
Site I've been working on every evening for six weeks - ycnews feedback would be awesome - abstractbill
http://clutu.com/
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PindaxDotCom
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.

~~~
abstractbill
"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!

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binarybits
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.

~~~
binarybits
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
See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27783>

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abstractbill
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
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
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 ;)

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joshwa
Have you seen this?

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

~~~
abstractbill
I hadn't - thanks!

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ian
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>

~~~
abstractbill
Excellent, thanks!

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mynameishere
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. ???

~~~
abstractbill
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?

~~~
mynameishere
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.

~~~
abstractbill
"Maybe a second click should alternate between them."

That's exactly what it does, for me. Thanks, I'll test with ff1.5 and see if I
can reproduce this.

~~~
mynameishere
Nevermind, I'm stupid, it does work [the double-clicking].

But lesson learned: Other people are going to be stupid, too.

And apparently my earlier problems were due to latency. If you go too fast,
the updates come up a little oddly, and the letters switch 1) When you type,
2) A moment later to something historical, and 3) Back to what you typed.

~~~
abstractbill
Heh, no problem - thanks again for the feedback.

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walesmd
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.

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

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bluemoo
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 :) )

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ralph
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.

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

~~~
ralph
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.

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patrickg-zill
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?

~~~
abstractbill
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.

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Psyonic
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

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ess
Nice. Well made and straightforward.

