Crossword Help Forum
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I'm happy to return to a single thread if it keeps it simpler. It would just be good if the odd person was discouraged from putting solutions in BLOCK CAPITALS which are really difficult to avoid seeing. Having said that, I don't recall this happening for a few months now. Thanks to Norah, Malone et al for continuing to navigate this ship through stormy waters.

Quixote, your 'come-uppance' was all very amusing - unintenional, but fun all the same. I hope it doesn't take you too long to recover from the ignominious state you landed yourself in!

Drxx, 'mediation skills' aren't all they're cracked up to be - the toguh nut approach has its appeal at times.

Simond9x, I'd forgotten all about the block capitals posts. I remember I queried them once - maybe on a Listener thread, maybe not - and was told they were helpful for some people. I agree with your point that they jump out, but if they have stopped anyway...

PS I think we could maybe all think about turning into snitches. I'm sure we all have good intentions, don't plan to give too much away on the theme and so on - but if any of us strays, it'd be better to tackle this head-on. Reporting the post might not be much fun for Norah, but any offending stuff could then be removed and not spoil things for others. It also means that the 'offending' behaviour doesn't carry on, gain a momentum of its own - I'm really thinking of overly-informative theme material appearing... and appearing way too soon for the majority of us.

I thought things had been resolved. Been away a while for other reasons. It seems like things have got silly again. So I shan’t be visiting again for a bit - again, I have other stuff to do, or stuff to get done to me 🙄, anyway.

In my climbing days there were often heated discussions about
what was called “ethics” - things like whether a first ascent of a new route counted as a “first ascent” if the claimant had spent time on a top rope working out the hardest moves. I thought that you only got into “ethics” if you were in a Joe Simpson “Touching the Void” scenario. Anything else was really “etiquette” rather than ”ethics”.

I think that’s what we have here. The world won’t shift on its axis if people give Listener answers - or even themes - away. But doing either or both just isn’t in the spirit of the game. So please don’t. Anyone could do either, anyone could do both. But it would be good manners not to.

jack aubrey - Best wishes regarding the other, far more important stuff (I'll give a little more thought to the etiquette).

I really wasn't on this setter's wavelength and it took me an age to finish this one. In fact, I had more fun reading this forum that actually doing the crossword!!!

The clue "...toguh nut approach..." (post # 142) had me foxed, until I subjected it to the usual analysis - it's a delightfully obscure allusion to the vanishingly rare and notoriously refractory Toguh nut - fruit of a palm, Macrocarpa anicetus, found growing only on Nuʻutele island. It is a round nut, up to about the size of a cricket ball, having a tiny, delicious, pleasurably narcotic kernel encased in inches of the strongest nutshell known to botany - the strength of this shell is reputed to be comparable to that of reinforced concrete. The extraction of these kernels has become the subject of a cult ritual practised by devotees - they gather in a special reservation to pound at the nuts with heavy cudgels called koreros; it can take several days of this, sometimes up to a week, to extract sufficient meat to satisfy the appetites of the cultists - who may then be found reclining in a stupor among the fragments of the nutshells, until their addiction impels them to rouse themselves and start the whole absurdly energetic, ultimately fruitless, process all over again.

(Hope I haven't given too much away?)

The problem we seem to have stumbled upon here, is not a new one. May I refer you all to Juvenal (Satire VI, lines 347–348). The problem is that anyone who answers Juvenal's question with "Me", is, almost by definition, immediatelt disqualifying themselves from suitability for the post.

The discussion on using encoded messages has all been very interesting.

I’m glad that common sense seems to have prevailed and that the idea of using the Encoder has fallen by the wayside. Even before the latest posts on the subject, I had decided that we needed to stick to simple English and that encoded messages would not be permitted, at least we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet on that one.

I have also decided to have just one thread for the 2 remaining Listener Crosswords in December to see how it goes. In agreement with Malone, I will post the thread on Friday when she alerts me that the Listener is up. I will also post an explanatory thread as not all Forum Users will read this particular message. Watch out for the two threads.

It's a bold decision, norah, and appears to be a fairly popular one
- at least amongst contributors who are broadly in favour of giving hints (I haven't seen much input as yet from those who don't want any hints at all, or if they do, want to delay them until they've had enough time to finish the puzzles themselves).
The period of experimentation with multiple threads was an attempt to find a way for the Listener factions to coexist, because they were/are often very far apart in their ambitions for the thread. The deathly silence on one side of the argument suggests (to me, at least) that we're in for more of the same old stuff once the Christmas interval is past. But by then, I suppose, we'll have tried everything and a firm diktat from the management team will settle the issue once and for all.

I applaud Norah's decision too, and let's hope that in future she'll be able to enjoy weekends free of issues with the Listener thread!