Please put a ban on frames

I agree with you, although I can only speak about Triddlers. Not only those outline frames are terrible but also the, for the picture completely unnecessary, lines or dots that some authors use to get more points or fill up the space (instead of making the puzzle smaller which would be much nicer for the solvers!)
But I want to make an exception for those puzzles in which the outline is an essential part of the picture as is f.i. the case in the beautiful coat of arms series of Giceasar (cities of Slowakija) or logos with an outline border.
Fineke

many times a puzzle is given a frame so it will be solvable (mostly in b&w) it is true that many times it is used to pump up scores but banning them will result in much less b&w puzzles (which i personally love)
so please, don't ban the frame just make sure the result looks good...

Nadav

I wouldn't usually dip my toe into this kind of issue but "banning" what one doesn't like is, I believe, contrary to the spirit of this site.

There are 40,000+ (!) puzzles here and no one has even come close to solving them all. If you don't like something move on to something that you do. I take strong objection to someone else deciding for me what is and isn't aesthetically pleasing, entertaining or challenging.

Personally, I don't like doing ducks, chicks or other avis. I have enough respect for this community, however, to recognize that there are those that do and I don't want to spoil their fun. One may take objection to the contrivance of a puzzle to boost its point total but that is all part of the panoply of the puzzles on this site.

There is no lost purity -- no ideal compromised -- by accomodating different tastes. Banning is a powerful sledge wich much be wielded very sparingly. Otherwise, one could wake up one day to find what one likes banned (but there was no one left to speak up for me when I was taken away....).

Sean

ps: We moved last week. Long-suffering wife hid the soap box, but I found it.

As an author i can say, sometimes you spend all the time making a puzzle and then you find out it is not solvable. You then put a border on it and find out it is. So, sometimes puzzles need a border in order to make them solvable.

[quote="Madrugada"]
There are always going to be a few people who resort to point-inflation ploys (racking up high "puzzles solved" counts by zipping through Minimalists at 4 or 5 per minute for an hour at a time, turning a 25X25 into a 30X30 with an unnecessary frame, making a three-color puzzle into a four-color by adding an unnecessary outline.) I think that trying to ban all of the ways to commit point-inflation is an exercise in futility.

What's wrong with solving all the minimalisms? I'm currently ranked #232 in puzzles solved, and I've solved all single puzzles with a mid time under 8 minutes, and most multigriddlers parts under 5 minutes.

The problem with these flippin' border thingies is mainly that it's all pretty boring to do .. because once you know there is a border .. and because in general they are all created with a similar format to each other .. you can simply fill in loads of the grid without even having to pay much attention to the clues .. :?

The only advantage I can see is that adding borders gives the authors an easy 'leg up' the leader board as borders increase the points .. often dramatically .. making the Griddler worth millions of points rather than it's true thousands of points ..

Personally I simply do the borders as fast as possible to get rid of that part of the Griddler.. then I can settle down and start tackling the 'real' part of the Griddler ..

I'm sure the 'borders' are mainly unnecessary, they definitely add nothing to the enjoyment of completing the Griddler and because everyone gets the 'extra' points ... in the end adding the border is simply a valueless exercise ..

If it is now impossible to make some pictures without borders the Griddler generator thingy must have changed .. if you work back through the early years of Griddlers we never used to have borders .. borders are only a recent phenomenon .. :roll:

[quote="patootie"]If it is now impossible to make some pictures without borders the Griddler generator thingy must have changed .. if you work back through the early years of Griddlers we never used to have borders .. borders are only a recent phenomenon .. :roll:
Borders have been in puzzles immemorially. Puzzle 2459 created in 2002 has a border. Puzzle 51544 created yesterday has not. Don't blame the system for them.

Hagit

One of the puzzles I'm stuck on, which I keep going back to and adding a few squares to, has a border. It doesn't make it any easier to solve!

Some borders are pretty They're nice when they're pretty, even if they aren't hard to fill in quickly

Solve the puzzle you like, and stay away from the one you don't like and everybody is happy.

some puzzles without a frame get high points to and are way more easy then the score says.
It should not matter whether there is a border or not, and as some already said, sometimes it is impossible for an author to create a solvable griddler without it!