It doesn't accept all valid solutions, only the one you've chosen (which I still can't figure out even after the lifelines, without bruteforcing).
2/19/2024: (spoiler) one alternative solution is 'BRA' [0], but that's not accepted.
2/19/2024: (spoiler) one alternative solution is 'BRA' [0], but that's not accepted.
Out of curiosity though, do you ensure there is only one solution for each challenge?
It would happen if I picked generic clues like BR/SL/ER (not a real puzzle, don't try to solve it), but I make a point not to. As long as you pick clues that are a little more specific than that, it's actually extremely improbable, despite what you would intuitively think (I had the same thought in the beginning!). Remember that there are 4 restraints, not 3 - it has to match 3 different prefixes or suffixes, but it also has to only be 3 letters (4 letters on weekends).
Sometimes I'm suspicious and I do verify them, but it's really only a risk with the compound word versions like SELL/LAW/FOX. Those I have to be more careful with.
Brall isn't an obscure word, it's an obsolete one. I think it's fair to say that if your word isn't in Oxford or American Heritage, you shouldn't expect it to be in the result set.
It feels as if you hit "BRASS" and "ZEBRA" then couldn't make it fit with "LL", then searched for "brall" hoping to have a hit.
But if you used WinAMP back in the day, you'd have whipped this one in the ass.
If on the other hand I set it to accept the alternate obscure solutions, that actually could ruin the puzzle in my opinion.
Take today's with BRA for example - it's a nigh-certainty that the commenter suggesting BRA did not know the archaic alternate spelling of BRAWL. What's much more likely is that they saw "BRASS", then checked ZE and saw "ZEBRA", and then thought "I wonder if BRALL is a word?" and googled it to find that it was indeed a word in a very obscure sense.
Check this google n-gram for a reference of just how obscure that word is - it hasn't registered meaningfully anytime in several centuries. I added in the word "quine," another obscure word, just for comparison, and you can see it's orders of magnitude less common even than that. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=brall%2Cbrawl%...
So what would start happening is people would find something that worked for 2 of 3 (which is easy), type it in cuz why not it might work, have it succeed because the 3rd option was written once by a Gregorian monk in a remote monastery in the Balkan Mountains, and be like "huh, well that's dumb." It's actually a lose-lose that would let people off easier because they'd feel like it was done just because they found something that matched 2 of 3 and happened to match the 3rd in a fairly ridiculous way.
Edit: I came up with a solution to this. I'll verify each puzzle against a full dictionary with obscure words included, and if a user puts in a valid obscure solution I'll display a message saying "Valid, but at least one of these words is too obscure. A better solution exists." It'll take a little time to add that functionality though.
Each puzzle has only one solution, so if you find one that doesn't work with 1 or more extremely uncommon words, it's safe to assume that's not the solution.
Maybe I should add a reveal option for when someone feels done with it.