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#1: Ailsa Hebert (bazette3) on Apr 2, 2025

Cute! Enjoyed the solve. Thanks!

Soooo funny!

he must be having a spat with his neighbors!

lolol

Yonah, I started seeing your work for the first time — you pack a lot of charm into the pixels. Ideas and titles are brilliant and the images make me smile.

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Awww thanks Jill!
Joe, how'd you know that? All I know is it's serial# 39348. Makes me want to see/solve the over 8,000 unpublished puzzles. :D

The front page for people not signed in shows the number of published puzzles. I must've had to sign in that day and noticed the number because it was a palindrome. And your puzzle must've been the last one published at that point

While it might be interesting to see the unsolved puzzles, it probably would not be as good to solve them. They never got published for a reason. I know my unpublished puzzles were

Ah! Thanks for the explanation. :) I also see it atop the page even when logged in. We've just passed 32,000!

My unpublished puzzles list is mostly "naaaah, nobody's going to understand/want to solve that!"

There are some gaps in the puzzle numbers, so there aren't actually 8,000 unpublished puzzles.

1) Puzzles with ID numbers from 25,206 to 28,017 are the ones that were lost during the database crash. The ones that were published before the crash were saved as PDF files, which is what was used to restore them. But anything in that range of ID numbers that was unpublished at the time of the crash was not saved as a PDF, so it wasn't able to be restored and is gone. (Actually it is remotely possible that if someone published a puzzle and then unpublished it, the PDF may have been left behind when it should have been deleted. I'm pretty sure I fixed a bug in old code that left behind PDF files this way. So it's actually possible that some unpublished-but-previously-published puzzles were restored from the database crash.)

2) Hm. When the puzzles from the crash were restored, I thought I left a gap between the last restored puzzle ID and the next puzzle number, the way there is an (annoying!) gap in ID numbers in the discussion forum. But 28,017 is the last restored puzzle ID, and puzzle 28,018 exists -- or, well, it's in the database as an unpublished puzzle, speaking of unpublished puzzles, and puzzle 28,019 is the first published puzzle after the crash. So the gap that I was thinking was there in the puzzle numbers doesn't actually exist.

On another topic: Right now there are just under 100 puzzles from the database crash left to display in the "Twenty restored puzzles from the database crash" section of the front page. When we run out, I have a plan for what will go there next. Sometime soon I will start a discussion thread to talk through the details, so that everybody can give input if they want to.

I did a quick database query. It says that there are 32,004 published puzzles and 4,268 unpublished puzzles in the database. For whatever that's worth!

Super interesting! Thanks for the deets, Valerie, and congrats for almost getting through the database crash recovery! My vote is dedicating that section of the homepage to anyone whose username begins with one of the last 5 letters of the alphabet! ;)

*first 5

What, DB? You don't want Valerie included in the dedication? :o :o :o

Aw, dang! I don't have a V in my username!

*first 5 using either of first 2 letters

Maybe a fan favorites list

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