Reforming rot13

Seconded. Although I'd say discussion of rot13 alternatives is relevant to LW-Meta until the site itself supports proper spoilers.

I agree that site-specific solutions are superior (if they are actually implemented). I agree that considering this, my original post was quite off-topic. Fortunately, my original off-topic thread about a proposed general solution was hijacked into an on-topic conversation about the best LW-specific solution. I think satt and Misha gave a quite acceptable temporary solution that would deserve some more visibility. Meanwhile, HonoreDB implemented my proposal (big thanks, HonoreDB!). So everything turned out fine.

It's done in this thread.

This brings up something I've been meaning to figure out for a while: is it possible to get to hovertext (on images or hyperlinks) on smartphones? Touchscreens don't really support mouseover, after all.

If not (and all my research indicates not), this would be rather annoying for me, as that's how I most frequently access the site.

[Spoiler](http://decode.org/?q=Fabj+vf+juvgr "Snow is white").

I came here to suggest LeetKey too. It's client side, and supports a number of reversible transformations. Most of the encryptions work with all types of punctuation (morse/rot13 being the exceptions). Some people might be able to decrypt rot13, a handful morse, and a couple hexadecimal; nobody is going to accidentally read AES encryption. It supports password based encryption/decryption for those encryptions that require it. Also, it's free and easy to use. The following encryptions all took about 2 seconds each. If we were all using leetkey, swapping to a new spoiler type would be as easy as picking and choosing.

Here's a spoiler in Rot13. Urer'f n fcbvyre va Ebg13.

Here's a spoiler in base64. SGVyZSdzIGEgc3BvaWxlciBpbiBiYXNlNjQu

Here's a spoiler in AES encryption. (Key: lesswrong)

XqqfeDMBITAhITAhLV5g2FnewrRa20y8iuzAA/AttnBO8f40jPAUYDulZnYyVi16mco=

You can also type in reverse, if you really want. .tnaw yllaer uoy fi ,esrever ni epyt osla nac uoY

Edit: Removed binary, morse, DES encryption, etc because they looked really annoying on the page and that many examples were unnecessary.

(Dislike presence of tooltip text obscuring the text already appearing in the mouseover area. No need for the many flavors of specialized spoilers.)

Strongly agree, though I don't think it's worth the effort to implement a new spoilers standard on the boards considering how rarely I see any posts containing spoilers AND how few people can naturally read rot13

The service now will display arbitrary html, and autogenerates formatted markdown links.

That's very cool, thanks a lot! I think it has a chance to become the de facto standard solution to a very obscure problem, if it gets some momentum. :) I don't think the bitwise-not is the best choice, though. Right now I don't have any time to improve it, but I'll try to make others interested, if you don't mind.

Presumably by practice. I am careful to always use rot13.com rather than decoding mentally, to prevent myself from accidentally picking up the skill.

People are differently good at linguistic skills. My experience in yeshiva demonstrated this to me. Aramaic is a language related to Hebrew, and in yeshiva it is very, very often read and never written or spoken, nor are new thoughts generated in it. Hebrew is used in Israel, the outside world for Americans learning in Israel, so it will be read frequently, and spoken and heard sometimes. English will be how Americans communicate with each other, even when learning things in Hebrew or Aramic. Yiddish is heard and spoken to various degrees in different places.

One guy at my yeshiva was, as a gimmick or parlor trick, able to speak fluently about mundane topics in (Babylonian Jewish) Aramaic without any paying any special attention to trying to learn to do it, in a way that seemed magical to me. This guy also learned to understand, read, speak, and write in Yiddish and Hebrew with apparently zero effort. In general, he wasn't very smart. Some non-Americans developed perfect understanding of spoken English without being able to speak much at all. Some native Hebrew speakers were able to read Aramaic after just a bit of practice, others learned much more slowly than even average English speakers, as the Hebrew speakers were confounded by the similarities amid differences. And, of course, most people had their separate skills in a language partially correlated instead of entirely correlated or uncorrelated, and their Aramaic and Hebrew skills loosely correlated.

The stereotypical case is of an illiterate person who can't read or write, making one think that those skills are inherently harder than listening or speaking. I don't think that any of the four skills is inherently the hardest or easiest for all humans.

I expect people's ability to learn rot13 to vary greatly.

This is an improved version of that bookmarklet.

I agree that a bookmarklet is preferable to external applications. And in that vein, I've adapted this one so that it does in-place encoding/decoding both of normal text and text inside textboxes (like this: na rknzcyr).

javascript:function%20convert(inText){var%20outText='',t;for(i=0;i64&&t96&&t77&&t109&&t<123))t%20-=%2013;outText%20+=%20String.fromCharCode(t);}return%20outText;}var%20sel=window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0);if(sel==''){var%20act=document.activeElement;if(act.type=="textarea"){var%20start=act.selectionStart,end=act.selectionEnd;if(start!=end){var%20prefix=act.value.substring(0,start);var%20middle=convert(act.value.substring(start,end));var%20suffix=act.value.substring(end);act.value=prefix;act.value%20+=%20middle;void(act.value%20+=%20suffix);}}else{void(inText=prompt('Phrase...',''));if(inText)alert(convert(inText));}}else{out=convert(sel.toString());sel.deleteContents();var%20span=document.createElement("span");span.innerHTML=out;sel.insertNode(span);}

(I've only tested it on newer versions of Firefox and Chrome)

If the other website stores the content, like pastebin.com or sketerpot's solution, then the content will be irreparably lost when the website goes offline. If the content is in the URL unencoded, then mouseover uncovers it.