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Shortyz Crosswords
GNU General Public License v3.0
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It appears the NYT .puz is no more #179

Open nibbler3465 opened 3 years ago

nibbler3465 commented 3 years ago

I'm sure you're aware, but figured I'd file the issue:

NYT posted this article announcing end of .puz support. It appears they delayed this move until today, as daily puzzle now looks like it returns a 404 . The last puzzle I was able to download was Sunday 09/12/21.

NYTDownloader only handles a 401 and 200 response explicitly, so this new behavior is silent. eg curl https://www.nytimes.com/svc/crosswords/v2/puzzle/daily-2021-9-12.puz returns 404 (if I got that right? ... although i didn't jump through the hoops to generate all the necessary headers with credentials)

This all inspired me to hook my Android device up in debug mode and compare log statements with code ... so that was fun! :)

I'll be adding my voice to those in support of the .puz format, but I'm not going to hold out that they will reverse their position on this.

And while I'm here, thanks for making Shortyz! Longtime user, big fan!

rogermontemayor commented 2 years ago

This is happening to me too. Any solution in sight for Shortyz users to be able to access the New York Times crossword puzzles?

mr-salty commented 2 years ago

ugh, what a mess. I had taken a little break from crosswords (Sept 8 was the last puzzle I did) and missed this whole thing until i fired up shortyz last night and saw the puzzles were missing.

My first thought was "I wonder if we could parse the PDF", I found one person that had the same idea but no followups after that message... it seems possible but also potentially very brittle.

I fired up alphacross and it did download some NYT puzzles, but the syndicated version which IIUC is 5 weeks behind. I don't know where it downloads them from; there are some parts of alphacross that are open sourced at 0xe1f/ararat but the whole app isn't. It did download a puzzle for yesterday, although I didn't check to see what NYT puzzle that corresponded to... but if it's 5 weeks that'd be September 28, which is after the NYT stopped publishing puz files. I'm not sure if they're still doing it for syndication for the time being or if alphacross is getting older puzzles.

mr-salty commented 2 years ago

I see a lot of people are upset about this but I can't imagine them reversing course if the initial wave didn't convince them to. It's really crappy that they removed the whole archive, if I'd have known I would have downloaded them all.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58102983