I love it that people are engaged and comment on the blog, and I'd hate to discourage that in any way; and I also don't want the MJM to have a whole crazy set of written rules that I have to post each week (that will almost assuredly confuse, or scare newer folks away), but I would really appreciate it if folks would at least let the MJM get to the hint before dropping their own juicy hints as it messes with folks putting in the time to figure them out.

If you're someone with two of the three jams figured out when you see the comment above, you're pissed that someone may have just caught others up with no effort required, while not even taking a stab at solving the puzzle themself. I don't really understand the point of that, unless there's a perception that each puzzle is a group effort, which it really isn't supposed to be, but could be I guess...

Like, if it's late Tuesday afternoon / evening and nobody has figured it out, by all means share your thoughts on the jams. Maybe it's not obvious but I legitimately want the MJM to be solved each week and would be happy for the blog to never win again - when I don't give away the code one week, I give two away the next week, so someone may as well get the joy of solving it. But it's kinda lame to feel like I need to police the comments to make sure folks aren't taking it upon themselves to drop their own weekly hint.

And yes, I realize this is a new issue entirely created by my own doing when I expanded from a single clip to multiple clips - with a single clip, the amount of effort required is low, and you may as well take a random shot on goal instead of just hinting at the answer for others, and there are often many more guesses that it's difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat as a contestant anyway, and once you've identified one clip, you've won - there are no half-right answers that inadvertently catch others up. And I don't want to have to close the comments down and accept answers by PM only, because the folks who cruise by and comment each week are cool, and I like that community aspect around the MJM as well: Phish fans appreciating and commenting on a little nug of Phish they may or may not have witnessed or heard before...

If this keeps happening every week (and it does seem like it's happening more and more of late, and I'm not just referring to the last two MJMs), maybe we'll just go back to single clips all the time. I admittedly have a lot more fun with the thematic puzzles, but going back to a clip a week would be fine by me and it would get substantially easier and wouldn't really require any moderation or awkward messages or downvote dumps etc. Or maybe we just turn it into a group effort, and #sorrynotsorry if you're trying to solve it on your own. For what it's worth, the reason I went to the multiclip format is because we expanded the scope of the jam charts, and Phish.in / PhishTracks made scanning through hundreds of jams totally feasible (rather than relying solely on people going from memory or downloading sets from the spreadsheet), so the MJM had gotten WAY too easy to solve and I had to work much harder to come up with shorter, tricky clips ... but on the bright side, if we go back to single clips I'd never have to come up with a hint again because almost every MJM would be solved within an hour of posting?

Anyway, I'm rambling, and apologies for the wall of text, but if anyone has any thoughts or ideas I'm all ears, either via PM or right here - pete