Jeanrosz wrote: ↑Mon Sep 20, 2021 8:30 am
I am so totally surprised that the moderators allowed the picture of the calculator with sin, cos, tan keys! And then another post mentioned the orange key for inverse. That was step one to the puzzle… how did that pass someone’s eyes?
Jean
Here is my thoughts on posts in general that might be considered spoilers
1) About 50% of all who are going to get on shore are on by Friday noon, 80% by Saturday noon and the rest arrive over the next 36 hours. The numbers are even higher earlier for the easier metas like we have this week. And I recognize that some do not get to look at the meta until the weekend so that is also a factor.
2) how I look at pictures or comments for spoilers is influenced by a few things including when it is posted (Sunday I am much more lax figuring that anyone who was going to work on this meta has already done it) and second by how difficult it is and how explicit the hints in the grid/clues are. Also I look at the general flavor of the comments and how relevant they are to solving the meta.
3) how many people are asking for nudges and when they start asking. This week we had almost no nudge requests.
4) how many comments - this week we had 390 posts by the time the contest closed.
For this one, I was not critical as there did not seem to be very many people who were stumped. Also between the title, and 72A, there was a lot of indications that this was math related and even more specifically trig related.
The first reference was comment 129 on page 7 but there was only reference to a calculator but no picture. Then we got into a slide rule discussion with pictures. The calculator picture showed up on Friday at 4 pm in post 265. My feeling at the time was that there were so many buttons and letters on the calculator that it really did not help.
The second picture in post 603 was a simpler calculator with no trig functions shown although the original image of the calculator showed up a couple of more times on Saturday
So it is always a judgement call. If you or anyone see a posting that they think is a spoiler, please PM either myself or @joe ross.
We appreciate the feedback.
Bob