For anyone interested in trying them out, I have new versions of the SNITCH and Quick SNITCH running in parallel to the main ones. These are on the following URLs: https://times3.xwdsnitch.link and https://quick3.xwdsnitch.link respectively.
In terms of functionality, there are only a few minor tweaks (that most won’t notice, I suspect). But the underlying infrastructure has been updated to the latest versions and I’ve streamlined a few things. I’m hoping it will be a tad faster.
If you’d like to give it a go, please feel free. And please let me know in the comments if you run into any trouble.
Thanks for all the work you’ve done on the Snitch and Quitch. It’s always nice to look at how puzzles rate and it’s particularly a good way to identify when I might like to have a go at the 15×15.
No problems that I can see – thank you.
My Quitch average time on both the current & new sites seems to only have values for December and January – is it possible to have it pull my more recent months’ times too?
Thanks, Amoeba, for reminding me of this. I’m not sure why you haven’t been included as a reference solver for the Quick in those months. I’m looking into this (but won’t promise a quick result).
Thank you – no rush, it’s rather flattering my Nitches at the moment!
Just reading the neutrino methodology and under remaining questions you say :
“ We see that some solvers have alignment to the SNITCH figures well above 1, which would suggest that they seems to find harder puzzles especially hard”
My experience as a solver with a alignment of >2 is that I sometimes run out of time to solve the harder puzzles and have to come back to them, if I forget to hit pause the timer keeps ticking. I wonder if that is an explanation for others like me?
Thanks, that’s interesting. May I ask what your club name is, so that I can look at your data more closely?
Just to say how much I appreciate both of these.
Thanks, Ian!
Thanks for these fabulous sites. Can I make a small feature request? Can the Quick Snitch site have a link to the 15×15 Snitch and vice versa? I know I could use bookmarks, but I use multiple browsers and devices. Thanks!
Great idea – I’ll see what I can do.
OK, this is now done (on the new “v3” sites). The link in the top right corner goes to the puzzle for today (if it can find it) on the alternative site. Please let me know what you think.
I notice I don’t have avg. monthly solving times like other users. Perhaps it is due to me only being a blog user rather than scraped off The Times’ leaderboards.
It would be useful if there were a way to Report an Error / Contact you directly from the Snitch sites rather than waiting for something to pop up on here. Of course I appreciate it may be a deliberate decision not to facilitate that!
Yes, the monthly averages are pulled directly from the reference solvers’ monthly averages. So, I don’t do this for Blog Solvers – sorry. I’ll put it on the to-do list, but it may not get done very quickly.
The “error/contact” idea is a good one and shouldn’t be too hard to implement. (When I started, people could DM me on LiveJournal, but we haven’t allowed that on the TfTT site, so something else is required.) I’m always interested in constructive feedback but don’t guarantee a quick response.
Thanks!
Thanks again for the suggestion. I’ve put in a “Contact Us” page to send me a message. I’ll see how that goes.
One thing I’ve spotted, which might be deliberate while it’s in test mode – the charts on a solver’s page aren’t showing up for me.
But that’s also reminded me that I’ve always wondered why the average solving times charts run right to left (with more recent averages to the left) rather than the more intuitive left to right!
Thanks for the comment, James. The charts should show up on times3 and quick3 versions of the site and go in the correct left to right order. I’ve just pushed updates of these two sites – they’re not fully working (especially the contact form) but the charts for solvers should work.
If they are not working for you, could you please let me know what equipment (operating system and browser) you’re working with?