The Stickler Weekly 57 Solution

In my early Australian Financial Review (AFR) days, I was told to create a difficult weekly crossword for use in a competition. “Times style” was the term used – the idea was to create a real challenge and keep a lid on the number of competition entries. I used to get regular updates from my contact at the AFR about weekly entry numbers, and these were relatively consistent and quite low. I wondered how many people ALMOST finished the crossword, maybe being one or two answers short, and therefore didn’t send in an entry. As an experiment, I intentionally eased up for a couple of weeks to see what would happen. The result was amazing: a tenfold increase in the number of entries, showing clearly that people were solving the puzzle but normally found it too hard to complete.
Occasionally I list some stats from my website showing, for instance, number of unique visitors and how many are doing the Stickler Weekly on average. The actual stats provide daily totals and accumulate across the month, which gives me some insight into the habits of solvers as a group. I’ve noticed over the last three months that there are less solvers doing the puzzle in the week it’s released, and access numbers for previous weeks slow down but still grow more than they used to. This indicates to me that the puzzles are too hard for most, and people are either taking longer than a week to solve them, or prefer to have the solution at hand as they solve. This would certainly make sense for U3A groups who only meet once a week where the course leader would like to have the solution available before class.
I’ve decided to “ease up” for a while to see if the puzzle stats shift, as I prefer to have a puzzle that most can finish in a week than service an elite group of solvers. As usual, I welcome feedback on this as real people will tell me much more than a few numbers on a report.