If you would like to see your crosswords included on our lists, we are happy to have you! Email us at crosswordlinks [at] gmail [dot] com, or reach out to us wherever you see us on Discord or other social media. We have never imposed a standard of quality and have no plans to — many constructors have seen their very first puzzles listed in our posts and emails.
This page lays out some key details and boundaries of our capacity and systems at this time. Please note that this information may change at any time — hopefully never drastically.
This page is largely directed at individual constructors and their sites. If your puzzle is a subscription service, attached to a publishing company, or in that vein, the contours are slightly different. Feel free to reach out to the email above, if we don’t reach you first.
There are vastly more puzzles each day than ever before, and even as our team of volunteers doubled in 2023, we are constantly fine tuning our tools and trying to keep the time demand on our daily teams down. A typical daily post takes 20-40 minutes to assemble. The major challenges with this project are (1) capturing puzzles in a timely manner and (2) capturing puzzle title and constructor info accurately.
What we do and do not include
This site is primarily devoted to sharing “American-style” crossword puzzles: the kind you’d see in the Los Angeles Times or USA Today. We also track and share links to two other formats: “Cryptic” crosswords, typically associated with the UK and Commonwealth countries, and crossword variants we categorize as “Variety Puzzles.”
An exhaustive list of variety formats would be difficult to compile, but the most common forms can be regularly found in the Wall Street Journal on Saturdays, in the weekend print edition of the New York Times, in GAMES Magazine, and at joon pahk’s Outside the Box Puzzles.
Wordle variants, logic puzzles, numbers-based puzzles, trivia games, and Puzzle Hunt-style puzzles do not fall under our mission. Neither do “crossword solver,” clue look-up, or hint sites.
General Logistics
We ask that all puzzle sources have a home page or landing page that we can point to. This should be a generic place where we can point solvers even if we’re not linking directly to a specific puzzle. In 95% of “indie” cases, this is a simple Blogspot or WordPress blog. Wix and Weebly are prone to more snags with our automations, but we won’t turn you away.
We are big fans of Crosshare but will not use a Crosshare constructor page as a home page. If you publish on Crosshare and want to be included in DCL, please create a separate site and embed your puzzles via Crosshare embed in posts. We’ll be happy to include.
Schedules and Timing
Our automation runs each day at 6:30 AM Eastern and captures puzzle information from the previous 24 hours. If a puzzle is posted later in the day, it will be included in the following day’s post.
Our bread and butter is RSS feeds. If your site has an RSS feed we can point to, we will never miss a puzzle. A set schedule, whether a consistent day of week (even if it’s every two or three weeks) or date of the month (like the 1st), is also great.
Barring one of the above setups, we can no longer guarantee we’ll catch and include your puzzle for the next post and email after you publish. In that case, we will manually check your site twice a month and include the most recent puzzle when there is something new. We may adjust down to checking only once a month if posts are more infrequent.
Again, if your site has an RSS feed, we will always capture puzzles in the next bot run. We strongly encourage setting this up if you don’t maintain a consistent schedule.
Ensuring Title and Constructor Accuracy
If you have an RSS feed or follow a set schedule, AND your post includes an AmuseLabs embed, Crosshare embed, or a direct link to a .puz download file, our tools will capture info exactly as you present it, with no risk of typos or other errors.
If the above options aren’t possible, but you can deliver puzzles as (.puz) email attachments, we can coordinate. Please reach out to the email address above. Once again, an RSS feed is preferred if possible.
Barring the above, title and constructor info is entered manually. We do our best to avoid typos but we are human. Depending on our capacity and daily load, the time may come when we can no longer do manual entry and will have to simply link to your site.