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They're for playing puzzley games in real time.
Each of them has a pinned message to explain the rules of the game. Anyone is welcome to take part, and the room owners tend to be people who are particularly active players of the game (or, sometimes, bots whose automatic pinning powers are necessary for playing the game).
Contact
Direct link to chatroom
...
14
Cipher Tools
Rumkin has a pretty neat collection of cipher tools for both encrypting and decrypting
Vigenere Cipher Codebreaker can solve vigenere ciphers with or without the key. (You will need sufficiently long ciphertext to break the cipher without a key.)
Len Schulwitz is useful for encoding/decoding those pesky base 58 numbers
QuipQiup can attempt to ...
13
Codenames
Overview
Codenames has an espionage setting, in which players in teams try to identify their own team's secret agents, based on their agents' code names. Codenames is a game of guessing which code names (words) in a set are related to a hint-word given by another player.
--Wikipedia
Setting
The game's espionage setting explains some of ...
13
Spyfall
Overview
Spyfall is best played with 4 or more players.
All players are in some location. This could be a circus tent, a space station, a theater, etc. Each player is also assigned a role for the location; this might be an acrobat for the circus tent, an alien for the space station, an actor for the theater, etc. However, one player is told ...
12
Yes, tables are possible with MathJax. Here's an example, taken from Mathematics.SE:
$$
\begin{array}{c|lcr}
n & \text{Left} & \text{Center} & \text{Right} \\
\hline
1 & 0.24 & 1 & 125 \\
2 & -1 & 189 & -8 \\
3 & -20 & 2000 & 1+10i
\end{array}
$$
This table was created with the following MathJax code:
$$
\...
12
Contact
Overview
Contact requires at least three people, one person to create a word and at least two people to guess it. The word creator thinks of a word and gives the guessers the first letter. The guessers' objective at any stage is to get the word creator to give them the next letter of the word. They do this by coming up with words which they can (...
11
My suggestion for a question like this would be to run it by the person you are joking about first.
That question felt like it was mocking the question by M D which she said she put a bunch of effort in and your puzzle seemed to dismiss it as silly. This is very different IMO for the Mithrandir lost his key puzzle which was also a joke but didn't mock ...
10
The association bonus doesn't count for protected questions (or "highly active questions", as they're now called). You need to earn 10 reputation on this site before that block disappears.
See also Why is the Association Bonus ignored when trying to answer a protected question?
9
You approved several edits that added blatantly incorrect formatting (and incorrectly rejected others). You voted to reopen / leave open several posts that were obvious duplicates. You claimed that a number of posts that clearly go against site policy "Look OK." Likewise for questions that should have been closed. Oh, and this one—come on, seriously?!
I ...
9
No, if a user visits the page and visits it again at least 15 minutes later, that counts as a second view. A third visit, at least 15 minutes later than the second view, will count as a third one and so on.
More details here on Meta Stack Exchange: How are the number of views in a question calculated?
8
Building on Shevliaskovic’s answer,
there are lots of things that you can do with HTML
that you can’t do with markdown. It’s a bit messy,
but you don’t need any invisible characters (spaces at the ends of lines).
Lists
Numbered Lists
Numbered lists are called ordered lists (<ol>) in HTML.
<li> is a list element in all kinds of lists.
>!&...
8
I just took a look at our tag blacklist, and it has this:
^puzzling|puzzles?$
Turns out that really means (^puzzling)|(puzzles?$), which blacklists any tag that starts with "puzzling" or ends with "puzzle" or "puzzles." Definitely not the intent.
I've poked an employee in chat to fix this for us.
8
Are the puzzles here supposed to be solvable without looking at the CSS-hidden hints?
"Supposed to", I'd say yes.
Are they? Unfortunately quite often not.
I would suggest that you let the OP of the puzzle know about the purpose of hints when you discover a puzzle which is "impossible" without using them.
Do this in the comments of the puzzle and maybe ...
8
Graphics Tools
RGB Color Wheel correlates colors to RGB (#RRGGBB and 255-255-255) and HSV ( °-%-%)
GIF-Explode is a web-tool to show individual frames of animated gif images. Just provide the link to the image.
GeoGebra Tools are an online collection of tools for drawing geometries and mathematical content online.
TinkerCAD is a browser-based 3D ...
8
Number Tools
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences is useful for puzzles involving integer sequences
Base Converter converts between binary, decimal, hexadecimal and ASCII
Calculator Soup is a cornucopia of tools (index) for manipulating numbers in myriad contexts, even sports
Prime Factors Calculator calculates the prime factors of integers less ...
8
Word Tools
Litscape has an extensive list of words finding tools (for example pattern matching, words containing or made from certain letters, single word anagrams, etc)
Ceptimus Word Ladder solver, finds a word ladder from word A to word B
Wordsmith's Advanced Anagramming is a multilingual, multi-word anagram solver with a range of options to restrict ...
8
I very much encourage the use of community-wiki answers as 'clean up' to some questions, and I do so myself on some of the more complex puzzles (f.e. here). It gives a good opportunity to tie up loose ends.
I also think it is okay to accept the community-wiki answer if it is substantially "better to read" and understand. Keep in mind, that "acceptance" is ...
8
Someone on one of our cousin websites had a similar concern:
https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/21814/i-feel-mathematically-inadequate-for-this-site-what-level-are-the-majority-of-q
Point is, don't worry. If you're interested in puzzles, you belong here. You shouldn't be surprised that you can't solve most of the puzzles here. If all the ...
8
It was spotted very soon after posting by a riddle expert with a 'dupehammer'; their gold tag badge lets them singlehandedly close a question as a duplicate of another one. You can see this when you hover over the badge:
More information about this feature can be found on Meta Stack Exchange: Increase close vote weight for gold tag badge holders. The idea ...
8
It's a little cumbersome, but you can use HTML:
>! <ul>
>! <li>bullet 1</li>
>! <li>bullet 2</li>
>! </ul>
produces
As GentlePurpleRain notes, not all tags are required, but if you omit the <ul> and </ul>, the bullets will have a strange alignment:
>! <li>bullet 1
>! <li>bullet ...
8
Those aren't quotes; they're spoilers, intended to not accidentally spoil the solution to a puzzle in case you want to figure it out yourself. They're frequently used on Puzzling, and see moderate use on sites like Movies & TV, Science Fantasy & Fiction, and Gaming. On most Stack Exchange sites there's simply no use case for them.
You can either ...
8
If you mean on Stack Overflow, I don't know whether anyone there makes a puzzle/problem distinction or how they make it, and I don't think it's something on which PSE folks can usefully comment.
If you mean here on Puzzling, the principle would be the same as for mathematical questions. It's pretty well expressed in this answer by xnor. Something is a ...
7
That's not a bug; that's standard Markdown behavior. If you don't want standard Markdown behavior, kill the Markdown:
2\. Puzzling••
3. Meta••
5. Stack••
7. Exchange
(trailing spaces shown as • for clarity), which results in:
2. Puzzling
3. Meta
5. Stack
7. Exchange
7
Because this:
Every one of your First Posts reviews were "No Action Needed," and many were in quick succession. I went through and quite a few of them could indeed use some sort of action, whether it be an edit, comment, vote, or something else.
Please consider each review carefully and avoid "robo-reviewing." The queue exists for a reason, and simply ...
7
First of all, nothing else could have been the answer.
First, something else could have been the answer : it is not because you have found the right one that it is necessarily easy for every other user. Many 'easy' riddles (or not very puzzling) can lead to several valid answers (see for example this post).
Am I supposed to address each and every single ...
7
Yes.
There's a long and tortuous history behind this, but nowadays most of the 'questions' on this site are puzzles posted just for fun. On Puzzling, unlike nearly all other SE sites, questions are usually intended as challenges to the community: problems for other people to solve for which the OP already knows the answer, rather than questions about ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
