- The 2012 puzzles are finally added. I apologize for this taking so long. Seth Schoen of Codex sent me his categorizations back in February, but rather than entering them directly through the web site as I intended and made possible for him, he just sent them to me in a big spreadsheet. I wrote a script to convert this to my XML bulk upload format, but then I realized I didn't code the handler for that in a way that really worked for merging (it was meant for the initial bulk upload and bulk restore in case I screw something up). And then I got involved with about a dozen different events, including writing and running BAPHL, and I just didn't devote any time to it. So finally I got around to doing the tiny bit of coding I needed to fix this, and uploading the new data.
- Although Seth did a very good job of tagging most of these puzzles, I reviewed them and reclassified some of them, mostly where he made a new keyword where an existing one was very similar (like "pasta varieties" when we already had "pasta"). And I corrected a couple old errors that have been there since the beginning, where an error in the original data created a near-duplicate puzzle entry with one of the keywords, isolated from the rest of the description of that puzzle.
- All the puzzles from 2000 forward have author credits on my site. Eventually, I will set something up so you can actually click an author's name and look at all of an author's puzzles, but I don't have a target date for that. It is not likely this year. I want to make pages for specific hunts, too.
- All the puzzles have separate puzzle and solution URLs, where possible. This allows you to directly jump to the solution - useful for those earlier hunts where the puzzles do not link directly to their solutions. Some of the metas used to link directly to solution pages; now the solution link goes to the solution page, and the puzzle link goes to the round page, or the top level page for the hunt if I couldn't find anything better.
- Mystery Hunts from 1999, 1997, 1996, and 1994 have been added! The 1996 and 1994 puzzles without solutions on the MIT site link to solutions I posted of my team's work this summer; this is also the initial public release of these 1994 solutions. This brings the site up to 997 keywords describing 1608 puzzles.
- What about 1998 and 1995? 1998's puzzles are mostly not posted, and 1995 only has some solutions written on the copy of the hunt that is in the archives. I hope to sort out the 1995 puzzles, and solve what's not solved, and do with them what I did with the 1994 and 1996 Hunts, but it needs more time. And most of the solutions to earlier hunts are not posted, either.
- I've started making more use of the descriptive text for items on my site, especially the keywords for specific puzzle types, which now briefly describe the way the standard form of the puzzle works. This somewhat incorporates another thing I have wanted to do for a long time, make a sort of encyclopedia of puzzle types, with my Hunt index site so as to provide links to examples of the puzzle type (though sometimes weird variant versions). I would like to eventually create miniature example puzzles of these types to post here, too.
- In doing this, I realized there are actually still quite a few standard puzzle types that have never appeared in the Mystery Hunt! Maybe I'll find examples in other puzzle hunts and add them, or maybe they will come in future years. Oh yeah, other hunts. With most of the Mystery Hunts with adequate information now indexed, I am considering including other puzzle hunts which, like the Mystery Hunt, have freely accessible online archives with solutions.
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- devjoe (
devjoe) wrote,