I both use ROT13 in my own comments AND find myself agreeing with you. It does make the comments section look a bit of a mess and could be off-putting to first-time visitors to the site.

I suppose we have to ask ourselves *why* people use it. They want to hide potential spoilers.

Puzzling is unique on SE in that people reading the questions don't usually want an instant answer. They want a try at figuring it out themselves. We use the **spoiler tag** to hide details in our answers, but this can't be used in comments, and comments on Puzzling serve the same purpose as everywhere else - to *improve* the answers. They do need to be hidden in some way.

Can spoiler tags be used in chat? If not then moving discussions to chat doesn't solve the problem, it just moves it. Neither first time visitors nor seasoned puzzlers can be sure that clicking a chat page *won't* contain spoilers.

I could understand abolishing ROT13 comments if there were some other way of masking spoiler comments that is no less "secure" than the spoiler tag.

On the other hand, would it be right to prevent two people from communicating in comments in any other language we did not understand? That would be *linguistic discrimination*. If two people want to communicate to each other in ROT13, should we stop them??