New Times Crossword Club Bulletin Board announcement.

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Announcement
For those who don’t often visit this currently quiet backwater, here’s what they said yesterday …

Thank you for all the ideas and feedback you’ve been sending us for the new site – we’ll do what we can to incorporate them for launch, and keep on making improvements after launch.

Listening to your comments, we think you’ll particularly like the new features in the interactive puzzles, and the members’ discussion forum, which will be linked to individual puzzles. Quite a few of you have requested interactive Mephisto, which unfortunately we won’t have for launch, but hope to include in a later release.

We’d also love to hear from you about how you use the puzzles on the site – whether you access it once a day or over the course of the day, at home or at work, and whether you’d like to be able access the Club on smartphone devices

We’re looking forward to the new site going live at the end of September, and will be emailing you before it goes live to let you know how to access it. All customers who have live subscriptions at that time will receive a month’s free access added to their subscription to thank you for your loyalty and welcome you to the new Club site.

I’m still intrigued by the popularity of high-speed Mephisto, but maybe the key point is the ability to save a part-solved puzzle rather than have a clipboard on the lounge coffee table. More importantly, I’m very glad to see words like “keep on making improvements after launch”.

15 comments on “New Times Crossword Club Bulletin Board announcement.”

  1. Looking forward to it, if only to lose that curious halfway log in screen which says:
    “IMPORTANT NOTICE
    We have improved registration to Times Online and associated products. As part of the change, we’ll be asking you to log in using your e-mail address and password rather than your old username and password.”
    and has been there nearly as long as I can remember!
    The extra month’s membership is also welcome. Thanks to all who kept the pressure up.
    1. I’m pretty sure that message will no longer be visible. The key point I recall from my visit for testing is that the new version will support user names for identification purposes, so the kludgy “name stored in a cookie” approach currently used for Race the Clock will be a thing of the past.
  2. I would have thought the request for interactive Mephisto was more for online competition entry than anything else. For example, I always print out and solve Saturday and Jumbo puzzles on paper, but then type them in to submit them online rather than pay for a stamp. Mephisto still has to be entered by post.
    1. I’m sure you’re right about interactive Mephisto, Andy – though I’m up for it if anyone else is interested in competing.
  3. I’ve never been a member of the Times Crossword Club because of all the endless posts I’ve seen in various places complaining about lack of access to it — the dreaded 404 error etc. So far as I can see, all the bells and whistles are secondary to having something that is really reliable. And is there any evidence that it’ll be any better? I shall wait and see what people say.
    1. Although I agree that the Times club service could have been a lot better than it has been, those posts exaggerate the problem to some degree – not many send people messages saying “everything worked fine today”, or “today I got my puzzles without any problem for the tenth day in a row”.

      The comments I’ve heard from the inside suggest that the new version will be much more reliable, but I guess the proof will have to be in the pudding.

  4. I’ve had little difficulty with the service in nearly two years. Several times I’ve written asking for a more equitable prize distribution system in the light of so many folks from abroad making entries. This has fallen on deaf ears it seems. Perhaps it would be more clear to say a different or ancillary prize structure. The satisfactory completion and posting of the solutions is reward enough but the pot could be sweetened.
    1. I don’t think “positive discrimination” is appropriate. I gave up putting stamps on envelopes for Saturday prize puzzles years ago, because the odds were clearly so bad that it made more sense to just go out and buy the fountain pen, £25 book token or other prize. There are people out there who have sent in hundreds of entries and are still waiting to be first out of the hat mailsack.

      Maybe I’m too cynical, but an “ancillary” prize structure seems like a way of encouraging people to get overseas relatives or friends to purchase their club membership for them.

  5. I do hope that I’m going to be proved wrong, but I feel decidedly uneasy about the wonderful new system we’re promised, particularly as it seems that it’s going to be a “big bang” switchover – exactly what we were warned against inflicting on customers when I started in IT – with considerably more new software than the last wonderful new system!

    The previous (19 August) Bulletin Board entry said “We’ll be sharing some of our ideas with you between then [next month, as of 19 August] and now, and asking for your feedback”, but since the new entry is the first since that 19 August entry, I’m unclear where all the feedback has come from other than you passing on our comments on your earlier posting. Or, since no e-mail address is given other than xcomments@thetimes.co.uk (which is effectively dead as far as I can tell), where feedback was (and is) supposed to be sent.

    1. Tony,

      I share at least some of your unease. Although I visited the Times offices in August and saw a test system which looked promising, I don’t know how close that test system is to what we’re going to get, how they implemented the parts that were not yet finished, or what they’ve done in response to suggestions I made after seeing the test system.

      My memory of the introduction of the new Times and ST newspaper websites was that there was some period of parallel operation before the old sites were taken away, and I had the impression that this would happen with the club site too. I still hope they’ll do it this way, but I’m rather less sure that they will.

      1. Hello, I manage the Crossword Club for The Times, and would like to reassure you first of all that the xcomments email address is far from dead – I apologise that we don’t have time to reply to every comment sent to us, but we do read them and act on them, and reply to as many as we can.

        Regarding the launch: although the new site will replace the old one, we’ll keep the old one running behind the scenes until we’re happy that the new one is working as well in real life as well as it did in our own tests.

        I don’t check this blog every day, so please do continue to contact me via the xcomments email address, but I did want to reply to this to let you know that we are doing everything we can to make the new Club as good as possible, and that we are listening to all comments from users.

        Jo Cogan, Times Crossword Club Manager

  6. I’m told my password is incorrect. It’s not. But, when I try the “forgotten password” route I get an email which sends me to another site which says there is an error and I can’t reset my password.
    Have tried emailing help, have tried “live chat”, no help.
    Anyone else managed to connect?
  7. I have just tried to access the new site, and even though my previous monthly membership should still be active, I cannot get past the payment page which means I will have to pay again to get access. Has anyone else had this problem? I have reported it on the help link and also to a contact who previously helped me with a membership issue, but no replies yet!
    1. I have an annual rather than monthly membership, so changes take longer to matter. As long as they’re treating you the same, you should have the remainder of your current monthly sub, then a free month from the Times. Then your current payment through WorldPay will run out and you have to decide whether to set up a new monthly payment. If none of that is working, I can only suggest continuing to bully them via e-mail. I’ve once or twice got much prompter service on the phone, so unless it’s prohibitively expensive because you live the other side of seawater, that could be worth a try.
  8. Why do members of the crossword club have to wait until Saturday to access solutions to the previous Saturday’s puzzle. Surely once the competition has closed, then the solution can be put on the web immediately. That way, we could access those tantalising answers sooner. We do pay for the service.

    Rgds

    Adrian

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