This might be a little dark, but the majority of our street is very elder, and none of there families want to move over here.
They were the original non-familial homesteaders from 50+ years ago when all this land was my wife's great grandfather's, and he sold off small plots to people. He, infact, inherited it from his father, who bought a half mile square back in the 20s or 30s (I believe). The first house on the road was his (Great Great Grandpa). The road WAS his driveway, then slowly but surely new generations of the family started building houses a few hundred yards away from each other, then they started selling plots to people in the 60s, and sold the last of the original land in 2023 about a year before grandpa passed.
Now the only land left in "the family", is this 1.25 acre plot that I live on. I don't really have the desire to buy more from the folks that are dying, but my neighbor has already bought up about half of the vacant land.
Maybe the solution is to ban editing. Or let moderators review + approve edits at least.
The gambling site “Stake” was doing the same thing recently, they’d make posts on financial advice or gaming subreddits and edit in a link (as to be “oh btw I need advice because I made money betting”). Were even using Greek Unicode “a”s and “e”s to hide from the automod filters. Scumbags among scumbags
Run your site like an old school BBS. You only run into these problems when you invite the world to your site and want big numbers. You don't have to do that.
It's funny you mention this, I got a Commodore 64 Ultimate the other day and one of the first things I did was load up the BBS client and browse some BBSes. Those are from before my time (my first PC was a Compaq Pentium 166) so I never got to experience them for real. But if the rest of the internet collapses under the weight of bot traffic, BBSes are quite nice.
BBSs have been in theory replaced, but in reality they haven't even been approached by modern social media. Small forums full of dedicated users, often local. So many great memories.
It's been a gradual process over the last 5.5 months. Here are some of the things that worked for me:
- I applied to showcase the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game Squad. They accepted me so I was able to showcase it at the expo for a day. This got me some players right off the bat
- I shared it on HN, Reddit, Mastodon, etc.
- The website Thinky Games wrote an article about it
- The YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic shared it which got a lot of new players. More recently a couple of other YouTubers (Timotab and Stro Solves) have been posting videos regularly
I remember seeing this! It was cool, and I will remember to play it more.
Re creating puzzles, does this mean you have to manually do them one per day? Is there a way to automate them ahead of time (as in have an app generate a bunch of puzzles you can pick from or tweak)?
I’ve automated parts of the process. Once I have the words and clues I can autogenerate crosswords and pick the best one.
I’m hesitant to automate the creation of the theme, words, and clues though. I worry that the quality would go down but there may be some opportunities to speed up brainstorming there. I’ve been noodling on this.
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