I'm getting sick and tired of the replies here showing "easy!", "first" or whatever. These comments are so useless to anyone else and the website would be better off without them. Now when come home late from and I don't understand something of a puzzle I have to scroll through 6 or more pages of bullshit just to see a useful post that helps explain the puzzle.

ok.

Amen!  It is literally the most annoying thing about the whole site.  People, telling us that you found the puzzle easy is helping nobody, there is always someone weaker than you who may not be able to do the puzzle so complaining about the easiness is selfish and unnecessary.

Next, comments saying nothing but the number of your post are SPAM and against the rules of the site....as far as I know.

The problem is that with the amount of comments that come through on the daily puzzle, it would be a full time job for someone to moderate them all!

Various solutions have been proposed. This is one.

Great minds think alike! This is number #21 on Erik's list: Forum posts moderated by users (like digg.com)

Loomis expressed it thus: There are other forums on the internet where  users can rate responses in a thread with a thumbs up or a thumbs down and then responses with negative responses are hidden (they can be expanded by the reader). I'm sure plenty of people would "thumbs down" the posts on the daily puzzle that just say "I'm first". Then 1) these posts wouldn't get in people's way and 2) people would stop making them.

 Maybe this could help clean up the forums a bit.

Onosson expressed it in this way (in Wishlist#3): Some sort of forum comment moderation system, A la Slashdot.com.   I know that would be probably be a huge undertaking, but this is a "wish" list!

Another approach, perhaps simpler, and fairly specific to the daily puzzle - would be to provide a simple filter: Hide from me any posts shorter than (say) 50 characters. (Ideally, a user-configurable value).

I must say, your last mentioned solution sounds perfect!

That's one of the troubles with my 'solutions' - most of them sound perfect at first glance. Difficulties include (but are not limited to) :

• it would be too easy to circumvent - just post: "first first first ..."
  
• topics are NOT handled at the individual posting level. The whole discussion is simply split into HTML pages of about 20 postings (depending upon the size of the posts). This same, generic page view can currently be formatted once then shown to everyone who views that topic.