The Sphinx's Lair

Will, Haven't you been barred from making any more cryptics?

Will

1) No. 2) I'm attempting to set a full crossword (and failing miserably!)

The restrictions imposed by the gimmick I want to use are... hindering, and I'd probably be struggling enough without those.

keep going! It'll work out in the end

TrojanByAccident

@BeastlyGerbil don't encourage him D:

Will

7:11 PM

If nothing else, I'm going to have a huge stockpile of trashed clues later :)

@BeastlyGerbil you asked about your answer

Good idea but wrong timing!

so... it will be needed later?

You said something about a cipher, but I wasn't around. What was that referring to?

I referred to your answer. You thought cipher is the wrong way to go. I've added the cipher tag to make clear

Oh so it is needed

that ciphers may be needed at some point

7:16 PM

@incesterror21 also, I'm not entirely ensure that your name is... appropriate...

@BeastlyGerbil Because of the word "terror"?

er no. Its possible that you don't know but the other part

There's something behind the name I can't tell you right now. The future holds many a secret!

More because it can be read as vaprfg reebe 13

When is the best time to post a puzzle in your opinion/experience?

7:20 PM

tuesday

I feel like my latest one is hilarously easy but no one solved it so far.

monday morning

When people are at work?

yup

Aha!

Thanks, that makes sense

7:22 PM

@Randal'Thor I'm getting a lot of ambiguous 1/2 combos... that's annoying

never weekends

@Will Shouldn't you include a homophone indicator for that?

@dcfyj I'm nearly done ...

nice

Q: A Riddle of Successive Subtractive Sentences

hughs back!

last line is surely dragon

Sphinx

1

All in all, time to rise as the morning you greet. Minus one and you'll find you are losing your seat. Minus two: it's a hue or a kind of a smirch. Minus three, in a way, nothing short of a perch. Minus four, time to flee! Run away in defeat! Minus five is a foe a king's daughter mig...

discussion questions closed-questions statistics reopened-questions

7:30 PM

Finished!

@TheGreatEscaper That was fun :-D

TIL we never reopen questions closed as opinion-based:

18

Q: 2016: a year in closing

A moderator asked me for data on the percentage of questions closed across all sites. This doesn't strike me as information that needs to be restricted to moderators, so for your idle enjoyment I present: Questions asked, closed and reopened for all sites in 2016 Site Name ...

@Will I disagree with @TrojanByAccident - anagram fodder is supposed to be verbatim. (You←→u substitution is common, but not in anagram fodder.)

@BeastlyGerbil I think a pea (or P) is more likely.

Q: Needles in a Haystack (Inverse wordsearch)

yeah, dragon is a bit long if you have to take away five letters too :P

Sphinx

7:57 PM

0

Wordsearch with a little twist. There are 23 words hidden inside the grid (purposely), they are all: 1) Characters from fiction books 2) Countries in South America 3) Ex-Presidents of the US Find as many words as possible for the word list. Words can be in any direction. There...

word trivia knowledge word-search

This site will probably help anyone trying to solve Hugh's riddle

Think I have four typing a partial up now

I saw Clinton and Garfield in there, but I'm not going to do the search as I don't feel like it :P

Oh wait no didn't see that rearrangement isn't nessecary

still pretty sure I have two...

I still see clinton and garfield, and now ford as well

well actually, it says Gerald Ford

Oh it's the full names, bill clinton, gerald ford, james garfield

8:02 PM

@Sid My first though was programming Logo on an Apple ][e.

Polly Plummer

I guess I may as well write an answer at the rate I'm going lol

8:22 PM

Well, feel free to loot my answer, I'm done.

progress on hughs which I hope is right: ? USURP ? ? UP P

8:49 PM

P = foe a king's daughter might meet? I'm confused...

I don't think so.

pea, maybe.

princess and the pea

usurp seems right

Yeah, I got that after chris's comment

What the morning greeting though?

no idea

It would have to be a vowel between the R and P.

Which doesn't work.

Also, USURP means to TAKE a seat, not lose,

8:54 PM

@BeastlyGerbil are you using that site I linked earlier?

that and aother

@ChrisCudmore usurp means like an uprising, so if you were on the end of one then you would lose your thrown

He just added a trivia tag "For the last line"

Usurp is a verb.

dont think princess and the pea counts as trivia...

must be wrong

Are you assuming that each word follows from the previous, or just that each word follows from the first?

each from the previous

9:01 PM

e.g. Could I remove one letter from the first word to get the second, but then remove 2 different letters from the first to get the third?

The poem doesn't seem to specify that.

In fact, it seems to say the opposite. It's subtracting from the first word on each line.

good point...

Maybe there is hope for me after all :P

so we have usurp...

not sure about anything else

I don't think usurp is right.

I was working backwards from p and up and that fitted pretty well

but if it isn't linear then maybe not...

Good point, GPR. Funnily enough there was another riddle like this the other day, where everyone assumed it was sequential and then it turned out to be just working from the original word to get new words!

@BeastlyGerbil I don't see how UP fits?

yeah that was my dodgy one

It was thinking give up/up sticks sort of thing

9:07 PM

Knowing Hugh's precision with language, I doubt it would be that vague or open to interpretation.

yeah like i said, dodgy

^^

Hugh is no "guess what I'm thinking" guy.

9:28 PM

did you see I found you in the haystack @Randal'Thor? :)

let m guess.... a needle? :P

@Rubio I don't sleep in haystacks.

:P

bah. :)

Of course not! Grass is much more comfortable :P

Or better bracken or heather

9:31 PM

new hint unlocked in the Times a half hour ago, if anyone cares.

and ... who's this Heather?

Heather is a soft springy plant found in the moors. If you ever find yourself stranded out there it makes the most comfortable bedding

Too much bear grylls ^ :P

@Rubio Why would you post that without a link? I have to search for it myself? < grumble, grumble >

Anyway night from me. See you all tomorrow.

@GentlePurpleRain Life is rough, I know. puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/47760/the-puzzling-times

ninight BG

@GentlePurpleRain It's literally two clicks from this room :-P puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/47760/5373

Night Beastly!

@Rubio I suspect the form of that "Welcome 2017!" is important somehow ...

9:36 PM

I'll save you from that dead end: puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/47408/…

Ah.

If I could have made the graphic a link to that question I would have. (Actually, can you do that?)

@Rubio Since you can make images links to other images, I assume you can make them links to whatever you want.

Hm

Yup, that works. Thanks :)

I assumed you could only link to other images.

10:03 PM

Wow, @Rubio, that must have been quite a job to change all those image links in my answer.

There's only 20. It went quick.

'only', he says

Actually, there being exactly 20 was nice

All the image links in the table were [1][1] [2][2] ... [19][19] [20][20]

Just cut & pasted the whole block, renumbered the new entries from 1->31, ... 20->40

edited the URLs to strip the t/s/m

and edited the inline links from 1->31, .... 20->40 for the target

Anything other than a multiple of 10 would have been annoying, but 20 worked out nicely hehe

OK, that does make it sound easy.

@Rubio @Gareth @Will Worth deleting this?

what's the mininimum[sic] number of votes needed to delete it? (*cough*)

10:14 PM

3

At least I think it's 3. Might be more because of the score of the answers.

The infamous "How to get to an island with a tree in the middle if all you have is rope" took about 8 or 10 delete votes.

I wasn't actually asking a real question there ;)

I still think that one should be undeleted and have a historical lock slapped on it instead.

This one I think said needed 3 more

so two after me

> This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. This question and its answers are frozen and cannot be changed.

Like it or loathe it, the tree/rope question does have historical significance for PSE.

Actually nevermind, I read that wrong entirely.

10:17 PM

@Rubio Did you fall into this trap? :-)

@Randal'Thor Why is it historically significant?

Less a trap, more a momentary lapse of memory.

I know what the popup means, I just blanked for a second on what it said and only remembered the number hehe

I was then, like, wait - that's not right ... (click again) oh yeah, that's what it said. That makes more sense.

Nov 4 '16 at 13:14, by Rand al'Thor

lol.

+12

For one thing, its answers have a cumulative score of >800, including the first three Great Answers on the site.

Oh.

Linky please?

10:22 PM

@Rubio puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/4304/5373

It became emblematic of the problem of PSE getting lots of questions and answers which weren't really 'good' but still got loads of upvotes.

Which is what led to the Great Puzzling War of Nov-Dec 2014.

hah. two mods needed to delete it too :)

@Rubio Well, Deusovi wasn't a mod back then.

But that's quite a line-up of names.

I seem to remember having read that prior to the War, posing puzzles wasn't even the norm and was actually discouraged

Like, a significant proportion of the people who've historically been the top users of the site.

'cop and Gamow were each #1 in rep at some point, CodeNewbie and BaileyM were each the main rising star at some point, Len used to be one of the main people involved in site maintenance, and of course Deusovi and Emrak are now mods.

@Rubio Well ... it's complicated.

lol. "If you have an unlimited (infinite) length of rope, you don't need to go to the island at all. It will come to you as a result of the infinite gravitational field your rope is creating. "

10:27 PM

Posing puzzles BECAME the norm a few weeks or months before the War. Which was why trying to ban them outright caused the War in the first place.

Dude. If it was up to me, I'd undelete this in a heartbeat. It's the poster child for why too-broad is too-broad

We could flag it and ask for an undeletion and historical lock.

But I may have discussed this with Emrak at some point before - can't remember.

Not sure if it's worth a meta post ...

I can imagine that a puzzling site devoted to questions about puzzles and techniques for solving them (or whatever) would be pretty dry and quite a bit less active than PSE is now—and it's not like it's a hotbed of activity as it is, especially comparing view/vote tallies to those from other sites

I have 400 rep from one rather unimpressive answer on worldbuilding. Short of HNQ and a lot of luck, that's very hard to get here even with a fantastic question and answer.

@Rubio I think PSE is a hotbed of activity, if you compare it to other sites of the same age.

Well - ok - I have very little basis for comparison. :)

10:33 PM

Check out this list of all SE sites. There are a few different ways you can order it.

SFF and worldbuilding are probably the only other two I do more than just occasionally glance at HNQs from, and they're both obviously vastly more busy than here

If you order it by age, Puzzling stands out quite a bit.

Well, Worldbuilding is actually newer than Puzzling, but that's another example of a wildly successful 'fun' site, as opposed to the more stolid and businesslike sites that are what SE is supposed to be all about.

You gave a wrong link but I got to it. interesting

kinda cool seeing the dramatic outliers in the age--traffic correlation

Oops - copy/paste error. Fixed.

Stack Overflow на русском - one year old, trouncing a lot of 6yr+ sites in traffic ... not surprising, but cool

10:37 PM

Yeah, most of the "SO in [language]" sites are outliers.