Unconfirmed Membership, Quick Links

Good morning!

New updates have been added to the site. You may have already noticed them, since they were added yesterday.

First, we have the "unconfirmed membership" option. This option is found on the "Join The Fun" page. When a visitor joins the site, they can create an account without using an email address. Visitors who do this don't have all the same rights and priveleges as confirmed members. Specifically, they can't do the daily/weekly puzzlers, and they won't be able to post in the forum. Forum? Forum, you say? Yes, there will be a forum. Coming soon. That'll be an easy addition, since it's mostly going to be a copy/paste job from the Quote Puzzler website.

But that's beside the point. The point is, the "unconfirmed membership" option is designed to help school teachers who want their entire class to sign up, even if they don't have email addresses.

If someone creates an unconfirmed membership account, they can confirm it later by adding an email address. On the membership page there is an email icon they can use for this purpose:



The second new feature added to the site is a set of "Quick Links". These are found at the bottom of each page. They are a series of icons you can use to accomplish common tasks like creating puzzles, solving the daily puzzles, etc. This is what the icons look like:



One final note: I think there are a few pages that don't have the Quick Links. If you happen to spot one of them, please post me a reply here, and I'll fix it!

Puzzle Difficulty: Randomizing Options

Before getting to the main point of this post, let me just say...yes, I am aware that the scoring system seems to be always giving a 10 point accuracy bonus to everyone. Not sure if that's a bug, or if it's just a badly optimized formula for gauging the difficulty of the puzzle.

I'll be looking into that, but it may not change for awhile.

Okay, on to the good stuff!

You may have noticed a new icon on the site - it's the 'Randomizing Options' icon. It appears on your member page. It also appears on the Random Puzzler page.

This feature allows you to optimize the site for your own best experience.

Are you a novice solver? Tell the site you only want to receive Tri Puzzlers and Tetra Puzzlers. Or tell the site that you don't want any puzzles with more than six shapes.

Maybe you're an advanced puzzler. You might want to tell the site never to give you Tri Puzzlers. Or include larger puzzles.

Once you've set up your options, the site will deliver to you the kinds of puzzles you requested!

Scoring: Time Bonus and Accuracy Bonus

I'm currently tweaking the scoring system for the Daily Puzzlers. Originally, the Time Bonuses were going to be calculated at midnight for the previous day's puzzler (just like at the Quote Puzzler website.)

However, this becomes a little bit problematic for Tournament Puzzles, since a tournament doesn't necessarily start and stop on a single day, so we have to wait until the tournament is closed to calculate time bonuses for all the puzzles. (And speaking of Tournaments, don't forget to sign up for Jeorge's Tournament - you can find a link to that on the home page of the site.)

So I'm trying something different. I have an algorithm I'm using to calculate a time bonus based on the "difficulty" of the puzzle. The time bonus will still be value from 0 to 10, it will just be calculated differently.

Likewise, I'm developing a new algorithm for calculating the Accuracy Bonus.

And while I'm in the process of tweaking my algorithm, scores may wildly fluctuate from day to day. Don't panic. :)