Hi!

Today you might have already spotted a small change in the daily puzzle. If not, check it out at https://cluesbysam.com

There's a new button under the grid labeled "Settings"!

This button takes you to a page where you can tweak some of the behaviour. I'm sure left-handed people will be happy to learn that they can now swap the color picker to the right side! The most stubborn solvers can now disable the hint button to avoid accidental clicks. And a few other small things.

I'm still open for suggestions what to add there. At least the option for changing the font is still coming.

Talking about fonts... I've made another small, mostly invisible, but a very important change to the website. It no longer downloads external fonts from Google Fonts. This was a privacy issue, since it gave some visibility to Google about users visiting the site. I value your privacy (I don't have any analytics besides tracking results so I can share the stats with you), so this has been bugging me for a long time. Finally it's fixed. While at it, I also changed the YouTube video embeds on the site to not connect to YouTube before you interact with them.

What does the above mean? It means improved privacy, and much faster load times. The speedup in load times was actually way bigger than I had imagined, so I'm really happy with that. You might have noticed it as well!

Now, let's have a look at last week's stats. Another roller coaster! Tuesday seems to have been surprisingly hard. Or was it just because you kept tapping on people to see professions and names bounce? And Thursday was another surprise. Though, based on the number of hints taken, it wasn't necessarily hard but just very slow. Perhaps time isn't the best indicator or difficulty?

Top 1% / 10% / 50% solve times, % of perfect solves, % of solves with no hints

Mon 2026-03-23 (Easy): 1m 19s / 1m 55s / 3m 29s / 62% / 85%
Tue 2026-03-24 (Medium): 2m 17s / 3m 32s / 6m 20s / 42% / 76%
Wed 2026-03-25 (Medium): 1m 33s / 2m 26s / 4m 45s / 43% / 77%
Thu 2026-03-26 (Tricky): 2m 50s / 4m 26s / 8m 21s / 32% / 69%
Fri 2026-03-27 (Hard): 2m 34s / 4m 6s / 7m 40s / 36% / 64%
Sat 2026-03-28 (Hard): 3m 14s / 5m 15s / 10m 9s / 25% / 63%
Sun 2026-03-29 (Hard): 3m 20s / 5m 26s / 10m 18s / 24% / 62%

Then we have more community puzzles. As usual, the editor is still being tested. There was still one critical issue discovered last week. And then there's a couple of things I want to improve before letting it into the wild. But feel free to reach out if you want to try it out!
Here's a list of community puzzles shared on Reddit last week: https://www.reddit.com/r/CluesBySamHelp/comments/1s1v1hl/weekly_community_puzzles_mar_23rd_2026_week_13/
(If you're an avid Reddit contributor, feel free to create this week's thread!)

And then some bonus puzzles. I think the last one is indeed quite evil...

#1 Medium - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/66b8885ab82c
#2 Medium - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/984cb9d38975
#3 Tricky - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/456742093385
#4 Evil - https://cluesbysam.com/archive/e31747997ab3

Also, happy end of March! The first quarter of year 2026 is now behind us. Pretty crazy! Excited about all the changes coming in the next quarter...