Update: January 2026

 I am somewhat familiar with the concept of link rot. When sites go offline, the hyperlinks that point to them are often considered broken or dead. A few years ago, I lost a few Witness panel sets I had made through Looksy because the link shortener I used for them, git.io, went out of service. I don't know what the status is there because, for example, the git.io link for my Plateaus puzzle still works but the link to the puzzle in its Source does not, but it is unfortunate nonetheless that information can just disappear from the internet. It was about a year ago that I mentioned someone advised me to provide pictures of the puzzles on the posts. I didn't think that the sites I was still linking to were liable to stop working.

I did notice late last year that the Kudamono editor started adding a pop-up on puzzle completion asking for donations. I also noticed that this pop-up disappeared in December, so I assumed it had accrued enough donations to keep going. Now I fear the opposite is true, as early this month I tried to visit the site and got redirected to a domain hoster. To put it informally, this really sucks. The site was easily in my top three favorite puzzle editors. It helped many genres and setters find an entrance to the limelight. I really hope this is just a temporary outage or a migration I'm unaware of. But, just in case, I have been going back recently and actually adding images to all the posts. This did at least lead to an interesting metapuzzle: using my secondary Kudamono links attached late last year to old puzz.link variant puzzles as a basis and some standalone links for further research, I've managed to reverse engineer enough of the encoding logic for cell contents and region borders to be able to restore several genres of puzzles from their links.

Originally, I was going to make the puzzle for today about restoring a link that I would have encoded myself, but an old idea popped back into my head and what I ended up making fits this post. Happy belated tenth anniversary.

The following Witness panels were drawn and shared on 1/22/26.