Hi!

Remember all those cool things I was takling about last week? Well, none of them have progressed an inch! I've been extremely busy with other things, and will be for at least a week or two. But cool things are coming! I got so many amazing suggestions for improvements after the last newsletter, thank you all! Can't waint to implement them!

I did do one thing though (in addition to all the puzzles). I tweaked the way bogus results are excluded from the stats.
What bogus results? Why would someone cheat?
There's always a bunch of results that aren't representable. For example, maybe someone re-plays the puzzle just for fun, or maybe someone just forces their way through it just to see the funny(?) texts, or maybe someone has invented a time machine and is using it to complete puzzles in matter of seconds. Even I cheat at times when I quickly force my way through a puzzle just to check if something works properly.

These are the kind of results that shouldn't affect the stats. So I'm trying to include only serious, genuine attempts. For example, I'm leaving out results with a whopping number of mistakes, since these are likely someone just forcing their way through the puzzle. Someone completing a puzzle in 30 seconds but with 10 mistakes isn't something you want to compare your own results to, right?

But thanks to an avid editor tester (editors see stats on the puzzles they create, and numbers didn't quite add up), I realized that the filter was too eager. In very hard puzzles, it is quite common to make a whopping number of mistakes! I made a mistake filtering them out. So I tweaked the filter. Now, even if there are many mistakes, but the attempt seems genuine otherwise, it's included in the stats. As a result, the percentage of perfect solves went down quite a bit for super hard puzzles like Sunday's. So if you had a perfect solve on Sunday, you can now feel even better about yourself! And if you made some mistakes, you are now even less alone.

And while we're on the topic, here are the stats for last week's puzzles! I mentioned that I'm aiming for an easier week. Having an easier week did raise some thoughts about the difficulty ranking: Was Friday's actually Hard? Obviously compared to Sunday, but it was harder than the Tricky puzzles of the week. Should Sunday have been Evil then? It didn't feel evil since you didn't even need to try many hypothetical scenarios. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed them!

Top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, % perfect solves, % of solves with no hints.

Mon 2026-03-16 (Easy): 1m 22s / 2m 0s / 3m 40s / 51% / 80%
Tue 2026-03-17 (Medium): 1m 26s / 2m 12s / 4m 8s / 58% / 83%
Wed 2026-03-18 (Tricky): 2m 13s / 3m 27s / 6m 27s / 18% / 69%
Thu 2026-03-19 (Tricky): 2m 12s / 3m 23s / 6m 13s / 40% / 79%
Fri 2026-03-20 (Hard): 2m 30s / 3m 49s / 7m 24s / 30% / 75%
Sat 2026-03-21 (Hard): 3m 15s / 5m 8s / 9m 22s / 26% / 66%
Sun 2026-03-22 (Hard): 4m 11s / 6m 54s / 13m 51s / 18% / 51%

These stats, and more, are also available on https://cluesbysam.com/s/home

The community editor is still being tested. I'm handing out access to more and more people, but it's still not quite ready to be let out in the wild. Here's the weekly community puzzle thread on Reddit where early testers have posted their puzzles. Great job everyone! https://www.reddit.com/r/CluesBySamHelp/comments/1rvenf5/weekly_community_puzzles_mar_16th_2026_week_12/

And here are the weekly bonus puzzles!

#1 Easy - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/e0b13a3cbb16
#2 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/769518fbc30c
#3 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/5d4d987b8a6d
#4 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/accbd0de383a

That's it! See you next week!

-Sam