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"[hint]"


herbk

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I'm really peeved by the guys who put square brackets around hints, especially long ones. Personally, I think they are idiots. The purpose of Rot13 is to prevent accidental reading of a hint, not to cause totally mindless work for the cacher who wants to read the hint.

 

I was caught by this when I went after such a cache, using CacheMate on a PDA. I didn't have a copy of the little Rot13 diagram on my PDA, an omission which I have since remedied. Still, I have seen a case of a hint which had multiple lines and "[]" around it. It would probably take at least five minutes work devoid of any semblance of intelligence to decode it. Bah!

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I'm confused. You seem to be angry with cache owners for leaving part of their hints unencrypted, but it sounds like the problem is with the software that you use, which seems to apply rot13 to unencrypted parts of the hints, thus encrypting them.

think you are missing this bit :

 

go to cache listing, create hint.

copy encrypted hint

edit listing, paste encrypted hint, add brackets.

voila, a hint that has to be manually decrypted.... and a right royal PITA if it is indeed a few lines long...

 

agreed with OP, a stupid practice...

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Recently i saw a cache with a hint :

[ROT7] scrmabled txt

 

.... I didn't manually decrypt it, but I liked the idea. The hint was SHORT, and if you needed it, you could manually decode - unless you've got a ROT7 script in some device you're carrying

 

i haven't seen ROT13 inside brackets, but it's the cache owner's option, and their call as to what the "purpose" is.

 

That said, I'm pretty quick to abandon tedious hunts (and cache owners) and decrypting a long hint manually would likely go into the "tedious" pile.

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yeah that's annoying. i've only seen it a couple of times, with the rot13 text either right in the cache description, or in the description field of an additional waypoint. i never could be bothered to decode it.

Edited by dfx
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Why in the world would anyone require seekers to decrypt a hint manually?

 

That's like telling them they can't drive a car to the cache, they have to ride a horse.

 

Ya'll have cars down there in 'bama? :unsure:

 

Yes, when we aren't riding our mules to the general store to buy more cotton we sometimes crawl out from under our porches and drive our cars into the big city to stare in wonderment at all the bright lights and fancy baubles. ;)

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That's like telling them they can't drive a car to the cache, they have to ride a horse.

That would have been the best ALR of all time.

Yo, I'm really happy for you, but that would make one of the best challenge caches of all time... Of all time.

 

No, seriously. I'm actually thinking about making a challenge cache where you must find 5 caches by horse in a day.

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Why in the world would anyone require seekers to decrypt a hint manually?

 

That's like telling them they can't drive a car to the cache, they have to ride a horse.

 

Ya'll have cars down there in 'bama? :unsure:

 

Yes, when we aren't riding our mules to the general store to buy more cotton we sometimes crawl out from under our porches and drive our cars into the big city to stare in wonderment at all the bright lights and fancy baubles. ;)

 

Sounds like a variation of life here in california. At noon when we wake up, we hop on our surfboards and cruise down the coast to Hollywood where we wait in line right behind Ben Affleck to order in spanish at the marijuana dispensary for our back pain.

 

I just incidentally picked up an AGA coin. It's pretty cool. Somebody drilled a hole and put a padlock in it. Great way to keep the coin from going missing.

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I'm really peeved by the guys who put square brackets around hints, especially long ones. Personally, I think they are idiots. The purpose of Rot13 is to prevent accidental reading of a hint, not to cause totally mindless work for the cacher who wants to read the hint.

 

I was caught by this when I went after such a cache, using CacheMate on a PDA. I didn't have a copy of the little Rot13 diagram on my PDA, an omission which I have since remedied. Still, I have seen a case of a hint which had multiple lines and "[]" around it. It would probably take at least five minutes work devoid of any semblance of intelligence to decode it. Bah!

At least with the Palm version of CacheMate, you can edit the hint and erase one of the "[" and then it will decrypt the hint just fine...

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I'm really peeved by the guys who put square brackets around hints, especially long ones. Personally, I think they are idiots. The purpose of Rot13 is to prevent accidental reading of a hint, not to cause totally mindless work for the cacher who wants to read the hint.

 

I was caught by this when I went after such a cache, using CacheMate on a PDA. I didn't have a copy of the little Rot13 diagram on my PDA, an omission which I have since remedied. Still, I have seen a case of a hint which had multiple lines and "[]" around it. It would probably take at least five minutes work devoid of any semblance of intelligence to decode it. Bah!

 

Hmmm - perhaps with 1200+ finds you might have figured out that if you get peeved about nonsense, it really adds nothing to the experience. Maybe you might just find them 'without' the hints and save yourself the stress and time ?

 

Or perhaps you might hide your 'first' cache rather than getting upset about the efforts of others (who at least made the effort to hide something for you to get peeved trying to find).

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