Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

The Crossword Forum is now running smoothly with few duplicate threads which is good.

I’m trying to think of ways of adding a ‘Spark’ to the Forum and one thing I’m considering is to revert back to the old days when personal threads were allowed. These were stopped because they were overwhelming the Forum but, with careful management by my good self, I think they could be an asset to the Forum.

By personal threads I mean those that started, say, @quisling or @malone, when the poster wants to attract another’s Member’s attention. I should stress that I do not want cliques to occur, as has happened in the past particularly in the Cafe, so these @ threads would NOT be for the sole use of the the poster of the @ thread and the recipient, anyone on the Forum could join in the discussion.

I’m thinking of 3 @ threads maximum on the first page. There are 20 threads, one of which will always be “Do not Create Duplicate Threads” so that leaves 16 threads for Crosswords and Quizzes which should be sufficient.

I will let the “Posting Guidelines” fall off the first page and only resurrect it when\if there is a particular problem

Can I have opinions on this please. I would also welcome other (sensible) suggestions for improving the Forum. I’m not saying I will implement every suggestion received but I will certainly consider them all.

Hi Norah,
The personal chat suggestion sounds fine to me.
Regarding suggestions I have two small points…
1. At the bottom of the main page there are search buttons which allow you to select “month” and “year”. For me (on an iPad) these don’t seem to work.
2. There is a side bar which is titled “Quick Crossword Solutions” but these contain links to discussion threads where generally we don’t give solutions so perhaps this could be retitled. Also Times Crossword and Times Cryptic Crossword are essentially the same and the New York Times link is rather old.
Hope that helps, much appreciate all the work you do! And I even notice when you remove the comma in a four digit crossword number ;-)

Jono, as regards the 'comma' in 4 digit numbers, a big well done for spotting my endeavours, I wasn't sure if anyone noticed I altered them.

I like things to be consistent, it probably wouldn't surprise you to know that my day job many moons ago was Text Processing Supervisor. I decided that 4 figure numbers did not need the comma but those over 10,000 did🥰

I often tweak other things, such as putting a space between FT and the number, IMHO it all helps to create a neat and tidy Forum.

As regards your other comments,

1. Which main page do you mean, can you please post the URL. I've never seen "month" and "year", my shortcut links obviously take me to a different page.

2. The "side bar" etc is outside my remit, I leave all technical stuff to Ash. However, I've created a document in Word and will copy your comments there, in due course I'll send all comments received to Ash for his attention. I'll make a note of the crossword names you mention, thanks.

Hello Norah
It sounds fine to me also.

I have just checked the month of June for 2015 on the link Jono mentioned (both on ipad and laptop) and it just shows current thread, so not working it seems.

Apart from that, all seems fair and you are doing a grand job.

I'm not a robot but the site still won't believe me :-).

Thanks Jazz. I also have trouble with Captcha, or whatever it's called, drives me potty sometimes. Other times it goes in with no problems whatsoever.

I've asked Jono for the link to this mythical page I cannot see, perhaps you could send it please?

Kinds for your kind comments.

sending you a screenshot Norah

Hi Norah, just click “Crossword Forum” and then scroll to the bottom of the page and you will find a month and year search function

Perhaps that sidebar could be titled “Latest crossword discussions” and then list…
Times
Listener
Guardian
Everyman
Spectator
Private Eye
etc

Just a thought

Jono, I've tried those buttons on my ipad and they worked fine for me. (I used Safari on an ipad mini c2013.)

Orson, i also tried on Safari i-pad (the latest version) and whatever month or year you enter, eg. March 2019, the result is this year's latest threads