Forums → The Tavern → Secret Communications of the Mods

Well, aviation began around my hogan, until fear stowed the highway. Only, skill is nigh, attention astray, nay, apart from fairness, and skimpy each. Once ideas still chafe bare. At bitter stares is triple care. And odd borrows, emperor is found, at the nether bypass. Await nothing, and attack heaps, I've been anticipating at ere eyry. It bores assumption, holds alone, every year biting it.

Solution will be posted tomorrow. If you still want to figure it out yourself, then don't read the spoilers.

Kill the dogfish. It doesn't understand the plume-plucked apple-john traces left by blue jays flying over the soldier armor, pooping on understandings of regular birds, that search for food in this weird-like dark forest.

i covered a notebook page with my attempts to find anagrams and to employ common cipher techniques. Finding meaning in the post is hit and miss, but creating one on my own is impossible. I am definitely over thinking this :\\

Solid entropy blocks tyrranical storage requirements, providing ammunition hitherto uninitiated masquerading atrocities forgetting troubled ignominity. Would other binomial iterations escape bounded effectual layman perseverance?

Capital assurance. If pandas primp, rain associates swimming renters. Skunks initiate possum owning.

It's been about a week and as far as we know, only one person has solved it. The solution is below. If you want to figure this out yourself, then stop reading. You should probably not read any post afterwards either.

SPOILERS
So, the solution to this hare-brained scheme is fairly simple. There are a couple clues to the solution. To be honest, at the start, I don't think any clues were necessary because I didn't think it would've been that difficult. In fact, I worried it might have been too easy and solved within the first few hours because you are a smart bunch. After a day, we were concerned that no one would be able to solve it. As far as I know, only one person has solved it and that was two days in. Maybe others have solved and and didn't care, but I wouldn't know. Since one person solved it, it couldn't have been that difficult. And this was after Strop deliberately posted a hint. It should be clear now that I am deliberately obfuscating the solution in this unnecessarily long paragraph. That itself is a clue, so if you still want to figure it out yourself, then stop reading now. (and no, there's nothing deliberately hidden in this paragraph but wordplay.) What is interesting that is the way we have chosen to hide our messages somewhat highlights our who we are, but that is a different matter entirely. Another interesting thing is that this could have been easily, or not so easily, solved from a logistics point of view. Sure, applying Occam's razor you might come to the conclusion that we aren't saying anything at all, but that doesn't really make sense. Think about it: Why would we create a thread with 'secrets' in the title if we didn't want you to be able to solve it? (aside from messing with you guys, that is.) Back on topic, in a digressive sort of way, you could figure that maybe it wasn't really that hard to cipher and was probably easy to decipher. It couldn't be something like anagrams or allegories. At the start of this, I had suggested several multi-step ciphers, which in hindsight, definitely may have been too difficult, especially with no prize or reward or anything of that sort. I'm sure if it went unsolved for a day more, there might have been some sort of reward just for solving the thing. So what is easy to hide and easy to read? Steganography. It wasn't even complicated steganography either like hiding the message in the third letter before punctuation where you wouldn't even realize there was a hidden message because the apparent message actually made sense. The method we used simple enough for us that we didn't have to hunt for letters or do any difficult time-consuming decoding, but words may have been hard to come by, especially for certain letters. (There's a simple solution to that problem, but it might have made it even harder to solve.) The first sign that should've tipped anyone off was that the words were, well, weird! And the messages didn't really make sense. It was obvious we were hiding something in the words! The cryptic weird "absolutely screwy assemblages" were part of the fun (for us at least), but I think too many users got caught up in how weird they were and tried to extract meaning from those words when they didn't mean anything at all. (Well, except for some of my posts where I hid the message and used the body of the post to communicate. That might have thrown more people off.) I enjoyed the watching the process of solving what was written but a bit disappointed that it didn't get very far beyond figurative language. From my own experience trying and horribly failing to solve cryptic messages that were intended to be solved, I've learned that if what you think is the answer doesn't scream, "This is the answer! Right here! This is right! No ifs, ands, or buts!" then it isn't the solution. If you have your doubts, you can be pretty sure you're wrong. Maybe out intention wasn't clear enough, but it was solved sure enough, so if you still want to solve it yourself, stop reading. So how did we do it? We hid the message in the second letter of every word that had more than one letter, except for that one message of mine on the second page, but it uses the same principle. Ignore all of the words and pick out the second letter and you'll figure out that I made a mistake and don't actually know my ABCs. After that long post on page 7, I thought for sure more users would figure it out and start responding with the same method we used to encode. Maybe they did and didn't post, because there's actually absolutely nothing interesting being said in this thread. In fact, the conversation about what was being said was more interesting than what was being said. So there you have, a mystery demystified into what is ultimately unsatisfying like a lot of things in life because we built it up to be more than it is, but that doesn't mean there aren't things that more that what they seem to be. There are lots of interesting things out there, like how the coloring on the coat of a Siamese cat is basically a heat map! It's true. Look it up. Go out, explore, and learn new things, and not just at your computer or in a book. Take a good long look at a tree the next time you pass by one. You might not even notice if it was replaced by a tree of the same species, since it's background stuff, just like how we might not recognize the difference between two dogs or birds or frogs. (We're certainly better equipped at recognizing people.) This last final digression is obviously to throw off anyone who wanted to skip to the bottom and find the solution, but if you really really really wanted to know how to do it, you probably would have found out how by now.
SPOILERS

This thread marked the beginning of my actual Armor Games activity. I've technically been a member since March, but didn't really do much aside from use the online saves, play the forums games, and post a little in WEPR.

Normally, I wouldn't look at the Tavern because it was where all the active members were, and most of the time I didn't know what they were talking about, or just didn't know them. I saw the name of this, saw it had a few pages, and though "hey, maybe it's something funny. A secret mod communication thread? Maybe I could even find out what they were communicating about" So I came in about the 5th page, read the past pages, and tried my hand at figuring it out. See, for the past 5-6 years, I've been intersted in codes and cyphers, and having used several similar to this, it was pretty easy to figure out. At first, I thought "how could it be so easy, I must be making a mistake" but after deciphering the first I knew I had hit it.

I made up something like this, except on mine, everyone in on it would get one number, usually between 3 and 6. If the number was 4, the first word, you take out number 1. The second word, you take out number 2. Third, you get number three, and fourth you get number 4. Then on the fifth word, you take out number 1 again, and go down the list. If say, word 4 only had three letters, you skipped it as in this code.

That's the first thing you look for in a code, the letter order. Normally I look at the first letter. Such as:

Tonight he is sleeping.

This was a fun little thing between the mods and the users. Killersup did not have the knowledgeable skills to crack this code, but it was a good brain teaser.

I thought it was going to be something like that Ganitc. Honestly I didn't care enough and it was much more fun posting random things, that made sense but didn't follow the patter.

It's getting late and I have a headache. I still don't get it. >.< I'm normally pretty good at this sort of thing.