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theBear69@live.com

Much head scratching over the last part of this puzzle until I bothered to read the penultimate sentence very carefully. Good luck!

I agree that the endgame involves some head scratching, but not too much after the first hint has been followed. My main problem was deciding where the message ended. What appears to be nonsense could have been a series of complex maths operations.

My own code of conduct is to confine my comments to clue hints, not to reveal endgame secrets; nor do I like to see them, which is why any comments I make are usually fairly late in the day (or even week) after I've solved the puzzle. So Elap needn't worry as far as I'm concerned. Having said that, I don't really see why Elap should be treated any differently from any other setter of a puzzle with a tricky endgame.

From the number of requests I have received by email, Dryden, there are enough people stumped by steps 2-4 of the endgame to qualify it as a legitimate 'secret'.

Why should Elap be treated differently? In a perfect world, he shouldn't. But we already know that there are contributors to this forum that jump at the slightest excuse to make the big REVEAL in the guise of asking a question: "I know that we need to replace 1-2 characters by atomic numbers but I cannot get 21across to work". Rather than "I cannot get 21across to work, please email me if you can help". It happens repeatedly so the posters clearly are getting some sort of pleasure from making the reveal.

What is different this time, is that the setter has explicitly begged for us to not reveal. These setters work hard to give us enjoyment - for little remuneration. The least we fans can do is respect their explicit wishes.

I hadn't ever visited the answerbank site before today and was getting a bit stuck with the end game and needed inspiration. So I thought I would take a look at the posts for this crossword on that site. Luckily for me a contributor called AHearer unwittingly helped me on the way with his/her post. Thanks to his comment about the numbers after stage 1, I have now finished the puzzle and didn't even have to understand stage 2 and 4. It just proves the point that even indirect comments (not even on this site!!) can let the cat out of the bag.
This site is invaluable to novices like me so please don't let's have a repeat of the discussion of a few weeks ago - the arguments for and against hints/answers have been stated many, many times before and it is frankly getting very tedious.

At last! The penny has finally dropped after days of staring. My problem was in trying to make sense of what came after the two hints.

I thought this was excellent. The first numerical for ages where I've maintained both my level of interest and my ability to keep going.

The only part I wasn't sure about was when to identify the groups of 15 and 16. The preamble seems to imply that this is possible "when the grid is completed" but I was only able to do this by trying to operate the four-step thematic process and seeing the results.