Trends in Voting and Thoughts

We authors know that points don't really factor in whether or not a puzzle will be fun, difficult, or time consuming. I created an Excel Spreadsheet to see if there were any factors that points influence, possibly an increase in voting from solvers?

As I expected, I found no correlation with points to any other statistic. I did find, however, many things but one trend stood out that could be considering disturbing, disheartening, or possibly good fortune.

As a puzzle ages it seems to be voted on less and less. Makes sense. My puzzles have an average of 21% voters per solvers. This means 1 in 5 people vote. The highest single puzzle older than 2 months has 29% voters per solvers while the lowest single puzzle older than 2 months has 11% voters per solvers.

I'm sure I'm not the first to notice this. I don't know if it's sad that more people aren't voting or that those votes could potentially be helpful or even detrimental.

I guess the reason I went about doing this is because many puzzles of mine that I believe deserve higher scores, which I did indeed solve to see the fun/artistic aspect, are trolled and given low votes, leading to either less solvers and therefore less voters and over time this all compounds. I have found a few of my first puzzles were "fill-ins" and I am dumbfounded by how high they scored while other real challenging ones, and in my opinion better looking, scored lower. Oh, and of course if the puzzle subject is completely unknown by the solver, despite challenge or creativity, that tends to attract more negative votes.

In conclusion, I will just say that there is no guarantee to one's puzzle's success. It's just too bad authors can't have their puzzles' popularities reflected by the majority of the solvers. It's sad we can't get their votes, whether good or bad, but I'll be an optimist and say this: I highly doubt 80% of my solvers didn't want to influence the popularity simply because they didn't like the puzzle.

I agree. I've not kept up with my stats even though I've made many more puzzles since I posted my original message. I have found that on my puzzles that are a real challenge and I strived to have artistry in them, if they get 0% or 25% they always seem to received them quite quickly after they are published and don't get any more, if any, for a long time. So this probably means there are new puzzle solvers who like to purposefully flaw puzzles once published.

Being on the internet I'm sure you know about this "FIRST!!!" fad. In the context of this site, some people enjoy voting on a puzzle first, some people enjoying giving a puzzle its first 100%, and of course, some people waste their time, find no enjoyment out of a puzzle, and LOVE to simply leave a puzzle its first 0%.

I've read it somewhere before, or maybe I stated it, anything that deserves a 0% probably wouldn't be published in the first place as it would be riddled with errors, unartistic, and have no challenge. But since the mods require puzzles to be solvable, fairly artistic, and not a complete fill-in to get published, no puzzle should ever get a 0%.

Still, I'm more saddened by those who just don't care to express their opinions through comments and/or voting. So many solvers, so little feedback.

I have recently been looking at my statistics again. While I haven't gone in depth as I did over a year ago, I have noticed that my overall average has dropped (significantly?).

The current number of solvers on all my puzzles is 67161 and the number of voters in all five percentage categories is 11226. This means that 16.72% of my solvers are voters. This number will more than likely continue to dwindle despite any new puzzles that I might create.

I have created 104 new puzzles since my first post and it's sad to see that I lost 5% of my solvers' votes in that time (previously was 21% voters/solvers). On my most recent creation spree, I created 20 puzzles. Among them I received one 0% and seven 25s. The one that received the 0% and one of the 25s, I took a lot of time to create and was my second most difficult to craft out of all my puzzles. I believe it personally to be a 90%+ rating puzzle by picture and challenge, but because of the 0 and 25, and its 3+ hour mid-time, it will stay at an undeserving percentage (currently 77%) for an extremely long time with fewer people solving it and even less voting on it.

I would really like to know what other authors are experiencing, especially griddler authors. Triddlers only get 1/10 of the site's action and tend to be voted lower on average.