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47 comments on “Site Feedback”

  1. Has the “edit post” facility been removed. I only noticed this today. Apologies if I’ve missed something.

    Oh it came up for this post but not on the Gemelo thread

  4. I’m not liking the change, since it seems to now sort search results by best match rather than by date. That search made it easy to check that I had a correct answer without seeing the rest of the answers.

  6. I suspect this is just how the site is but we now have three users called “jay” commenting on some blogs. First there was Jay, then JAY and then later another Jay (with a different avatar). This can cause confusion.

  8. Luckily, fifteensquared is a small and friendly community and can probably sort this out through self- policing. The second “Jay” has already volunteered to use a different name.

  11. Any chance of instituting blogs for the TLS crosswords? They have a formidable stable of setters, including Broteas (Peter Biddlecombe, Sunday Times crossword editor), Agenor (aka Twin), and Talos (aka Hoskins).

  12. Is it really asking too much for the Guardian blog to include the word “Guardian” in the title as it used to (and as is the pattern for all the other blogs)?

    While each instance is only a minor inconvenience, the daily repetition adds up.

  13. (And yes, I know it appears in small print below the title and intro, but that’s not the point. The inconsistent format is a constant, needling inconvenience that is so easily avoidable.)

  14. @13

    As you may or may not know, some of the bloggers use a utility that creates the appropriate blog.

    Shortly the utility will be amended to provide consistency among blog titles.

    Blogs produced without using the utility will be unaffected.

    Let’s see how it goes.

  16. Hi kenmac, to repeat phitonelly’s question @72 on Guardian 29,781 the other day, is the Maskarade special puzzle from the bank holiday weekend going to be blogged?

  20. I agree with muffin @19: it’s taking up too much of the screen, and it’s actually less readable than before because it spreads the titles over two lines.

  21. Hi Kenmac
    The bigger font size is good for me – probably going to be another of those pantomime issues, i.e. “it’s better!” “Oh no it isn’t!”. Have a stiff drink to hand.

  22. @19/20/21

    I made a small change the other day to make “Select Category” a bit more obvious.

    I had noticed that many people are using the search facility to search for categories and I was acting under a desire for efficiency.

    Anyway, a side effect of the change was that post headings reduced in size. And I don’t understand why.

    Anticipating an outcry, I changed it back to what I guessed was the original size.

    In hindsight because no-one seemed to mind, I’ve reverted to the smaller size.

  23. I’ve been having problems getting onto this website in the last week or so. I get a database connection error message, which I can usually overcome by refreshing the page, but not always.

    It’s not happening on any of the other sites that I visit regularly. It happens on my laptop at home and also on my phone when roaming, so there’s no other common factor (apart from me! 🙂 ). Is this happening to others?

  27. Unfortunately, problem is persisting. Exactly the same experience as sheffield hatter and only on 225.

    (Though I read that TTFT and Times solvers have been having problems too. WordPress related, apparently)

  28. Worse than ever this morning – though if it’s a general WordPress problem I don’t suppose there’s much that our Admin can do about it.

  30. Also Eileen and others lower down in the Vlad blog posts are reporting that her email address appears to have been compromised. You may be aware of that but it hasn’t been reported here. Wondering if it’s a related problem and if any one else could be similarly affected?

    (Multiple attempts to post this.)

  31. Sorry KenMac. I inadvertently copied only part of my original post. Thank you for your efforts. Afraid the database error messages have been frequent here this Friday morning Australian time.

  32. I’m still trying to fix this. It’s proving more difficult than usual as I’m on holiday.

    I have just disabled the new search facility to see if that might be the culprit.

    🤞

  33. Thank you, paddymelon @30. I’m afraid my email has been hacked and I’m unable to send or receive emails and, like others, have been having great difficulty in posting here. I’m trying very hard to get the problem solved and I hope that no one here has been taken in by a particularly nasty scam.
    Do not reply to an innocent-sounding email, supposedly from me, asking if you use Amazon, or you will receive a request asking you to send £300 for me to help a friend with breast cancer.

    I don’t think this is connected to the database error problem, which I’ve been experiencing for several weeks now but which was much worse yesterday.

  34. Ken @32 – the problem is much wider across WordPress, having tried to sign up for something else this morning and realised that they had to be hosted on WordPress as I kept seeing all too familiar screens. The prove I’m human and the hanging screens.

    My daughter, who is active on Tumblr is muttering that the owner of Automatic, the company that owns Tumblr and WordPress, has obviously got annoyed about something and that’s why these sites are having problems.

  35. @Kenmac. A very unfortunate time while you’re on holidays. Hope you can still enjoy your well-deserved break.
    Eileen@33. I only mentioned your email problem as a potential diagnostic tool for KenMac. You may be infected from this bug and, from the Vlad blog, others were receiving emails purported to be from you. Unless you had exchanged personal emails it would seem the common source was 15sq, or, as Shanne has said @34, maybe this is a wider thing, possibly WordPress.

  36. New search facility has been exonerated.

    Next thing I’m trying is moving away from Cloudflare but that won’t be until Sep 17th at the earliest. 😠

  37. My two cents on this: Perhaps the problem is with the hosting provider. Maybe their tech support can be contacted to arrange a database connection stress test. Could be a misconfigured or under-resourced DB connection pool?

  38. I am getting “establishing database connection errors” too, even to this page. Refreshing the page does seem to succeed sometimes, as a workaround.

  39. Hi
    I’m having enormous difficulty getting into the site. I’m not sure you are aware but I am one of a few relatively new crossword enthusiasts working diligently through your back pages for the last three years. I finished the quiptics and went on to the easier cryptic solutions. I have a feeling I have been locked out by the administrators who think I’m a hacker ( trust me I’m near 75 years old .. I’m not even sure what the word means)
    If I have been locked out can you please undo it. I thought the whole idea was to encourage newbies like me to learn about how to solve cross words. FYI the error message I get is “error consolidation database”

  42. How’s this?

    It seems to work. I hope that it hasn’t just been user error all along. How embarrassing 🙂

    Thanks for looking into this, Ken

  45. For a few weeks I’ve been unable to search for clues – I do the i (recycled) crosswords and need to dig out the first appearance of a puzzle to see the blog. I type in the clue, and nothing happens.

  47. It’s sort of working again!

    These searches from yesterday’s Tees puzzle did not work –

    Get out with this key (no response at all, not even ‘Nothing found’ – which is what’s been happening ALL the time)
    also
    One who thought about deer as scent spread about
    and
    Stomach large? Move slowly (this did bring up some of the individual words)

    But today these DID:
    Indebted veteran stuffs live chicken
    Perfumed powder found in metal crate

    So … I hope it’s resolved itself, or you did it somehow. Thank you!

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