lat-puzz.com

I archived the chatroom posts. One year was gone since last time.
Go on puzzling. Have fun.

Thanks! Could one of the mods pin the chat room to the top of the page?

Happy holiday season, everyone! Hope you're all keeping well.

Happy New Year, dear puzzling community.
I started the Puzzel of the Year thread in the Chatroom Archives section > http://lat-puzz.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18340
Please nominate your favorites.

Thanks, Sundowner! Would it make sense to move the thread to the Active Puzzles sections? If someone neither checks the chatroom nor the archives, they might easily miss it.

Yes, you're right. I moved the thread here. Please nominate your favorites.

And, by the way, welcome brtd83. Happy puzzling!

Reminder: please nominate your favorites for the Puzzel of the Year 2022.

I'm confused already! So where is the thread we nominate on, &/or existing votes? (being a bit dateless today, sorry).

The thread is here in the Active Puzzles section. Or just follow the link in my last post.

Still a few days left to nominate your favorites for the Puzzel of the Year 2022.

I do plan to nominate some puzzles, just need a day or two more. Also, hello again, it's been a while (though I lurk from time to time).

@ Admin: Hello Paul, if you're reading here from time to time and have some time, could you please remove the template "metro_teal" from the board and all member profiles where it is? This is the reason why many of the old forum members are not able to log on with their old handle any more. Thanks!

So we're getting another intense wave of spambots. Over the past five days, there were 142 spam posts dropped in the Solved section. I've deleted the posts but couldn't find a way to ban all the spam usernames in one go.

Since I'm not as active on the forum, I'd suggest adding another mod. Admin, do you agree?

Why do they bother/what do they hope to achieve? Meanwhile, is it always this quiet at this time of year?

Some of our regulars haven't posted in a while. Some of our regular puzzle-setters (me among them) don't tend to go solving other puzzles. Some days I force myself to ask questions on every puzzle I can just to keep things moving, but I really do have to force it - once a puzzle has more than a few dozen questions I get lost.

I haven't been as active on the forum because I was super busy with work, but we've just reached a major milestone and things have calmed down a bit. Of course, now that I have the time to be more active again, I suffer from severe puzzler's block

I'm not very good at thinking up puzzles, but I do enjoy solving them. However, when my ADHD is going full throttle (or life is out of hand) it can be difficult for me to focus long enough to catch up with a puzzle to ask questions on it. Trying to make more of an effort over the next while.

Hi,

Do we need another moderator and who would like the honour of being one?

regards

Paul

Hi Paul, I think we're fine at the moment with mods, things have become quiet here at the moment, unfortunately.
What could help is another site admin who could delete the 18000+ spam accounts we have in the meanwhile.

A good while back, someone posted the Tom Scott-hosted "Lateral" YouTube quiz show. I recently learned he adapted that quiz show into a podcast (link) which has been running for over a year - about a third of the way through now.

Thanks for sharing.

And, by the way, Happy New Year to everyone!

Happy new year! Here's to a more active LTPF in 2024!

Tau hou hari and happy new year to you all. I have made a resolution to host more puzzles this year. Finding life's little absurdities and turning them into riddles; it brings me joy.

This year will mark the 10th anniversary of the move to the new forum, hard as that is to believe. I still feel I'm getting used to being able to add my own name to puzzle titles and say the word 'spoiler' with impunity.

We've survived four thousand spambots, two account purges and one ragequit by Nimue. We've added achievements, a glossary, and an annual puzzel of the year. We invented the OAATP, the versponse and the kittehspeak. We had two podcasts and may or may not have had our content stolen by a third. And then Tom Scott made lateral puzzles cool again, which has done precisely nothing to boost our forum numbers.

And through this all, we kept going. We've had days of dead air and our lowest year of activity yet, but we're still here - tiptoeing through the dead men, clutching at straws and supping on albatrosses.

Here's to 2024. Long live the LTPF!

I had wondered what happened with Nimue.

Long live Tom Scott and lateral puzzles! I'd say the same about Futility Closet, but alas, it is no more. (And I appreciated how they actually answered in a yes/no format.)

There's another podcast where a group of comedians/improv artists solve lateral puzzles, but I found it impossible to enjoy because they went on too many tangents and one host in particular would keep making jokes about how he couldn't be expected to know any references to anything that happened before he was born. Or something like that. I just kept getting too irritated with the annoying parts to listen for the good ones. Does anyone else find that with puzzle-themed podcasts? They hardly spent half the time doing something that wasn't the puzzle.

Then again, try to hold a conversation with me and I go off on tangents upon tangents, so maybe I shouldn't comment.

Depression and severe distraction has caused all too little participation on my part. Will try to do better this year.

Glad you're back, hope you're feeling better. Happy new 2024 to you and all LTPFers!

Also, WiZ, we're far beyond four thousand spambots -- there's well over 20,000.

True - I think my mind is on the day where our membership jumped from 100 to 4100 overnight. And then the board was unusable for a month afterwards. A credit to the mod team that you've been able to keep that in check ever since.

Welcome Naomi! Have a puzzling time.

Is anyone else experiencing problems with the LTPF website? When I log in and then click on "Return to the index page", I get an error message. I then have to re-load the page and log in again. This is happening across different operating systems and browsers.

It was a little "page not found"-y yesterday, but only a couple of times. Lately it has been ok for me. I use Firefox.
Edit: also, welcome Naomi!

Welcome back, TDGPerson! Enjoy puzzling.

Welcome to the forum, Leadsinger77!
Enjoy and have fun puzzling.

Just popping a note in here to say hello, and to generate random conversation. I find the chatroom interesting when we talk a little bit about things other than puzzles. Sometimes I log on because I want to connect with people but don't have the capacity for a lot of questions. Oddly enough.

So... what books/shows/movies/plays/podcasts is everyone consuming these days? I am nearing the end of the book "They Both Die At The End". In the world of the book, there is a company called Death-Cast that calls people between the hours of 12 am and 3 am if they are going to die that day, notifying them of their upcoming death. And the story centres around two male youths who get the call and then use an app to connect with each other so they're not alone on their last day.

I just finished my third or fourth listen to The Murderbot Diaries and the Bobiverse audio books. Great scifi, and very well narrated. Murderbot is one of my favorite fictional characters.

Some people who want to register for the site are having problems getting on. See this correspndence on the FB group Lateral Thinking. Any idea what the problem is?

Tommy Petersson
Site still doesn't work and email server is defunct.

27w

Reply
Share

Paul SloaneAuthor
Sorry - what exactly does not work please?

27w

Reply
Share

Tommy Petersson
After login:
No photo description available.

27w

Reply
Share

Tommy Petersson
...and then I'm logged out.
And sending emails to the given email address doesn't work - "no server".

27w

Reply
Share

Tommy Petersson
Paul Sloane A workaround is probably just to copy another template to metro_teal which seems to be removed - and any user that has that template set gets thrown out.

4w

Reply
Share

Paul SloaneAuthor
I just created a new account on lat-puzz.com as a test and it seems to work. Where are you getting the problem? Do you get the registration email?
Lateral Puzzles
LAT-PUZZ.COM
Lateral Puzzles
Lateral Puzzles

4w

Reply
Share
Remove Preview

Michael Lam
Paul Sloane I'm having this exact problem showing exactly the same screen. the system thinks I'm logged in but not really, when I try to log in using an account opened on the old site.

3d

Reply
Share


Owen Bragdon
I would really love any advice on joining as well. I am getting the same error message, and trying to create a new account isn't working.

Hello Paul, I think the problem is indeed the board style. The board style is an attribute of the user (i.e. the user can chose how to see the board). Currently there are two options available to chose from: "prosilver" and "Metro Teal". But "Metro Teal" seems not to exist. (maybe it has been deleted accidentally)
So, as soon as a user switches the board style to "Metro Teal" he will be kicked out and cannot log on any more. (and, thus, also not switch back to "prosilver")
All the old accounts (created before ~ 2020) have "Metro Teal" and can't log on therefore anymore. (The notable exception is GalFisk )
In my opinion, the solution would be:
- either: set the board style for all users to "prosilver" and remove "Metro Teal" from the selection list, if this is possible & make sure that new accounts are created with "prosilver" by default
- or: create a board style named "Metro Teal" and see whether this revives the old accounts

Former member CupofSun just contacted me on Facebook - can't get in either. No activation email even when they try to set up a new account.

I just tried to sign up with a new user and it worked without any problem. I received the activation mail and could activate the account.
But I spotted a problem with the activation mail: it is still using a "from" address with the old lateralpuzzles.com domain which most likely does not exist any more. A mail server with strict rules might filter that out.
CupofSun may try it again and check the spam folder for the activation mail. Or whitelist "lateralpuzzles.com" to make sure to receive it. Or try a different mail account. (maybe set up a gmail account for that)
Actually, I could not find any user named CupofSun or similar here in the list. So maybe this user existed in the very old forum, but not yet here.
So, try it again and let me know.

Remember when there used to be holiday themed latventures around this time?? It seems those have disappeared, it's a shame.

Not only the latventures, but also a lot of people have disappeared. Which is also a shame.
Seems, lateral thinking puzzles are falling out of fashion.

Hey old and new friends,

I used to be active on the old forum. Must have close to 15 years ago now. The unpredictable flow of life and its distractions eventually lead me away, and when I finally discovered that the forum moved here, I wasn't able to create an account for a while (no activation email, as reported by Burdoo1 a couple messages above.) Today I decided on a whim to try with a non-gmail address and this finally worked. (Alas, this means I temporarily locked a bunch of better usernames?)

Anyway, just writing to say hi and to raise another flag that something's up with the emails.

I have gotten a message from old user Hominid saying they are unable to log in or create an account. If there is an issue with people accessing the site, it would seem that needs to be resolved to maintain/increase membership and ensure a vibrant forum.

Does anyone want to spitball ideas on how to increase sign-ups and activity on the forum, given that Tom Scott has a massive following? I mean, even when Futility Closet was on the air, the lateral puzzles were a hugely popular feature of theirs. So I don't think lack of activity is due to lateral puzzles falling out of fashion.

Could we maybe do some promoting on social media? Maybe set up some accounts (other than, like, the one I saw a year and a half ago on Facebook) on various platforms and get the word out?

Just to let people know, there is now a new lateral puzzle-themed podcast, called simply Lateral by Tom Scott. It is the first one to my knowledge to appear since Futility Closet shut down (in 2022 I believe). Actually, Futility Closest wasn't lateral puzzle themed, it was mainly about weird and rather forgotten events in history--it just regularly featured them--whereas Lateral is as you might expect actually centered around them. I have nothing to do with this podcast, I just found it today.

By the way, although at first I was seeing only episodes of Lateral since June 2025, which made me think it was new (and explaining why I hadn't seen it before), I can now see that it had episodes as far back as 2022, possibly even overlapping Futility Closet. This shows that this podcast for some reason is very difficult to search for--I've been looking for puzzles-themed podcasts ever since Futility Closet stopped and NPR's Says You! went off the air, yet was never able to find this one.

I've been listening to The Puzzler with AJ Jacobs as that's the only puzzle podcast I could find, but it actually has very little puzzling for the length of episode, with conversations with the guests and advertisements together taking up about two thirds of each 20-minute episode. Also, it features way too many movies, celebrities, and other proper names for my liking, as well as many of the puzzles being a bit too easy (when you DO have the knowledge to solve them). Whereas Lateral is mostly puzzling, and they have four people working on them so they get through a lot of puzzles in the time of the show. And I found The Puzzler based on a recommendation from a thread on r/podcasts, in which none of the people seemed to have heard of Lateral either, because it was never mentioned.

I've been having issues logging in to the forum lately; different issues on different computers. But if I change https:// to http:// in the login page URL, it works every time.

The spambots are getting out of control again. Last time I missed a week and checked, there were over 700 spam topics that needed to be deleted.