A few of you have contacted us asking if we could make the desktop calendar wallpaper anagram harder, so we thought we’d explain why we do them the way we do.

Most of you will be aware the anagram concept is based on the advertising campaign the BBC ran for series 2 in the UK -  ‘SHERLOCK RETURNS’. (there’s an example screen shot of the anagram for this from one of the adverts above.) They like us, wanted the public to work them out, so did not make them very difficult for this reason.

For those of you whose first language is English, please bear in mind that for many Sherlock fans this is not the case. We would like everyone to be able to download these wallpapers, as their purpose is to be useful during the month and used as a calendar. In order to obtain them, we introduced a little puzzle to make the download process a little more fun. They are not intended to be difficult as we notice that even now Yahoo Answers and Tumblr are littered with people asking for clues or the answers so they can have the wallpapers, not to mention the amount of people who ask us directly for help.

Some of you have asked if we could create several difficulty levels; this unfortunately is not possible for two reasons. Firstly, Sherlockology is an independent website, maintained by fans in their spare time. It is an enormous and time consuming job to run the social media accounts and update the website, but even so we still like to offer Sherlock fans a little extra in the form of free downloads, competitions and in the case of the Christmas Advent Calendar and the Easter Egg hunt, stories fans can follow. If we had the time to offer more we really would, but without any funding and a full time day job, there simply isn’t enough hours in the day to do more, as unlike Sherlock we do need a little sleep.

The second problem is that there are only so many anagrams that make up certain words, and fewer that make up words that are relevant. Most of you will have deduced the pattern by now, so they will certainly appear to be getting easier as by process of elimination, it should take less time to solve them. In fact come December, most of you won’t even need to see the anagram in order to solve it as there will only be one possible choice left.

We will always listen to feedback though and try and meet some requests, so we will try our best to develop a puzzle game with the sole purpose being the game rather than a means to an end in order to download something, this way we hope that those wanting the wallpaper will still be able to, but those who just want a puzzle will also have something to hold their interest.