The rules: (as I currently understand them)

• There is one "right" word to be found. The hint is significant.
• Start with one of the letters on the gray background.
• Move either horizontally or vertically to the next letter.
• You may not move diagonally.
• You may not use a square more than once.

In 2019, I began sharing a kind of Wordsearch puzzle which I had only seen once elsewhere. If you have any information about its origins or a full explanation of the rules, I'd love to hear from you.

The puzzles are published here as an archive after their weekly release (Sundays) into the fediverse through the account: https://mastodon.art/@Algot. To get fediverse-connected yourself, go to https://joinmastodon.org/ where you can choose from a broad set of independent, but linked, servers. An account on any server can connect with an account on any other federated server, in addition to my local one. No lock-in. Great people, working to support each other is the federated social network way. Support your instance admin and the fine moderators who help keep hate speech at bay.

Superb Social Network Stars
Two programmers have created solver/verifier programs for these puzzles. @andinus@tilde.zone is working on Octans in Raku which can be downloaded from the Github repository to run on your computer. They are working on an online version, too. @trebach@masto.ai has written another solver/verifier called Sharp Eyes which you can download and use.

How cool is that?
Thanks to these generous and skilled coders for making my puzzle work easier.