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[mr.judkins]

That would be great if you've got the time Elizabeth.

Oh - and the <br> doesn't count as any kind of space.

[mr.judkins]

Whoops! Sorry - it looks like when I changed the spelling mistake my space formatting disappeared! I'll fix it.

[Elizabeth123]

Well the decoder doesn't seem to work for me--Not sure why.

I used the old version and got the words "Theo" and "contact," doing it by hand, but after that I got the letters "szsaer," which isn't right, is it? And then I tried to go back to the beginning and double-check, but my head got spinny.

[mr.judkins]

Well, it started to work anyway - the first two words were "Theo contact".

Possibly I screwed up in adding the spaces...

I've gone through and done them again, but yeah - I bet it would screw with your head - hence I tried to do a really short message.

EDIT: The main thing is that coded properly it will work, and as we've seen - is totally invisible on the surface of the page, and hard to spot even looking at the code.

A secret message hidden in plain sight, just like the original Bacon Cypher - but specifically for the web.


EDIT AGAIN: I'll have another go at encoding, starting from scratch. Will post soon.

[mr.judkins]

Double post to alert new coded message demo.

25-letters long.

Same as above:
1-space = A
2-space = B

Tool to decode result.

I've used Version 1 - so there will be optional letters.

Just like the original font version, this takes a lot of concentration to encode and decode!


EDIT: Looks like the Purple Hell Tool will just cancel the translation if any of the AB code is incorrect, rather than doing a partial decode.

EDIT AGAIN: And actual Paragraph <br>eaks are not counted as spaces, but where the html drops down to another line is (and you can see are either one or two spaces between words).

[mr.judkins]

TRIPLE POST!

Okay - the formatting of the html is obviously vital in being able to have clear spacing between the words, so I've redone it once again with all the html text on a single line.

Here is the final version.

All the details are above for decoding it, and you need to view the source code to see the different spacing.

It should now work, apologies to anyone who's been struggling with my badly formatted versions.

Whew!

[Weezel]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Decoding can go fairly fast with simple replacements in notepad.

I just do a search for "1"s and "2"s in the original text and if they don't exist, replace [Space, Space] with "2" and then [Space] with "1".
Then just replace all the other characters with nothing and finally replace "1" with "A" and "2" with "B".

In Access VBA, "[a-z]" handles most of it in one swell foop.

[mr.judkins]

Rogi's plan totally works, but make sure to start with the double-space find & replace, then do the single-space.

I've just tried encoding a message using the reverse system - got my code from the Purple Hell tool, find & replaced the As and Bs into 1s and 2s, then typed my message in between them. I then find & replaced the 1s and 2s with single-space and double-space, and uploaded as html.

Here is the result.

I have then decoded this one myself, using Rogi's method. Remember to find & replace ALL the other characters with nothing, including the numbers 3 & 9, and all punctuation. Once you've finally got your As and Bs, you can paste them directly into the tool and translate them.

This should create a mostly foolproof method of creating and deciphering these codes - and as Weezel suggests, a program can do the hard work for us.

Is everyone happy for this to be the cipher we use to get messages to Theo?

[Weezel]

[mr.judkins]

Onward we go...

[mr.judkins]

Double post to update.

Okay - we've got our next set of Artifact locations, and macmonkey (the player doing the pickup in London) is happy to deliver our message to Theo.

However - they'll only be awake for another few hours, so we need to move on it fairly quickly. I'm currently at my "real job", so don't have a lot of time to legitimately put into it.

Is anyone in the world currently free and able to put something together?

It needs to explain or give theo some directions as to how to decode the SpaceBacon Cipher, and give him some idea of how to know a post contains a coded message.

I figure it can be just as mysterious as his messages have been, as long as it carries the point.

Can anyone help get a printable version of this to macmonkey rather quickly? Otherwise I'll take a long morning tea break...


EDIT: Okay, how about this:

[mr.judkins]

bump.

Forgot editing doesn't bring it back to the top.

[jasper]

Looks okay to me.
Do you want to try to convince Theo that the player who retrieves the artifact is the one leaving the note?

Maybe the persons recovering to codex would say in the note that they waited, hoping that Theo would show up, but left the note because they couldn't wait longer. . . and in the hopes that Theo might be near . . .

[mr.judkins]

Good idea Jasper.

How about this between: "Theo." and "We distrust..."