Where are my Acrostic stats?

When you solve Acrostics on XWord Info, we remember your progress so when you go back to that web page later, you can pick up where you left off.

Sort of.

Some history

We first created our Acrostic Solver because the old one on nytimes.com was, uh, not good. It was built on a system called Flash that was popular before you were born. It was awkward to use, and most importantly, if you left the page (even accidentally) and came back, all your work was lost.

So, we built a new modern acrostic solver and automatically stored your progress in your browser using what’s called HTML 5 Local Storage. In other words, the data was all stored locally on your browser, not on our system. If you suddenly used a different computer or even a different browser, that data wasn’t there. Your browser could also decide without warning that it needed to recover some of that memory for its own use, and your Acrostic data could be deleted.

This seemed fine to us. Starting the acrostic, going back to it later and picking up where you left off is a huge benefit. Because we’re short-sighted (and because it would be hard and expensive) we never considered roaming that data by storing it on our servers.

NYT eventually built their own HTML 5 Acrostic Solver. It had some features ours didn’t, and vice versa, but it was excellent. So, nobody cared that our data wasn’t permanent.

Then, inexplicably, the Times decided they weren’t going to provide a digital solving experience for their Acrostics, and we became the go-to place for solvers. Now we’re inundated with complaints that solver history isn’t preserved.

What about other Variety puzzles?

Cryptics and PandAs and Vowelless and similar crossword-like Variety puzzles all work the same, although for some reason we only get complaints about the Acrostics. Our solver keeps current state in your local browser memory. Wait too long (or move to a different browser or computer) and that info will disappear too.

XWord Info and Variety

We love Variety puzzles and Acrostics have a special place in our hearts, and we have a goal of preserving NYT puzzle history, so we took on the task of trying to make these available to you. We digitize these puzzles by hand — a process that’s difficult and error-prone. We don’t know if the Times will continue to let us provide these, so there’s risk that it will all go away anyway.

For now, all the Variety puzzles we have digitized are available for you to solve and enjoy. And we’ll even keep your solving status. On one browser. For a while. We can’t promise more.