I forgot to mention that I haven't uploaded the video to YouTube yet; I wanted to wait till barefootmath.blog points to barefootmath.wordpress.com instead of mathenchant.wordpress.com. Jim On Monday, June 12, 2017, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
Any suggestions (based on your experience as a puzzle-poser or puzzle-solver) on best practices for sharing puzzles in a way that allows solvers to see what other solvers have done?
Three people I can think of who do this are Matt Parker, James Tanton, and Alex Bellos (though there may be others who are doing it too that I just don't happen to know about).
Keeping in mind that I'm often a sub-optimal user of newfangled media, here's my impression of what they're doing:
Parker posts videos on YouTube (though not as many of them feature puzzles as formerly), and discussion of problems takes place through the amorphous YouTube comments feature. For his really popular videos, hundreds of people post comments (many of them of the uninformative "Cool puzzle!" variety), which makes the comments feature of limited value to someone as impatient as I am. In two-parters he'll sometimes comment on people's comments.
Tanton uses Twitter, but I haven't figured out how to follow threads efficiently (sometimes it appears that there are no replies, but then it turns out I just didn't know how to access them).
I'm not sure what Bellos does. I know that he posts puzzles on Monday mornings and solutions on Monday evenings (UK time), so I'm guessing he gets emails during the day and summarizes them, which seems insanely hectic to me. I know that he always reminds people not to post spoilers in the comments, so I infer that this is an ongoing problem.
Which brings me to one of my major concerns: how to create a forum that's helpful to those who want a hint but doesn't inadvertently give away solutions?
Since I'm only just getting into this game now --- my first (not-quite-ready-for-distribution) video is at http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/barefootmath/Swine-in-a-line-1a.mov --- I'd like to know what I should be doing!
My current plan is to invite people to post comments to http://barefootmath.wordpress.com, which I will lightly moderate, urging people to label spoilers as spoilers. This seems workable as long as I don't attract too large a following (which seems unlikely to happen anytime soon if ever) and I don't post too many puzzles at once (which seems unlikely to happen since I'm still trying to keep active as a researcher, which limits the amount of time I can spend on blogging and tweeting and sharing puzzles and whatnot).
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Jim Propp