Sunday Update
Our eighth Smashing the Sudoku video for “Fleet Week” is now live:
We have two more weeks in this look back series and then we will be putting our attention to a new subscription model for daily puzzles starting in April. While we have a long-term goal of having a full digital platform to deliver puzzles, we will get started by using Discord to support a Penpa + PDF delivery of two puzzles per day. Discord should also allow for a more dynamic conversation ability between our constructors and our audience while we gather feedback on features for the future.
Look to this Sunday update space for more details on our Discord invites and on how to get an early subscription before our April launch.
Discord? Some concerns that I hope you will consider during the upcoming transition to a new delivery model (please notice that these concerns are coming from someone that has always subscribed to GMP when it was an option):
Will the audience be able to continue to use standard RSS readers to at least receive notice of new puzzles? Some people don’t want special clients for every communication path and/or have to remember to visit WWW sites, etc. I definitely will not be inclined to install something that insists upon notifying me on its schedule vs me pulling updates in a communication tool that I already know and trust (e.g. Feedly since Google Reader was “de-googled” but any RSS client has worked great with GMP over the years).
Will it be possible to subscribe to get puzzles without needing to sign up on third-party sites with a questionable reputation?
Regards,
Loren
Thanks for the feedback, Loren. We are likely to continue an email-receipt option as well, sending each week of puzzles, as we did in our earlier donor-backed days with bonus puzzles.
To give more background on our thinking: We’re at a stage where the blog model to us looks broken, and I am no longer willing to put in my own time to maintain it and post. So we are evaluating some alternate modes of release and aggregation of “daily” content particularly if we put out more puzzles per day in a subscription-only mode. A lot of our basic requirements are met by the platform Discord on top of our own generated Penpa-Edit links and PDF files. So we are considering this a bridging solution while we decide if we want to set up a digital-release platform just for ourselves.
We have some familiarity with Discord, and have seen it used effectively in other parts of the puzzle community to share puzzles including our own GMPuzzles links where those channels’ users comment on puzzles, share times, talk in spoilers. There is the risk of needing more content moderation (perhaps because the “chat” mode may get to more aggressive or argumentative communication), but we have had to do some of that on this blog already. In other words, we have just judged the platform on technical specs without knowing how our users will adapt to it or use it yet. If they do not, we will make another adjustment but will still have email-based delivery of puzzles and links as a fall back.
My absence from the GMPuzzles Discord server will certainly be conspicuous given my status as the first and most prolific Contributing Puzzlemaster, though I highly doubt that it will be much of a loss for anyone. The aforementioned “questionable reputation” of Discord is part of it, to be sure.