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downforacross / downforacross.com

Web frontend for downforacross.com -- continuation of stevenhao/crosswordsio
https://downforacrosscom.downforacross1.now.sh
MIT License
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Blank spaces in official answer key are not recognized #178

Open puja-jena opened 3 years ago

puja-jena commented 3 years ago

In the NYTimes crossword puzzle for 3/17/2021, the solution has blank cells:

Screen Shot 2021-03-17 at 7 19 35 PM

However, DownForAcross requires you to insert "NOTHING" into each of the blank cells for it to be marked correctly:

Screen Shot 2021-03-17 at 7 30 05 PM

This should probably follow the same guidelines as the official solution or information should be added in the tooltip to account for this edge case.

JohnHKoh commented 3 years ago

I was toying around with this, and I think we run into a few issues when we want to allow completely blank spaces. For example, if a user checks the word or the puzzle, all the blank spaces within the checked scope that are supposed to be 'NOTHING' will be automatically revealed.

As an example in the 3/18*/2021 NYT puzzle, let's look at 65 across.

image

Let's say I want to check 65 across - what happens now? We could correctly say that the user's blank square in the second square is correct, but that could be revealing more than what the user had anticipated.

image

If we ignore the blank squares during the check (which is what currently happens), then the user has no way of knowing if their blank answer is correct.

I don't know how NYT does it, but it seems like Across Lite also expects 'NOTHING' in these blank spots. The better solution may be, as you alluded to, explicitly telling the user in the information section to enter 'NOTHING' in spaces that are supposed to be empty.