Thanks for everyone’s feedback on the Quick SNITCH (or “Quitch” as some are calling it).
I’ve now added an initial set of Blog Solvers for this. Blog Solvers’ times are taken from the details they provide in the TfTT blog comments. These times are aggregated and reported (as a separate type of solver) alongside the times of the Reference and Tracked Solvers from the Crossword Club.
If you’ve been marked as a Blog Solver but don’t want to be, please let me know. Conversely, if you’d like to be tracked as a Blog Solver, also let me know. You will need at least 15 error-free times to have been listed in the blog to begin.
Thanks again for your input.
So how are you able to pull the times out of the comments? No only that, you would need some primitive sort of AI to be able to tell whether the commenter completed the puzzle successfully or not. I know that some of our users post their times at the beginning or the end of their comment, but most do not, and some give their times and then say they had an error.
A good question … it’s not 100% reliable but works in most cases. I look for a time in various formats (15:23, 15.23, 15m23s, 15 minutes, 15’23”, …) ideally at the start of the blog. Then I look for indications of errors (an/one error, pink square, DNF, …). There’s a hierarchy of sorts (a match at the beginning takes precedence over a match at the end, etc; if i read “one error” or “no errors”, I don’t look for “pink squares”, etc). I won’t bore you with all the details 🙂
If people want to be included as Blog Solvers, I recommend that they put their time up front, and be explicit about the number of errors (e.g. 15:23, no errors). This is pretty reliable.
I don’t expect a time for every comment, of course, and I don’t use any of the blog times for the SNITCH calculations.
I always put my time first if no errors or aids but otherwise I put DNF. So I guess my results would be useful data for you.
I’ll start posting my times at the start, as I do for the 15×15. Thanks for all your work on this!
I still can’t help but feel this doesn’t quite represent what’s going on accurately. Discounting DNFs removes a huge part of assessing difficulty.
Prior to today, my successful times over the past 10 have been … 00:20:16 00:21:25 00:19:26 00:11:05 00:14:30 00:24:36 00:18:12 00:07:56 00:14:25 00:18:04
But interspersed in there are some DNFs of 28:38, 56:58, 23:16 – three of the worst four times.
Now today I took an hour for a successful completion on Izetti so that can contribute to showing it’s hard. But if I’d quit or made a mistake it wouldn’t be included and it’s discounted.