Transient issue in Exolve Player

[Viresh Ratnakar]

In a specific corner case, you may have a puzzle open in Exolve Player (https://exolve.app) that would lose its state if you reload. If you are affected, then read on to see how you can recover that state.

I basically got rid of the '#' character from the auto-generated "id" of the puzzle, which had this one-time effect on anyone with a puzzle that did not already specify an ID (such as one created from just the text of the clues) already open in Exolve Player.

The goal is worthy, but the hiccup is not nice, sorry. I'm trying to set up a free, no-ads, no-strings-attached hosting solution that uses a site whose hosting fee I've anyway been paying and that should have enough capacity to host at least 100K puzzles. The puzzle-id will become a part of the file name the serving URL and I got rid of the '#' to keep things alphanumeric.

You can recover your puzzle state for any affected puzzles like this: Find the text inside the "Exolve-formatted specs for the current crossword" area near the bottom of Exolve Player. Copy it into a file (say "foo.xlv"). Edit foo.xlv to add a line that looks like this, somewhere near the beginning, after exolve-begin:

exolve-id: xlv-#1zdb9

The bolded part, without the '#' is what you currently see in Exolve Player under your puzzle, when you click on "Exolve", which would show something like:

Crossword ID: xlv-1zdb9

Your ID itself would be different of course. Just copy that, insert a # after 'xlv-' and paste it into the foo.xlv line as shown above.

You can then open the foo.xlv file from  Exolve Player and it should recover its old state (as that state was saved with the '#' in the id). You would not have to do this with future puzzles (only the puzzles that were already open when I pushed the change are affected).

Viresh