Self-answer basically is abandoning the puzzle and conceding that nobody will ever get it. I doubt we're there yet, especially since it really hasn't been that long.
Your puzzles are, how shall I put this.... Some of them are pretty simple and are quickly solved. But others tend to be very inaccessible, requiring us to basically be in your head because the leaps of logic that are "obvious" to you, as the puzzle setter, are left unhinted (or at least very under-hinted) because you think they're so obvious or such giveaways that making those hints trivializes the whole puzzle.
Taking this current riddle at face value, when it says "One of us reside in each line here", I think we all understand that to mean that whatever us is, there is a single occurrence of them per line of the riddle. I don't know if that's actually true, though, because the only thing common to every line that I can see and which occurs exactly once is a pair of identical words (or the "> " formatting at the start of each line, though that's unlikely to be relevant). You've rejected both.
Other than that, pretty much every other hint therein is helpful to verify a guess, but not all that useful in coming up with meaningful guesses to try.
It also doesn't help that some of the more intricate puzzles you've set before have been riddles that have, unfortunately, had some serious errors in them that made solving them a particularly challenging exercise, as it's not clear then if we're just on the wrong track entirely, or if we're stumbling up against a malformed puzzle.
There's definitely been a couple of these that were only solved by interacting with you because they didn't give enough guidance to provide a solver with an approach to move forward; had no internal validation to indicate you were heading the right way, unless you were lucky enough to take all the right steps and end up with a solution; and had errors that meant some right steps seemed to be wrong, leading the solver astray. interactively solving a puzzle with its creator shouldn't be required.
So now I don't know if one or more of these concerns is the case with this riddle. It starts to feel that way when nobody has gotten even a start on it, when on its surface the riddle doesn't seem like it should be that hard. Especially when it tells us (if we take it at face value) that the answer is in the riddle and has a length of 6.
Yes, I agree those were much better - they were forward-solvable, you had to find a pattern and the structure/content of the puzzle hinted at it. Once you found that, the answer was an obvious next step.
I'm not sure if the imprecision and/or red herring elements are intentional, or clumsy design, or even language barrier related, but at least once you get close enough you can actually solve them.
Honestly I think you struggle in that you know the answer so you can provide a puzzle, with clues and hinting, all of which perfectly fit the answer -- but again, being able to verify an answer is way different than being able to arrive at that answer using what's in the puzzle.
@Techidiot See, that's not how a puzzle works. :) You can't make it so "Hey, once you get the answer, it will all make sense" - the puzzle has to provide what is needed to GET the answer, not to make sense of it.
The issue is that we can't read minds - I'm not sure what those notes are supposed to mean, and without something to grab onto, there's nothing there for us.
Ciphers take away confirmation. If you see something spelling out a phrase, you know you're on the right track. But with ciphers, anything can be a valid clue.
It's worse that that, even - in many ciphers, you won't even get a sensible decrypt with the right key unless you have the complete cipher text in the right order
So you have to solve both notes' riddles with no confirmation that you've done so, until by serendipity you get it right and decrypting gives you a sensible output.
And who knows if the letters will come out in order. who knows if they're words that the notes translate to, or just a jumble of letters. no hint as to any of that is provided by the puzzle. you're left to flail around in hopes that you get the full cipher text, in the right order, with the right key and the right cipher method.
I don't want it to seem like we're ganging up on you or anything. We don't mean to! And hey, everyone's learning still! It's just that we're not really sure where to go from here.
Yeah - not saying "Man, your puzzles suck" - they don't, they're intricate and interesting
But if you want people to be able to solve them without you having to give them what is in your head, then the puzzle needs to do that for you. There needs to be guidance so we're not looking at a 4 line stanza and scratching our heads thinking, "What do I do now?" and having no clue at all how to proceed.
Thanks @Rubio @Deusovi I will take a note of it. Although if my plain text is Techidiot and cipher text is dhshjskot with key hello, does dhsh decoded with hello gives tech?
And, and quite importantly, you can't meaningfully expect someone to make 3 logical leaps to solve three pieces of a puzzle at once to be able to move forward to get confirmation that all three were correctl unless all three are either very obvious or very trivial.
>X-mas is around and so are you. >Arrange using a group of 30 and you will see >Chances are you might get lost but >No we the first of each will be your way.
I don't see why it was necessary to keep it hidden though. You could fit some hint into there about what stays and what goes.
Still though, overall a good idea.
>Tree Mazeltov Free Abduction Saliva Yes Dead Infra Was Bash Alfredo Abominated Dad *Boinota Quermios Tranted Smearo Lefat(Translation of this line - Don't use me everywhere)
I'll give the first note a pass, only because you have to keep everything to get groups of 30. But it is an unmotivated thing to do, since usually you drop punctuation and spaces, and it's a very indirect clue to tell you to do ootherwise
Speaking of botched execution, for the puzzle I'm making now, I only just thought to check the possible anagrams of some fodder which was supposed to give a hint, and got back over 100,000 results. Should have known -.- .
CCCC: Hint 0: @GarethMcCaughan has already identified most of the second word, amongst the possible decipherings he's pondered. Hint 1: "Following" and "directions" are separate things, so nothing to do with taking orders / obeying etc.
so, Rubio's cryptic clue. Obvious thoughts: perhaps "directions in the middle of Middle" = DEND or DEWD or something of the sort (DD = middle of "middle"; compass directions). Perhaps the "penniless fraction" is THIR (= THIRD without D) or PER (= PERCENT without CENT). Perhaps "his strange" is ISH or SHI. Perhaps there's a way to put these bits together that makes sense, but I haven't found one.
Question Period (French: période des questions), known officially as Oral Questions (French: questions orales) occurs each sitting day in the House of Commons of Canada. According to the House of Commons Compendium, “The primary purpose of Question Period is to seek information from the Government and to call it to account for its actions.”
At the Legislative Assembly of Ontario questions raised are referred as Oral Questions.
== History ==
The first oral question occurred during the 1st Canadian Parliament, before rules had been established providing for formal questions. According to the record...
Secretary's problem - answering questions!
Calling in (-e)A[NSWE]R(-th) + PER(-cent)+I+OD(-d), @Rubio.
I'm some small devil or sprite, who merged with danger. But things were not alright. When it did not turn off. They said something about learning, or at least something similar to that, I'm trapped but also the key.
(In case it wasn't clear, just talk to us as you would any other user. We're just members of the community who happen to be able to clean up things and deal with other issues. c: )