As many of you have discovered, the Times Crossword Championships did not come off this morning due to various problems.
The Championship has been rescheduled for tomorrow, Sunday, November 22 at 10:30 GMT. Please use this thread, and not the prior one, for your discussions. The prior thread has now been locked.
Beyond parody as they say.
ah well – back to Portrait Artist of the Week, let’s see how I get on with that this week!
Edited at 2020-11-22 10:42 am (UTC)
If it were a volume problem, someone, somewhere would get a puzzle.
Edited at 2020-11-22 10:43 am (UTC)
For them to advise David yesterday that the changes to be made would allow the same amount of traffic to succeed 24 hours later, and be wrong about that, is not.
Not to know whether they could handle the traffic (which is clearly the case) shows an utter disrespect for their customers.
Will heads roll? And if not, why not?
To repeat what others have said: if this is an ONLINE competition and the task of timing puzzles has really been solved, even by the Times, why not set a 24 hour window for doing the puzzles and let everyone log in whenever is convenient, with the requirement to submit all three puzzles within 90 minutes of starting the first one.
And yet, here we are again…..
Although at least I’m in the UK so I don’t have the crack-of-dawn issues to contend with (apart from 3 children all demanding breakfast at 6.30am obviously)
I suppose you test this in a test environment, and it works perfectly. This would point to a problem with a configuration file that is different in test and production, which is how these errors usually happen. It’s connecting to the database correctly, and the database is saying it doesn’t have such a puzzle.
All I can do is offer my sincerest apologies for disrupting both days of your weekends. I hope that by this time next year we will be in a position to run the championship as normal, when we can attempt to make it up to you all.
David Parfitt
Puzzles Editor
David Parfitt
The good news is that the rest of The Times now knows that the crossword is important to a lot more people than they might have thought it was important to.
I said yesterday that I thought 24 hours notice of a further attempt was unfair on those who can’t easily re-schedule plans at such short notice. Evidently more time is also needed to get some more rubber bands in to fix the system.
Very disappointed of Quorn.
IN which case, I’m out.
How about a refund?
Even more disappointed of Quorn.
Leave open for a couple of days, and competitors could choose their own time, freed from the GMT constraints.
Have been happily doing (not) the Parkrun throughout COVID time. Run your 5K during the week, choosing your own course, and enter the time online. Who would want to cheat? It’s only a bit of fun, after all. This would work for me, until normal life returns.
Edited at 2020-11-22 11:59 am (UTC)
Apologies from the Times Crossword heads are of course accepted, but to fail twice in a row is seriously unimpressive.
– James
This is the only indication on the Crossword site that something was amiss. There’s no reference to the competition being cancelled whatsoever.
I’m surprised that more people haven’t expressed their disappointment and anger. I appreciate Derek’s heartfelt apology and I’m sure he is profoundly embarrassed and disappointed too, but I’d really like a full explanation as to what the problem was, why only a 24 hour postponement was deemed appropriate and what the rationale for abandoning the much heralded and anticipated event was. Not too much to expect is it?
Following the crash on the Saturday, our IT team made changes to the underlying database, and as stated above, they were confident these changes would be more than sufficient to support the increased level of traffic. When these changes were made, the site immediately began functioning again, which bolstered the level of confidence. The decision to postpone until the next day was based on this confidence, along with my feeling that having got everyone keyed up for the event that weekend, it would be better to reschedule the event for as soon as possible, rather than drawing it out to the following weekend.
Clearly, the database changes were not sufficient. In the aftermath of the second crash, the IT team were still of the opinion that the changes should have supported that level of traffic, and they felt that something deeper, perhaps in the coding of the site itself, was the root cause. They will be investigating further.
With regard to abandoning the event, this really was simply a case of not wanting to take any further chances with the software and compounding the disappointment should further problems occur. Having tried for a second time on the Sunday with the same outcome, I thought it best to cancel and then everyone would know where they stood and could get on with other plans. One thing that is certainly the case is that there was a significant level of interest in the online event, and we’ll certainly look into a more robust method of holding an online event in the future.
Once it had become clear that Covid was going to make the traditional format impossible this year, we were very keen to keep some form of championship going in an online format, even if it was “just for fun”, rather than simply giving up and missing the event entirely. I am desperately sorry that we failed to deliver this for you and all the participants, and for the disruption to your weekends.
David Parfitt
Puzzles Editor
Many thanks for your prompt and detailed response to my query. Clearly you have been very frustrated by the whole affair as well. I see that you have updated the Crossword page to confirm the event’s cancellation.
Without wishing to sound like too much of an old fogey I’d have thought, in the modern technological age, it shouldn’t really have been that difficult to create a system that could easily cope with the demands of its cruciverbalist users. I for one would have been happy to wait another week for a working format. But never mind, a first world problem in the grand scheme of life, especially at present.
Kind regards,
Kevin Ward
Quorn, Leicestershire