Crossword Help Forum
Forum Rules

Post in a thread by Kasseistamper which I felt needed reading by a wider audience, thanks Kasseistamper for raising the point.

“Why is it essential to give details of the crossword one is asking about?
If I am asking for help in parsing an answer, how does it help if I say that it is from 'The Telegraph Big Book of Cryptic Crosswords 6' and the puzzle on page 143?

I live ouside the UK so all the English language puzzles that I solve are from books of puzzles rather than from newspapers or magazines.”

Kasseistasmper, you have a valid point for our Forum Users from abroad, I would say though that the majority of our Users are UK residents as are the majority of the crosswords we cover. Individual users follow different crosswords and it is far easier for them to look down the list on the first page to pick out the crossword in which they are interested in and just ignore the rest.

Having said that, I do not wish to preclude any of our Forum Users from overseas and in those cases I suggest a short title saying, in your particular case, “Telegraph Book of Cryptic Crosswords”. That is all that is needed in the heading, further details can be given in the post such as

“Page 43, 6 down - or whatever it is
Parsing ESCHEW
I have based on letters from other answers: E?C?E?
The clue is: Key cut to abstain from (6)
The word I can think of is: ESCHEW.
I have trouble parsing the answer.
Key = E
Cut = CHEW
How does the S add to the parsing? Or is my answer wrong?”

Hopefully, someone will have that particular book and be able to help you, perhaps they would have a better idea if the answer is wrong if they could see the other clues in their own book.

What I am trying to do is get away from headings which say, Help Please, Explanation Wanted, What Does this Mean, they annoy our Users and someone usually emails me about such threads.

As Chris says, if the puzzle is identified it makes it easier to avoid posting duplicate threads on the same puzzle. In the case of a book, all queries from the same book could go in one thread, I doubt there would be many but it would keep them all together.

I’m trying to provide a Forum which helps as many Users as possible and at the same time looks neat and tidy with easily read concise headings.

Thanks Norah for all you do to make this a neat and tidy forum.

I'd just like to add, that knowing where the crossword comes from can give solvers an idea of the degree of difficulty of the clue.

In reply to Kasseistamper, understand what you mean.

Yet I too live in France (well, I am French) and I have subscribed to
The Times and The Sunday Times as an 'International subscriber'some time ago.
I think there is an offer for £3 a month for 3 months and £5 a month thereafter.

Perhaps you might be interested in such a deal? doing the crossword on line is very easy and neatly set out.

I hope the above is useful to any British person living abroad
Getting The Times in paper form would cost me a fortune.....and
since I live in a small village, there is no guarantee that I would
ever find it!

I meant 'I too live abroad', in France etc

Thanks, Norah. That was all very interesting. As others have said, I like seeing puzzles identified so that I can work out how interested I am, how keen to have a bash! There's a wide range of difficulty across the crossword spectrum - some are more challenging than others, some are more appealing than others (the RTE puzzles often feature odd clues, odd definitions, odd answers, so I seldom bother.)

I welcome queries from Forum members who live abroad, who're accessing crosswords from other places. A change is as good as a rest!

Thanks Norah. May I just add another vote for knowing the origin of the clue, i.e. the publication and even the age if it’s from a while ago. As Malone and Rossim have said, it gives context and makes the request much more engaging.

It’s good to hear from you Pigale.
It’s been a long time time.

It would be simpler and clearer, I think, if one part of the site had a little redesign.

When one tries to begin a new thread, "A brief overview of your problem to grab attention" is the only advice given for the heading. Why not add that the title should include the name of the crossword?

It could also mention something about not creating duplicate threads. This would avoid the message on the first page having to be continully bumped up.

The problem is, Orson, that posters don't seem to read the instructions in the first place which is why Norah created that new thread.

That's a good idea Orson, but Rossim has a point. It's like those "Don't put feet on seats" notices on trains, which are only read by the people who'd never put their feet on the seats anyway!

I wish I had one tenth of Norah's benign tolerance. I don't want to be the cyber-equivalent of a curtain twitcher, but I would have immediately deleted the threads from the poster with a username consisting mainly of numbers who posts ambiguous, not-really-cryptic clues and then argues when people try to help - especially as he's already had warnings for bad language and duplication.