Category: Announcement

Apologies to all for this ongoing problem. Our tech team have been working on this for some time without success. We identified a bug in one of our core plug-ins that was causing the site to call itself frequently when finding avatar images. That was fixed with a new version of the plug-in but the error hasn’t stopped occurring. Repeated interactions with Bluehost support have not yet resolved the issue. It has been escalated to the core technical team and we expect a response from them in the next 72 hours. Thank-you all for your continuing patience and I hope we get it resolved soon. P.S. When the problem happens it occurs just after the hour mark and site comes back 1 hour later, so if you see the issue please wait until after the next hour mark to try again. All users get the same message. Don’t take it personally!

Jason has been kind enough to post a reply to the complaints about extremely difficult puzzles on Friday.

As posted on the Times Crossword Club site here today…
Congratulations to Mark Goodliffe, who has won the Times Crossword Championship for a record 14th time, solving a fiendish final puzzle in 8:55….

As many of you know, Piquet has resigned from the Wednesday daily cryptic slot.   Over the past few weeks, JerryW has been blogging half time in this slot.

I experienced severe problems accessing the Wednesday puzzles overnight because the on-line newspaper was late rolling them over. However they were available from midnight via the club although I note that following a further revamp … Read more “Further Changes at The Times”

My apologies that the SNITCH (both the 15×15 and the Quick versions) is not currently working. Some changes I did introduced a bug(*) that causes it to crash. I’m working on a fix but it … Read more “SNITCH under repair”

The new Times Puzzles platform came into effect on Wednesday 3rd September.

Apologies for website disruption today. The site started producing errors this morning and I contacted support from our hosting provider. They diagnosed a corrupt file and rebuilt the site for us. After further issues with the rebuild which meant the site wasn’t working correctly, it should now be stable and working as normal for Admin, Editors, Authors and  Commenters.

If anyone has any further problems, please report it via the Contact Us form under the Help menu

For devotees of the QUITCH, there is now an analysis of the difficulty by setter. You can find it by starting here. There is also a link available at the top of the Trends page … Read more “Difficulty of Quick Crosswords by Setter”

Following discussions in the 15×15 blog (Tuesday 8th July) and many previous occasions about homophone clues I decided to seek the view of Google Gemini on the subject. I wasn’t entirely happy with the first … Read more “Homophonic clues”