Site I've been working on every evening for six weeks - ycnews feedback would be awesome

by abstractbill • 19 years ago

16 32 19 years ago

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

clutu is a crossword game you can play online with your friends.

I've been working on it every evening and a couple of weekends for six weeks now, after being inspired by counttonine.com

If you want to play clutu fast, you can instantly see what your friends are doing thanks to ajax. If you prefer to play slower you can bookmark your game and/or subscribe to an rss feed for it.

clutu runs in sbcl, using hunchentoot as its web server, on an ubuntu vps. Crosswords are generated continuously and the best ones are kept in a pool so that a request for a new game is quick if the pool isn't empty.

Most fun thing so far: finding a very fast way to generate anagrams.

Least fun thing so far: trying to get invite emails past spam filters - I spent more than a week on this and it's still not reliable.

Thanks for any feedback!

ph0rque• 19 years ago

Looks good!

Random thoughts:

-I know I've been docked for saying this before, but a facebook app that ties in with your site might be a good way to virally grow the user base.

-My first reaction to the site's name was a play on Cthulhu: you might want to capitalize on that and make a (dyslexic?) cthulhu be the site's mascot.

-An idea for crossword generation is to take the top stories on reddit and make crosswords be based on key words (and their clues) from the stories.

ujeezy• 19 years ago

Yeah, my first thought was: Facebook app it! A good tie in might be to generate crosswords based on your friends' names, and make the clues be based on their interests, wall posts, or something like that. Hmm, actually this sounds interesting, give me a holler if you'd like a collaborator ;)

brlewis2• 19 years ago

Overall looks great.

Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't. Other than that it seemed smooth.

I don't think there's a reliable route past spam filters for any kind of web-site invite. You might give users some text to cut/paste into their own email to friends.

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

Thanks.

I really should have noted that you can just cut and paste the url of you game and send that to your friends if the emails don't get through.

"Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't"

I've never seen this myself - what browser/os?

Thanks again.

PindaxDotCom• 19 years ago

Not bad, I like the concept. The crossword grid doesnt quite look right in IE6.

This is the sort of concept that you infinitely play around with. Some ideas for your to-do list:

1. Widgetize it

2. I know its collaborative, but throw in a few features that cater to the solo user

3. Add in some kind of top-score list or top-user list and put on home page

4. Screen shot of game on home page

5. Allow users to pick games based on predefined categories and difficulty levels

6. Allow users to race against a clock to complete the puzzle if they want.

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

"The crossword grid doesnt quite look right in IE6"

Typical :-( I tested in IE7 (and firefox, safari, and opera). Thanks for the heads-up.

Thanks for the ideas also!

joshwa• 19 years ago

Have you seen this?

http://neugierig.org/software/lmnopuz/demo/

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

I hadn't - thanks!

patrickg-zill• 19 years ago

If you are having problems with legitimate email being stopped by spam there are a number of ways to improve your odds of getting through. What email address - your domain or the email of the person doing the invite? Do you have SPF records set up? Reverse DNS? What does dnsstuff.com have to say about your IP being in any spam databases? Or DNSreport have to say about your domain?

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

I've tried every suggestion from every article I could find on the subject - SPF is set up; DKIM is set up; dns records are fine according to every checker I could find; SpamAssassin doesn't report anything bad; the IP's not in any blacklist I could find.

Thanks all the same though.

binarybits2• 19 years ago

This is a very slick little application! Some random thoughts:

It wasn't obvious to me that the anagram clues were anagrams. Woul it really kill you to spell out "anagram?" Maybe even put "Anagram:" before the clue instead of putting it in parentheses afterwards?

What's the point of the "play" button? Why not just give the user a puzzle right out of the gate?

The delete key should let me delete a letter, and probably go back to the previous letter.

There should be some way to choose the direction of my typing with the mouse when I click a square that starts both an across and a down arrow. For example, perhaps add a little "right" arrow and a little "down" arrow in opposite corners of the square that users can push? At the very least, if I'm entering a "down" word and I click a square in that word that's also part of an "across" word, it's confusing for it to switch to the across word.

Let people make their own puzzles. A really easy way to do this would be to simply ask the user to enter 40 or 50 word-clue pairs, which you could then assemble into a new puzzle. This might also be a source for new clue ideas.

Relatedly: let users rate clues. This will allow you to refine your database. Your rating options might be something like "Hard," "medium," "easy," and "unfair." Clues that get several "unfair" ratings could be automatically weeded out of the database. Once you had a substantial database of ratings for clues, you could offer puzzles with varying difficulty levels based on the ratings.

binarybits2• 19 years ago

Huh, I guess asterisks have special meaning in the site markup. I was trying to make a bulleted list, but instead I got every other point italicized.

davidw• 19 years ago

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783

ess• 19 years ago

Nice. Well made and straightforward.

mynameishere3• 19 years ago

Black-on-blue lettering very painful.

The puzzle itself looks nice, but I think there is a slight contrast problem with the black-to-white fading of the white squares against the black background. It just feels slightly off, no big deal.

However: You've clearly got some bad bugs in this. I went to answer "Country whose capital is Tehran" and it took a good minute before I could enter the answer. I clicked on it, the correct row highlighted green, and when I went to type "I", the second letter filled in "I". Then I pressed the first square of four, but the attached (horizontal) row highlighted. So I clicked on the IRAN squares again, typed I-R-A-N, it didn't work, and after some fiddling, I typed it again, and it seemed to enter I-I-A-N, then I-I-I-N, then it highlighted the last square, which flashed I then R then A then N as I typed them, then finally I typed it again, it seemed to go I-I-I-I, then changed to IRAN, finally. ???

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

It's possible the site is overloaded to the extent that ajax messages are getting lost (I have no resend mechanism right now).

Out of interest though, what browser/os are you using?

mynameishere3• 19 years ago

ff 1.5.0.12

I tested a little more, and the worst problem seem to be that in a situation like this:

EDIT: I can't get the formatting to work, but picture a horizontal "HELLO" with "LEMON" coming off the HELLO's second "L".

... and you click on the "l" in lemon, it highlights "hello". You really should NEVER have ambiguity like that. Maybe a second click should alternate between them.

ian• 19 years ago

I think cryptic crossword players would be particularly interested in this. There is a significant amount of kudos associated with solving an unusual clue and therefore perhaps more desire for users to share solutions with the community/collaborate on solutions. I know avid fans of the Times (UK) crossword who pass their part-complete solutions back and forth throughout the day, your app would be an easier way for them to collaborate. For more details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptic_crosswords

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

Excellent, thanks!

bluemoo• 19 years ago

I claim that one of the best features you could add is a feedback mechanism in the site. At the minimum, stick "Report a bug, Request a feature" as a link on all of the pages. Then give the user a simple text field to type their comment into. If you want to go fancier, I think iminlikewithyou.com has a nice feedback mechanism. (The implication being that you could look at their site and steal the mechanism :) )

walesmd• 19 years ago

First thing I noticed - I can't delete letters, or if I can, it's not intuitive at all.

I clicked the letters and tried backspace and delete - didn't work, gave up.

ralph3• 19 years ago

Me too. I worked out I can spacebar over them.

Psyonic• 19 years ago

I don't know if it is a conflict with one of my firefox extensions, but when I type a letter, it gets in the box, but also starts the firefox quick search. Every letter after that only goes into the quick search. So to write a word I have to click on every single box. Definitely annoying. But again, could just be a conflict on my machine. That's firefox 2.0.0.4 on gentoo linux

ralph3• 19 years ago

I'd like feedback in the list of clues as to what ones have been filled in so I can scan the list of clues looking for the next one to work on. Perhaps indicate which ones I have answered compared to everyone else.

abstractbill11• 19 years ago

Yup, definitely a good idea - I'll get it working soon. Thanks!

ralph3• 19 years ago

Also, it was a little jarring for the clues to be all lower-case. I think frequent crossword solvers may be used to each clue being a sentance with a full-stop, even if it's just "Begin." Unless that varies by nation.

Site I've been working on every evening for six weeks - ycnews feedback would be awesome

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