"I'd like to hear from John Green on this issue - if he feels that this site seriously undermines his work, I will refrain from posting immediately!"
The Listener statistician (whose name I'm not supposed to say according to the
Site Rules that I've just read) would, I'm confident, be apoplectic if he knew about this site.
"Is use of those plus the odd hint from spouse / child / friend any worse than a gentle directional hint from this forum? A line needs to be drawn somewhere - but where, and who is to decide where?"
A suggestion for drawing the line: don't post answers (to any prize puzzle, but especially one as sensitive as the Listener) on the Internet before the deadline. The argument for doing so seems to be that "nobody has to read it". But I don't think this quite works, for three reasons.
- If a newspaper published a solution in the same issue as a prize puzzle, saying "please don't read the solution before submitting", they would be fools.
- People legitimately use Google to research Listener themes. If a Google excerpt contains solutions (which it easily could) then people will see them completely inadvertently.
- It's less fun to climb a mountain that has a cable-car up it already.
This web site might seem like a private group of friends chatting in the pub (and even the statistician wouldn't mind that sort of collaboration), but unfortunately it's a lot more public than that.