I remember seeing her posts in the Chat boards. So sorry to hear of her passing - way too young to go. I agree with Pat that we need to have a thread somewhere to commemorate those FT members who have left us.

I agree that we need a thread, probably in the community section, to remember past members.

Lonely-lady was a member of the Internationals and active on our boards, too. We miss her.

This is quite a shock, it came quite suddenly. She was a long-time member of the community, who contributed a lot.

Coming soon(ish) to a Diamond Dome near you.

Hope I am not making this too easy.

I think we can guess what that's all about. Too easy? No, I doubt that you've knowingly ever made anything easy!

Very sorry to hear this. I had several conversations and told her how brave I thought she was for using that Nym.

Bumping this.
We just went through the month of June where this was a Team game. Now the month of July is starting up with this game repeating as a Team game. Could we PLEASE have a link to the scores for the Team in the current hour? At least an ackowledgement that this is a yes or no. It's long overdue.

Crystal Ball could use a little attention. The “View Game Details” on the CB page are a little vague and could be dolled up a bit. The page is missing the list of badges available, namely I See All for 1 win, Fortune Teller for 25 wins, and the Crystal Pyramid for a badgelet. It also doesn’t provide any information on the number of points given for each win (1,000). Would you be able to include that information under the game details?

Speaking of badges, surely it’s time to consider another badge. Several players have over 1,000 wins – that’s a great accomplishment and could be recognized as such.

One more thing - I’ve noticed on the Buzz feed that wins at exactly .45 do not appear. Every other win after that point shows up and the winner’s name is posted (7:55 ***** guessed the word of the hour! It was *****.) At the top of the hour another message (The Crystal Ball has reset! Last hour’s word was *****. Guess this hour’s word and win a badge!) appears but no mention of the winner. It would be lovely if the blind guesses at .45 were given the same prominence as other wins.

Thanks Terry!

Crazy chef in author's kitchen frequently displays

"Did you know that at least one player has successfully made every single dish?"

Not much of a help is it?

Not sure where to put this - I recall initially being told that it was too difficult to reward completed crosswords with ingredients in the Kitchen. It appears it wasn't too difficult after all.

Now I'm wondering whether it would be possible to reward completed crosswords with credits towards a Rainbow badgelet and upgrades? I have been concentrating lately on improving my crossword compilation skills, and if my crosswords were taken into account, I would probably qualify at least for the basic badgelet in several categories.

In recent times the standard for an acceptable crossword has increased to a professional level, so I have no doubt that it is just as difficult as an acceptable quiz.

How about it?

So you are suggesting that Rainbow badgelets should apply to either quizzes or crosswords? Hmmm... I wonder if that would make for very complicated coding? But if it's feasible, it seems fair.

Or... considering that crosswords IMHO are much harder than quizzes to write, maybe there should be a separate range of badgelets for crosswords?

I mean in fairness, it seems FT should do one or the other!

Thanks for your support, Gracious. Yes, for some time in the Author's Kitchen, the recipes and ingredients were restricted to quizzes and single questions. A couple of us asked to be included and were at first told exactly what you have put in your top para, then suddenly out of the blue, it was done. I salute the geniuses who work on the programs, but assume it was a matter of some kind of trigger when something goes online.

If that is the case, then the same principle should be valid for the badgelets, surely?

That way, if an author writes a number of quizzes and and a number of crosswords in the same category, they could be combined for a total.

I'd love to see crosswords contributing towards the Rainbow badgelets. Great idea, Windrush.

I would also support the crossword puzzles also counting towards the Rainbow badgelets or at least being counted towards a parallel set of badges if that coding would be easier.

I would like to see a line across crosswords played that listed on individual author profile pages the same as it is for quizzes.

That would be great. Maybe Terry could pinch a bit of code from the quiz display and enable this functionality.

I'm in complete agreement with these suggestions. Whilst a few years ago crosswords were perhaps the poor relations on FT compared to quizzes, they seem to have developed a new life recently with many more members now compiling them.

Like much around the site, being able to get these things up and running is not always a matter of whether it can/can't be done (though sometimes it is). Quite often it is a matter of priority and magnitude. Keeping the site running smoothly is a necessity, and anything that interferes with that is top priority. There is certainly a lot of behind-the-scenes work put into maintaining what we already have. And if something is going to take a really long time to program for little actual gain, it's likely going to be low priority.

There's a long list of things that are always in the to-do queue, and things like adding ingredients for crosswords had always been present, but not necessarily high on the priority side of things. Once it had its turn in the programming spotlight, it was implemented.

Thank you, Trident, I do understand that. It's a marvellous site, and I very much enjoy playing and creating crosswords. I can only guess at how much work is involved in maintenance, but that is not exactly my point.

Perhaps in future, some consideration might be given to automatically including crosswords at the same time that quizzes are rewarded with badges.

It's all very well saying that there is not enough food in a famine. It's not really equitable to cut a section of the people out altogether because there's not enough to feed everyone adequately.

By the way, one-time triggers are easier to do than including crosswords in counts. Having some ingredients when a crossword goes online does not affect anything else - it just increments counts in the kitchen. No side effects.

Adding crosswords to the author rainbow is a bit tougher - it needs to check two entirely different data sets and consolidate them, both in calculation and display and to redo that whenever something changes on either end, so that's something that can more easily go wrong.

A separate rainbow for crosswords would probably not have enough demand at this time - we only have 101 players who even made the basic "Four Across" badge and only 45 of those are at 8 categories or above.

However I'd be open for suggestions for an additional crossword authoring badge or activity if someone can come up with a good idea there. Maybe we could expand TRIC?

Thank you for the answer, Wesley. It was worth asking the question, but I accept that if it is too difficult, that's that. Just that I sometimes feel crossword compilers are the forgotten contributors - look at Ivor with well over 700 puzzles. If he had been able to be included in the Rainbows he would have crowns in several categories.

I guess any rewards would be welcome - I know nothing about how TRIC works, so will leave it to better brains to come up with something.

TRIC is an authoring activity that currently has three categories you can try for - X requires a quiz in one of three specific main categories, Y requires one on one of four specific subcategories and Z finally offers five subcategories, but you must write a photo quiz.

It uses the stage game template (the same code that is behind the race) and each two weeks, there are new tasks (however you can finish your current task beyond the switch - it won't time out as long as you don't leave the stage).

Players get X, Y and Z points (each has a corresponding badgelet) and overall points towards a full badge.

It would entirely be possible to have a fourth category in TRIC - let's call it W - that uses crosswords and contributes points to the overall as well as having its own badgelet progression. That would only be a minor backend addition (stage games currently have no "author a crossword" task, so that would need coding) and everything else is existing logic. The advantage of this is that it's light on Terry - he'd only need to add the task type, everything else in TRIC can be coded by Kyle and myself.

To add on this front-- everything in TRIC, from selections to flavour text to the actual inputting to make sure it all works, is done manually on a templated game page. This includes manually switching the game out every two weeks.

Keep in mind that there are no subcategories in Crosswords (and it's going to get darn murky if that comes to pass), so TRIC Y and TRIC Z really have no bearing on anything in that regard (and I'm not considering manually awarding for that. Way too much work.).

I was thinking TRIC W to be one fixed size in 2 root categories. It would give two overall credits for small, 3 for medium and 4 for large (and one W point regardless of size)

So it would take 4 quizzes/40 questions to make the equivalent amount of points as a large crossword?