Goodbye July, welcome August!

How did your last month go? I've seen a couple people report a full green grid for July on the daily archive page, which is absolutely impressive. I'm struggling with getting a full green week, and that's while knowing the answers! Making silly mistakes is just too easy. But I like to think it's just part of the puzzle. You know what they say: Count twice, arrest once.

There hasn't been many updates in the past, since I've been trying to fit some holidays between all my ongoing projects. Last week I had the chance to improve one thing that has been requested a couple of times: Saving your settings to your account. If you're logged in, the settings page now has a button that will store your settings on your account, so if you ever clear your local storage, your settings will be restored after logging in again. Currently the settings are synced from your account only if your locally stored settings are unchanged. Otherwise it respects your current local settings. This is because some users might want different settings on different devices, and I didn't have the time to implement a more elaborate overriding system. But I hope this helps you if you have to reset your cookies often!

Alright, let's have a look at last week's results. We got a surprisingly hard puzzle already on Thursday. It should have been ranked "Hard" instead of "Tricky". To give some time to breathe, I made Friday again a bit easier, before going perhaps a bit too far on Saturday, which ended up being harder than Sunday. Except that Sunday had the lowest perfect % of the week. Having more stats on where the most mistakes were made would be interesting. I'll try to have this available one day...

Top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, % perfect solves and % no-hint solves:
Mon 2026-07-27 (Easy): 1m 25s / 2m 6s / 3m 57s / 52% / 85%
Tue 2026-07-28 (Medium): 1m 37s / 2m 22s / 4m 8s / 54% / 85%
Wed 2026-07-29 (Tricky): 2m 27s / 3m 52s / 7m 30s / 34% / 69%
Thu 2026-07-30 (Tricky): 3m 4s / 5m 11s / 9m 38s / 25% / 61%
Fri 2026-07-31 (Tricky): 2m 25s / 3m 48s / 7m 17s / 27% / 69%
Sat 2026-08-01 (Hard): 3m 19s / 6m 3s / 12m 25s / 20% / 46%
Sun 2026-08-02 (Hard): 3m 56s / 6m 15s / 11m 28s / 16% / 56%

Here are the weekly bonus puzzles. Having these accessible from an archive is still coming. It just got momentarily buried under other things on my list.
#1 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/6b2d4ad132eb
#2 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/110077f2ef8c
#3 Evil - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/0f180325231b

And here are again some of the best rated community puzzles from last week. Ranking the difficulty can be really challenging since they often present a clever, unique deduction that can be very hard to digest at first, but after getting it, solving the puzzle doesn't necessarily take that long. Anyway I enjoyed these a lot, and I hope you do too!

#1 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/s/share/?puzzleId=70ce57-1de1ecdfe6c780dc
#2 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/s/share/?puzzleId=758cea-48a323aed675eb21
#3 Hard - https://cluesbysam.com/s/share/?puzzleId=a8611a-87184cc59fa70a97

Oh, and if you like the style of some specific community puzzle, there's now a button below the puzzle that takes you to a list of all puzzles created by the same person. Perhaps a "Follow" feature would be nice to have at some point? I hope you find this small addition fun and useful!

Finally, apologies for last week's newsletter layout. The first row started mid sentence, and the greeting appeared halfway down the mail. I must have done some weird last second drag-and-drop. Let's hope the same doesn't repeat today...