A standards page is usually a list of intentions, and the trouble with intentions is that no reader can check them. Anyone can write that they value originality. So this one is built the other way around: it describes the checks that run against this site every time it is built, exactly what each refuses to let through, and the places where the judgement is still a person's rather than a program's.
What follows is about the words. The puzzles have their own account — how a grid is proved to have a single answer, how its difficulty is measured, what is verified for contrast and keyboard use — and that lives on how we make and test every puzzle. Neither page repeats the other, which is itself one of the rules below.
No sentence here appears twice
This is the rule the rest hang off. Before the site is published, every article on it is stripped of its markup and cut into sentences; each is lowercased and reduced to letters and digits, and any sentence of six words or more is compared against every sentence on every other page. Two matches anywhere and the build stops with both addresses named. Repunctuating will not get you past it, and neither will changing the capitals.
A page that needs a sentence some other page has already used is a page that has not yet found its own subject.
The practical effect is that a great deal of ordinary web furniture becomes impossible. No house introduction that opens every variant. No shared explanation of how sudoku works, dropped in fifteen times with the rule swapped. No paragraph of reassurance about quality at the foot of each game. Every one of those would be caught, so none of them can be written in the first place, and the writing has to go and find something particular to say instead.
It also decides when a page is allowed to exist at all. Fifteen playable boards means fifteen genuinely separate arguments, and the ones that are hard to make are the honest test of the whole approach. Where we cannot make one, the page is not written: unbuilt things appear on the site as cards you cannot click, rather than as a paragraph of placeholder waiting to be filled in.
The standards that fail the build
Thirteen checks run over the finished site, and any one of them failing is treated exactly like a broken feature — the build does not pass, and nothing is published until it does. They are described here in the order they run.
| The check | What it rejects |
|---|---|
| No page repeats another | Any six-word run already used elsewhere on the site. |
| Level articles stay distinct | A difficulty page that is thin, or reads like its neighbour. |
| One address per page | A stray parameter serving a second copy of a page. |
| Articles are structured | Over 400 words under one heading; a subheading before any heading. |
| Nothing runs as a wall | 250 words of prose with no diagram, table, list or callout in them. |
| Jump links resolve | A contents link pointing at a section that is not there. |
| Titles and descriptions fit | A title outside 20-70 characters, a description outside 70-185. |
| Pages point at themselves | A canonical naming another address; a second first-level heading. |
| The two front doors differ | The home page competing with the play page for one search. |
| Breadcrumbs tell the truth | A trail that does not describe where the page sits. |
| The 404 behaves | An error page that is indexable, or offers no way on. |
| The sitemap is exact | An indexable page missing from it, or a hidden page in it. |
| No FAQ markup, ever | FAQ schema, on any page, anywhere. |
Some of these are about quality and some are about hygiene, and it is worth being clear which is which. A check on canonical tags or on the sitemap is plumbing; it stops a technical mistake from quietly costing the site something. The first two, and the two about structure, are different in kind — they are attempts to catch a page that has gone thin or shapeless before a reader has to.
None of them can judge whether a paragraph is any good. That part is not automatable, and claiming otherwise would be the same sort of overreach the checks exist to prevent. What they do is make a certain class of failure impossible to ship by accident, which frees the human review to be about the writing rather than about compliance.
What we don't publish
Question-and-answer blocks. They were the single most templated thing on most puzzle sites, and since 2023 they no longer earn the search result they were added for — Google withdrew that treatment for everything outside government and health. A page here can still answer a question a reader would actually ask, in prose, in its own voice. What it cannot do is carry a bolted-on accordion of them, and a test watches for the markup in case the temptation returns.
Translated copies. Running these articles through a machine into six more languages would multiply the page count without adding a single new idea, and nobody here can check the result reads well in Portuguese. If this is ever done it will be done by someone who speaks the language.
Pages waiting to be finished. A page ships when its puzzle and its article are both real. There are no coming-soon routes, no stubs and no outlines dressed up as drafts.
This page is one of the exceptions
The general rule is that words alone do not earn an address here — an indexable page is supposed to have a working thing on it, or it is a page that exists for a search engine rather than a person. Genuine editorial is the stated exception, and this page is one: there is nothing to play on it. That seems worth saying plainly on the page that makes the rule, rather than quietly relying on it.
Who writes it, and what is kept on record
Articles are written by named people, credited on the pages they wrote and linked to author pages elsewhere. Nothing here is published anonymously, and nothing is published under an invented byline.
Alongside the site there is a content log with one row for every page — currently thirty-three rows for thirty-three pages — recording the angle that page was written to, the outline it followed, and the date it was written. It is kept for a specific reason. The drift these rules guard against is gradual, and it is far easier to see in a list of what each page was for than by rereading the pages themselves. Before a new page is committed, four questions have to be answered:
- Could this article be pasted onto a neighbouring page with a find-and-replace?
- Does it contain a section that already exists on two or more other pages?
- Does it teach or offer anything the main sudoku page does not?
- Would a solver bookmark it?
The first two are grounds for rejection on their own. The third usually means the material should be folded into a page that already exists rather than given one of its own, and the last is the one that most often sends something back to be rewritten.
On independence: this site carries advertising, and that is what pays for it. It has no bearing on what gets written. No page here is sponsored, no link in any article is an affiliate link, and nothing has been added to the list of puzzles because someone paid for it to be there. If that ever changes, it will be said on this page before it is true anywhere else. Corrections work the same way — if something here is wrong, the contact page is the fastest way to tell us, and the fix is made to the page rather than noted somewhere it will not be read.