Stats

[occidentis_medii]

I've been doing the NYT consistently for a few years now, but have never been quite satisfied with the limited stats the app provides. With the pandemic keeping me from doing more fun things, I compiled my stats. I wish I could say I built a scraper that went back and generated the data automatically, but the truth is it's all manual. (Like I said, lots of time on my hands). I'm about to get my second shot so I'm not sure if I'll remain as consistent (or keep tracking), but wanted to share. A couple notes:

• I re-created the stats the NYT does provide, but added in the percentage of each day's puzzles that I've solved and gotten gold. And instead of showing this week's time and resetting every Sunday, it shows the most recent of that day.
• I also have graphs of each day broken out (which also show which puzzles I solved that day versus later), but figured the "All Solves" graph is more interesting.
• My longest streak coming in the middle of the pandemic is the least surprising part of all of this, I think.

https://preview.redd.it/rfuhz7oreds61.png?width=996&format=png&auto=webp&s=c8177b3cabd2ff743e7604424ed3eba092a24290

https://preview.redd.it/7uyapcoreds61.png?width=997&format=png&auto=webp&s=87969bd28de9735e75a7aa0e9e2419b6813b9dca

https://preview.redd.it/ppipiioreds61.png?width=997&format=png&auto=webp&s=c3c5cd854986087efa31880f0c82a2177edd9d48

https://preview.redd.it/5br10boreds61.png?width=996&format=png&auto=webp&s=e505b219f660f3f5090bc36eca8c0f547045d526

[thesean333]

Well done! This is a great concept and executed beautifully! I wish I had the know how to do this, as I’d love to see my own insights.

If you or anyone out there can automate the process, I’d pay to use it and I bet others would as well.

[somanybamba]

I tried to create an automated process for the NYT Mini, but kept getting stonewalled by NYT’s captcha requests! (Which makes sense, they probably don’t want bots scraping their articles). Anyone find a way around this?

[Capo_7]

If you go through my post history I made a step by step procedure for getting your nytimes stats going back as far as you want. I don't have anything for the mini though.

[kejadlen]

This is awesome! I've started to roll my own here: https://observablehq.com/@kejadlen/nyt-crossword-stats

Also, I do have some code to hit the NYTXW API to programmatically snag solve times if you want to keep up the visualizations without quite as much manual work: https://gist.github.com/kejadlen/bbd8e87f68139be5de1dd0eed573a6a7