Re: Unstable access to site/puzzles
Strange: Today, October 5, after 11 days of the problems I described above, everything at calcudoku.org has been loading lightning-fast, in the hours after midnight CET as well as late in the morning. Submission of solutions is also not a problem.
I should mention that I did some apparently unrelated things with my PC yesterday evening after posting the bug report: updated Firefox plugins QuickTime and VLC media player, re-installed Adobe Flash Player because Internet Explorer reported it missing (though it works just fine in Firefox, which is the browser I use for calcudokuing and almost everything else) and, maybe most importantly, ran
CCleaner, which deleted a lot of temporary files and freed several GB on my constipated hard drive.
It is not entirely inconceivable that the problems I reported may have been caused by my own system, but seeing that others have reported similar experiences in response to my post and that I haven't encountered this kind of lag at other sites I visited using the same PC, I still find it most probable that the problems have been with the hosting/server.
The functionality at calcudoku.org is near-perfect thanks to all the tweaks Patrick has done. I think that stability of access is
the thing to focus on now because the time lag was a big turn-off – and must have been so especially to new puzzlers who aren't yet as hooked on calcudoku as those of us who hang out at the forum
. Stability of access is the single factor most likely to affect the
number of users in the long run.