 2023-07-05 9:53 PM

Thanks

After having done a few more puzzles, it's still the most common mistake, that a puzzle is started with the wrong default tool (e.g. "Surface" in a Sudoku). It's easy to fix for the solver, but it still feels annoying, if it comes up again and again.

It's especially bad for newcomers who don't have experience with switching tools and don't even know what the best options are. Some of them are buried deep in the menu structure. E.g. for the Ring Ring, which is also set to "Surface" on default currently, my natural choice would be switching to "Special -> Loop -> Line or x", but I don't think a new user would find that.

Therefore I think the setters should be guided better into choosing the right default tool when publishing a puzzle.

One idea might be an (initially checked) checkbox "use appropriate default tool" or something like that in the submitting dialog. If the software is able to identify the puzzle as a standard type (e.g. a Sudoku of any kind or a shading puzzle), the default tool is switched to an appropriate option, regardless of what the user has set. It's still possible to uncheck it either for unknown types, or if the setter really has something different in mind.

It's just a rough idea though, I have no idea how this could work with Penpa Lite or user defined tool lists.

Thanks for the changes so far. I still have some small concerns with "Puzzles under review".

They are filtered now on the mainpage in the "unsolved puzzles" list and they have a symbol in the "recently published" list. But if I enter the list of unsolved puzzles via the main page, they are shown again and I can't distinguish them from currently available puzzles. Depending on my activity and the number of posted puzzles, this could lead to a situation where I have a handful of unsolved puzzles among a long list of "puzzles under review". And I have to click through all of them to find the ones I can still do.

For me it seems the list of "unsolved puzzles" entered from the main page is the most common way to navigate for "heavy users". At least for now and if they are not searching for something specific. And as long as the portal does not take off with dozens of puzzles per day, there will be enough people with near completion that have the same problem.

You might also consider deleting "Puzzles under review", if the reason does not get adressed by the author after a reasonable time. There are a few currently which should be easily fixable in a minute or so (they are just missing a proper answer check), meanwhile the author prefers publishing more puzzles.

I hope I'm not annoying with my suggestions and errors, but right now I'm assuming you want as much feedback as possible.
One more thing I've seen is that room outside the grid is sometimes taken into account when the grid size is determind. As an example look at the Skyscrapers (Cipher) by professorX. It is possible that this is a mistake during the setup in Penpa. But even then, if this is a common mistake, there is a question if there might be a better guidance for the setter.

Edited by Realshaggy 2023-07-07 6:16 PM